Will Baker rescue president on Iraq?

Waiting for Baker.
That may be the last, desperate Bush administration hope for rescuing its flailing Iraq policy. U.S. officials are anxiously awaiting the report of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by former Secretary of State and Bush family confidante James A. Baker III, whose task is to reassess Iraq strategy.
The group's report won't come out until after the November elections, but, in a sign of how bleak the Iraq situation has become, Baker is being looked at as a sort of Houdini. Never mind that he has already warned "there is no magic bullet" for the Iraq situation. He knows he will be constrained by the fact that the administration's disastrous policy errors have foreclosed any good options.
Yet the Study Group has galvanized Washington's attention by virtue of the fact that the president endorsed to its creation. The same president who has incessantly said he would "stay the course" has anointed Baker to propose a change of course.
"I wouldn't do it unless the president told me to do it," Baker told the Dallas Morning News.
It's worth pondering what this Bush concession means.
Jim Baker is hardly the man one would have expected the president to call on as rescuer-in-chief. True, Baker operated as the Bush family's consigliere in the 2000 Florida election. But George W. was never fond of his father's friend, who is a foreign policy realist with no illusions about the Mideast region. Indeed, Baker has harshly criticized Bush's Iraq policy in his new autobiography, "Work Hard, Study ... and Keep Out of Politics!"
Humilitating admission
By endorsing the study group, the president is making a humiliating admission that he needs rescuing from his Iraq mess. In fact, the normally stubborn Bush made a stunning admission in an Oct. 11 news conference.
"I think the characterization of 'let's stay the course' is about a quarter right," he said. "Stay the course means keep doing what you're doing. My attitude is, don't do what you're doing if it's not working; change."
However, finding a new course that will work at this late date will be a staggering task for Baker. ... With Iraq convulsed by sectarian killing, and the Sunni insurgency unchecked, Baker will have to pick and choose among a list of unsatisfactory choices:
1. Change the Iraqi government. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has proved incapable of the tough leadership needed to reconcile with "moderate" Sunnis, stop the sectarian slaughter, and undercut the Sunni insurgency. But this is not Vietnam 1963; the gung-ho-for-democracy Bush can't depose an elected Iraqi leader. The White House is stuck with an Iraqi government that can't govern.
2. Pull out immediately. Baker has already rejected this option. He fears a chaotic Iraq would become a regional battleground, as Iran, Syria and Sunni Arab states rush to fill the power vacuum left by the U.S. exit.
3. Push for the division of Iraq into three federal states for Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds, in hopes this would stop the fighting. Baker says he can't see how one could draw the boundary lines, since Iraq's cities and towns are mixed. Sunnis and many Shiites bitterly oppose this idea, and I see no way U.S. occupiers could impose such a plan on Iraqis.
4. Send more troops. This isn't on because the U.S. military has run out of available bodies.
5. Draw down U.S. forces, but insert more teams of U.S. military trainers inside Iraqi security force units. A good idea -- but military experts say it will be hard to find enough additional U.S. trainers, since this requires stripping officers out of their units.
6. Give the Maliki government a finite deadline to design a reconciliation pact with the Sunnis, and ratchet up the pressure by setting a timetable for the withdrawal of most U.S. forces -- say, in two years. Then convene a conference of Iraq's neighbors and big powers to help stabilize the country. Such a conference would require the White House to deal with Iran (Baker supports negotiating with one's enemies).
My guess is that Baker's Iraq Study Group will propose some combination of 5 and 6, with no guarantees that Iraq or American policy can be salvaged.
Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.