Panel Moves From Consensus To Conflict

In December 2006, in an effort to build a national consensus on a “new way forward in Iraq,” the Iraq Study Group painted itself as a portrait of bipartisan chumminess, with all political hackery checked at the door.

Sixteen months later, seven of the 10 ISG members are backing presidential candidates with radically different views about how to proceed in Iraq.

Republicans James Baker, Lawrence Eagleburger and Ed Meese are supporting Sen. John McCain, who argues that the United States should be sending more troops to Iraq. Democrats Vernon Jordan, Leon Panetta and William Perry have endorsed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has vowed to start bringing U.S. troops home immediately. Earlier this month, Democrat Lee Hamilton endorsed Sen. Barack Obama, who vows to start bringing the troops home and to engage in “aggressive personal diplomacy” with Iran.

Consensus?

Panetta, who served as President Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff, says Hillary Clinton and Obama are closely aligned with the Study Group’s recommendations. “The only one who is not, obviously, is John McCain,” he says.

Meese cries hogwash. McCain’s Iraq views are “by far” the closest to the ISG’s, says the former attorney general under President Ronald Reagan. “I think the principal, the primary, part of the report was we should go on to support the effort in Iraq and we should not cut and run or surrender,” he says. “John is the only one of those three that has taken that position.”

Hamilton, the former Democratic congressman from Indiana and co-chairman of both the ISG and the 9/11 Commission, says that while “no candidate precisely mirrors my point of view or precisely mirrors views of any members of ISG,” Obama’s Iraq views are “by and large consistent” with the ISG’s major recommendations.

Meese, again: “How can Obama be close if he wants to surrender and cut and run? I don’t think that Obama agrees with almost anything in the Iraq Study Group, from what I’ve seen in his pronouncements.”

Maybe it’s not surprising that a pack of political animals — five Democrats, five Republicans — would return to their regularly scheduled partisan programming two years after reaching a bipartisan, unanimous view on Iraq.

“We all went back to our chambers,” says ISG member Alan Simpson, a former Republican senator from Wyoming who hasn’t endorsed a presidential candidate because he’s currently on another nonpartisan commission. “Do we then go back and think, ‘Now that we did that wonderful thing, we don’t want to get back into partisan politics?’ That was the first thing you would want to do.”

But it’s also what Hamilton and ISG co-chairman Baker, the former secretary of state, warned everyone else against doing at the time. “If our report is going to mean anything, ... we really have to take it out of politics,” Baker told PBS the week before the report was released.

Moreover, in returning to the partisan fray, ISG members may be guilty of doing exactly what they said shouldn’t be done: cherry-picking some of their report’s recommendations and bending others to fit the political angles of the candidate they now support.

Take the question of Iran. In its report, the Study Group recommended that the United States help create an Iraq International Support Group and then use it to engage both “Iran and Syria in ... diplomatic dialogue, without preconditions.”

Daniel Serwer, a vice president at the United States Institute of Peace and executive director of the ISG, says the idea of holding conversations with regional neighbors was “an important part of the report, and one that has been implemented in piecemeal and not in the spirit of fullness [in] whih it had been recommended.” Panetta agrees, calling the recommendation to engage in dialogue with Iraq’s neighbors one of the three main objectives of the Iraq Study Group.

McCain rejected that recommendation, telling Baker and Hamilton at an Armed Services Committee hearing in December 2006 that he didn’t see much “short-term gain” in holding “a peace conference with people who are dedicated to your extinction.”

Meese and Eagleburger, who was secretary of state under President George H.W. Bush, are supporting him anyway.

Meese dismissed the diplomacy-with-Iran recommendation as “probably one of the less important compared to the basic security recommendations.”

Eagleburger says times have changed. When the ISG was writing its report, Eagleburger — who endorsed McCain last year — says he thought the United States would be “leaving Iraq less than successfully. I thought we should do anything we could do to loosen things up with the Iranians, or leave them in no doubt, though it would be largely a charade. So, yeah, I’m not wild about talking with them now, but to me, it’s not a major issue if we talk to them.”

But instead of beginning to withdraw from Iraq, as many were urging, the president — with McCain’s support — sent more troops there. “I think I made a mistake on the Iraq Study Group,” Eagleburger says.

“I didn’t expect that there would be the surge. With the surge taking place and administration having shifted its strategic proportions, I would not be in favor of recommendations [we made] at the time. I have changed my mind, and it is because the surge has taken place.”

Panetta sees things differently. He says he is “not aware” of any circumstances that have rendered any of the report’s recommendations obsolete. “When we had five Democrats and five Republicans come to a unanimous recommendation in the Iraq Study Group, ... the basis of making those recommendations was what we all learned was going on in Iraq,” he says. “And I frankly don’t see that having changed very much.”

Serwer agrees, saying he sees “very little reason” to “run away” from the ISG’s recommendations.

Among the members, only three have refrained from offering public support to a 2008 presidential candidate. Like Simpson, former Virginia Sen. Chuck Robb is serving on another nonpartisan commission and feels duty-bound not to endorse a presidential candidate this year. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor also has refrained from endorsing a candidate.

While Baker has endorsed McCain, he has tellingly avoided commenting publicly on the Arizona senator’s war stance, focusing more on the candidate’s character than on his policies. Through a spokesman at his Houston law office, Baker declined to speak for this story.

Baker’s co-chairman, Hamilton, says that when it comes to interpreting and applying the report in the context of the 2008 presidential race, “every member of the Iraq Study Group has to speak for themselves.

“I hold firm to the principal recommendations,” Hamilton says, adding that he doesn’t feel “constrained” by the consensus reached two years ago. “It doesn’t give me any heartburn,” he says.

Says Eagleburger: “What that means is he’s walked away from the report, too. We all have.”