Iraq report takes broader approach to Mid-East crisis

WorldView:'I guess you heard from some people before the war commenced that the road to Arab-Israeli peace ran through Baghdad . . . The road to Arab-Israeli peace runs through Jerusalem." So said James Baker to a congressional committee in Washington on Thursday, defending the Iraq Study Group's (ISG)recommendation that there should be a linkage between the two conflicts.

His comment illustrates just how comprehensively the report confronts the following neoconservative nostrums underlying the Bush administration's foreign policy.

A comprehensive Middle East peace will flow from US military victory in Iraq. This would allow the US to set terms for regime change in Iran. That would best remove the threat of Islamic subversion from Israel and the rest of the world. There is no point in talking to Iran or Syria directly, but if it is necessary to give the impression you would be willing to, conditions they will reject should be set out as the price for doing so.

The ISG's three main recommendations say the very opposite. There is a realistic acceptance that military victory is not attainable in Iraq. Baker said at the press conference launching the study that "staying the course" - Bush's code for victory - is no longer an option. Rather does the report support a "responsible transition" so that US combat troops would be removed from action by early 2008, even if their support troops and bases remain indefinitely.

"You talk to your enemies, not just your friends," Baker added in reference to Iran (and Syria). There is no support for regime change in the report, rather the assumption that Iran will want to talk about the consequences for it if Iraq disintegrates, including the prospect of a huge refugee problem from the Shia south. Baker told the congressional committee that engaging Iran in such talks would better test its willingness to co-operate and expose its reluctance.

The report says the remit of proposed talks should be broadened to include the other major world powers, the European Union and the United Nations.

The report stresses much more the ways Islamic movements are bolstered by the US-led occupation of Iraq than progress in rolling them back there. And it will be necessary to offer Iran and Syria realistic terms if their co-operation is to be assured.

These must be "bold and comprehensive, addressing all the major dimensions of the conflict between the United States and Iran, including the nuclear question", according to Larry Diamond, an associate member of the group. Robert Gates, the new defence secretary, told Congress a military attack on Iran is out of the question.

The report calls for direct talks with Syria as part of a regional conference on Iraq. It goes further to propose that the Golan Heights be returned by Israel as part of a comprehensive settlement of its conflict with the Palestinians and neighbouring states.

The linkage between these various conflicts has effectively been denied by George Bush - and was explicitly repudiated once again on Thursday by Ehud Olmert, who said "the attempt to create a linkage between the Iraqi issue and the Mid East issue - we have a different view".

But it was strongly affirmed in an interview with this newspaper by the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who visited Dublin this week. The Sunni-dominated conservative Middle Eastern states have a central interest in seeing progress from which they too can draw popular legitimacy.

Initial Bush administration responses to the report do not indicate a willingness to shift positions towards drawing down troops or unconditional regional talks. Bush's endorsement of Tony Blair's Middle East initiative is qualified but supportive.

Neoconservative writers have kept up a barrage of fire on James Baker, the Bush family consiglieri whom they blame for recurrent betrayals over Israel, Syria and Lebanon in and around the 1990-91 Iraq war. They have found support among congressional and administration figures unwilling to make the huge policy changes called for - so much so that Baker appealed to his congressional audience to balance the argument against White House resistance on Thursday.

Criticism from a different direction came from Peter Galbraith, former US ambassador to Croatia. He recalled that Baker flew in to Belgrade on June 21st, 1991, to warn Yugoslavia's leaders not to break up the country - four days before Slovenia and Croatia declared independence. It is similarly too late to save a disintegrating Iraq. The report is therefore "dead on arrival".

Continuing US policy disarray may therefore be the outcome of this encounter. But international politics confronted with the scale of this crisis abhors a vacuum. Can it be filled, at least in part, from this side of the Atlantic?

It will be fascinating to see how Blair calibrates his Middle East initiative with others taken in Europe, leading in to the EU summit in Brussels next week.

In Washington on Thursday he argued the case for "a kind of whole vision about how we need to proceed that links what happens inside Iraq with what happens outside Iraq". His special foreign policy adviser has recently been in Syria to explore its willingness to move. So have other Europeans, including the Spanish foreign minister. France, Spain and Italy have launched another initiative to get Middle East talks going again, involving Syria and the Arab states, and in the expectation that Fatah and Hamas will be able to agree on an interim technocratic government.

They have been consulting other EU governments and hope to see this bear fruit next week. There is a parallelism and a certain tension with the British initiative.

It will be a real test of the EU's slow but significant progress towards a common foreign policy to see if this can be accomplished without being sacrificed to Blair's (or Chirac's) desire for peacemaking kudos at the end of their political careers.

A particularly tricky issue is whether and how to relax the stringent conditions laid down on Hamas after winning January's Palestinian elections - that they recognise Israel, renounce violence and accept past agreement with Israel. The failure to meet them in full collapsed EU aid to the West Bank and Gaza, resulting in a growing humanitarian crisis there.

The incoming German EU presidency would have to manage any EU initiative and seems well prepared and willing to do so, notwithstanding its understandable reluctance to antagonise Israel.