The coming debate
Cliff May has been a member of the “expert” advisory group of the Baker/Hamilton panel. Here is his summary of that experience.
Cliff and a few like-minded colleagues wisely argued not for “victory” as Bush once envisioned it (Iraq as a shining city on the Middle Eastern hill), but "against accepting defeat at the hands of such groups al Qaeda in Iraq and Saddam loyalists" and "against lamely attempting to disguise defeat as 'redeployment' or 'an exit strategy.'” Cliff and his like-minded colleagues were unsuccessful; his group was not interested in having that discussion. As he puts it, "the Foreign Policy Establishment types who dominate the Iraq Study Group had opposed the war from the start and, in my view, mostly wanted to send Bush this message: 'Idiot! We told you so!'" As one of these Establishment types put it, "We had to move the national debate from whether to stay the course to how do we start down the path out."
The debate that Cliff tried to have within his group is the debate we will have to insist on once the Baker report is released.
