Another view of Jim Baker's new job

From Josh Marshall:
The following is from someone whom, after some lengthy negotiation, I've agreed to call a 'former high-level Democratic executive branch appointee.'

Only the naive can think [Jim Baker's] mission – special part-time job (so conflicts of interest will not need to be disclosed), with plane, staff, and direct report to President – is about renegotiating Iraq’s debt obligations, as if he were restructuring a company’s balance sheet. This company is deep into chapter 7. It loses vast sums of money a day. Its few, severely impaired assets have been spoken for many times over. Its employees are impoverished and barely working. Its political liabilities are burgeoning: indeed it is the principal risk to the parent company’s future. If Iraq could be liquidated, it would be. But instead the proprietors need to abandon it.

...Baker has to pull off a trifecta: (1) involve Europeans (and perhaps Indians) in an indefinitely long occupation of a country they did not want invaded, (2) bring in enough non-American troops to create an appearance of stability by next summer, and (3) enable President Bush to announce with a straight face at the Republican Convention next September that 'progress' will permit him to withdraw virtually all American troops soon after his second inauguration.

...This deal will be as much appearance as substance. In return for playing their part in the President's re-election, our 'allies' naturally will ask for a great deal of….money.

Billions of dollars, currency exchange ratios, and trade concessions are the ways Baker will buy his deal. Think of this as the Plaza Accord redux: this time America will weaken not its dollar but its whole economy in order to extend the Administration.

...The neo-con vision of a western Iraq reforming the Arab world is, with Baker’s appointment, pretty much finished. Perhaps the United States may end up with an airfield in one of the more deserted areas of the sad desert land of Iraq, but perhaps not; that’s negotiable.   article

Well, there was some talk about military bases....