sourceHe's already pushing back against the Baker-Hamilton report, and no wonder. Accepting the proposal to engage Iran and Syria would mean admitting his foreign policy has failed
Explaining the report of his Iraq Study Group to Congress on Thursday, former Secretary of State James Baker stressed that its recommendations need to be taken as a whole, rather than cherry-picked. "I hope we don't treat this like a fruit salad, saying, 'I like this, but I don't like that,'" Baker told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "It's a comprehensive strategy designed to deal with the problems in Iraq, but also to deal with other problems in the region. These are interdependent recommendations."
President Bush plainly had other ideas, telling a press conference he was sure Baker and Lee Hamilton didn't expect him to embrace all of their recommendations. Bush made clear, for example, that he has no intention of following the Baker-Hamilton proposal for a rapid move to engage Iran and Syria in a process aimed at stabilizing Iraq. Instead, he simply reiterated his Administration's preconditions for talking to those two nations: Iran must first suspend its uranium enrichment activities, Bush said, while Syria would have to stop interfering in Lebanon.
Tags: interdependent | Non-Starter | Strategy | report | proposal | policy | conference | talking | Syria | Lebanon | Iraq | Iran | hamilton | Bush | accepting
No comments:
Post a Comment