The ‘Net has been abuzz with reactions of the ISG report.  The report eagerly awaited by the left as proof of Bush’s failure has had some surprising critics though.

Pretty bad when Slate questions the report:

This Is What We’ve Been Waiting For?

Here’s a question that the Baker-Hamilton committee report didn’t completely address: What happens if its new approach doesn’t work?

Because all signs show that it will not. The examples are almost endless, especially when it comes to the much-hyped "regional approach" to the Iraq conflict. "The United States cannot achieve its goals in the Middle East unless it deals directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict," the committee states. This is not a surprising or new approach by American policy-makers (or advisers, or committee members). In fact, it was the policy of all American administrations until the Bush administration turned it on its head and decided that the Arab-Israeli conflict was not the cause of the core problem of the Middle East, but rather one of its results.

…

But troubles emerge as soon as you delve into the practical recommendations regarding the "renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace on all fronts"—the most important of the committee’s recommendations, other than those dealing directly with managing the troops in Iraq.

More than anything else, these proposals are no more than a reiteration of the old James Baker formula for peace. A formula—just take a look at the region—that was not entirely successful in achieving its goals of peace and stability for Israel and its Arab neighbors. "Henry Kissinger says the war in Iraq is unwinnable," joked Jay Leno a couple of nights ago. "And if anybody knows how not to win a war, it’s Henry Kissinger." 

That nicely sums up the report.  The report seeks to make Iraq all about Israel and Iran more then about Al Qaeda.

Captain Ed notes:

At least two presidential aspiranta have publicly opposed the Iraq Study Group and its linkage of the situation in Iraq with the Palestinian conflict. Rudy Giuliani called some of the ISG’s recommendations "useful", but told Dennis Prager that leaving Iraq would be a "terrible mistake", while John McCain scotched the notion of a regional conference dominated by two terror-supporting states:

"The idea of leaving Iraq, I think, is a terrible mistake," the former mayor said. The group’s report, however, stresses that America should not make an "open-ended" commitment of troops and links the presence of troops to milestones met by the Iraqi government.

Mr. Giuliani also rejected the panel’s recommendation that America tie the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian Arab conflict to stabilizing Iraq. When asked about this linkage on Mr. Prager’s radio show, Mr. Giuliani said, "Israel and Palestine is an important issue. Sometimes it’s used as an excuse to deal with underlying issues. But the reality here is that the Islamo-fundamentalist terrorists are at war with our way of life, with our modern world, with rights for women, religious freedom, societies that have religious freedom. And all of that would still exist, no matter what happens in Israel and Palestine."

The stark difference between the position of Mr. Giuliani, who left the Iraq Study Group this summer, and that of the rest of the group — which is headed by a former secretary of state, James Baker, and a former congressman, Lee Hamilton — indicates that the greater political world is less agreed on the group’s 79 recommendations than are the group’s five Republicans and five Democrats.

John McCain offered a less-certain assessment of the Iraq-Israel link, calling it "tenuous at best". He also objected to the timeline offered by the Iraq Study Group. The 2008 deadline only encourages Iraqis to move towards the militias that will endure after an American withdrawal rather than to remain firm and fight the sectarian forces in order to establish authority under their representative government. McCain also rejected the notion of a regional conference with Iran and Syria, calling the divergence of interests between those countries and the US "unlikely to change under the current regimes".

One of the chief problems with the report is the group that created it:

• James A. Baker, III – Co-Chair
  Former Secretary of State
  Honorary Chair, James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Rice University
• Lee H. Hamilton – Co-Chair
  Former Member of Congress
  Director, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars
• Lawrence S. Eagleburger
  Former U.S. Secretary of State
  Chairman, International Commission on Holocaust Era Insurance Claims
• Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. - Member
  Former Advisor to President Clinton
  Senior Managing Director, Lazard Frères & Co. LLC
• Edwin Meese III - Member
  Former Attorney General
  Ronald Reagan Chair in Public Policy, The Heritage Foundation
  Distinguished Visiting Fellow, Hoover Institution
• Sandra Day O’Connor - Member
  Associate Justice, U.S. Supreme Court (Retired)
• Leon E. Panetta - Member
  Former White House Chief of Staff
  Founder and Director, Panetta Institute
• William J. Perry - Member
  Former Secretary of Defense
  Professor, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Stanford University
• Charles S. Robb - Member
  Former Governor of Virginia
  Former U.S. Senator
  Distinguished Professor of Law & Public Policy, George Mason University School of Law
• Alan K. Simpson - Member
  Former U.S. Senator from Wyoming

Looking at the list the bona fidas total up to (in order of relative importance to the objectives):

• 1 former US Secretary of Defense
• 2 former US Secretary of State
• 2 former US Legislatures 
• 1 former State Governor
• 1 former SCOTUS Justice
• 1 former Attorney General
• 1 former Presidential Adviser
• 1 former Whitehouse Chief of Staff

Let’s see, out of 10 we have 1 with any relevant military connection.  Sure 2 or 3 had military service, but in the respect of understanding and directing a Military Operation, only one has any real experience, and he does not have an impressive resume.

Where is Stormin Norm?  Colin Powell?  Our military academies have turned out some of the finest military minds in US history.  Why not include some of them in an effort to understand whether a war is going well or not?

Why are the military powerhouses missing?  Because they wanted to examine this from a diplomatic standpoint, not a military one.

Oh sure, you say, they have a Military Study group, right?  Yes.  Take a look:

• Paul Hughes, USIP Secretariat
  Senior Program Officer, Center for Post-conflict Peace and Stability Operations,
  United States Institute of Peace
• Hans A. Binnendijk
  Director & Theodore Roosevelt Chair, Center for Technology & National Security Policy, National Defense University
• James Jay Carafano, Ph.D.
  Senior Research Fellow, Defense and Homeland Security, Doug and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies, The Heritage Foundation
• Michele A. Flournoy
  Senior Advisor, International Security Program, Center for Strategic & International Studies
• Michael Eisenstadt
  Director, Military & Security Program, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
• Bruce Hoffman
  Professor, Security Studies Program, Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University
• Clifford May
  President, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies
• Robert M. Perito
  Senior Program Officer, Center for Post-conflict Peace and Stability Operations,
  United States Institute of Peace
• Kalev I. Sepp
  Assistant Professor, Department of Defense Analysis, Center on Terrorism and Irregular Warfare, Naval Postgraduate School
• John F. Sigler
  Adjunct Distinguished Professor, Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, National Defense University
• W. Andrew Terrill
  Research Professor, National Security Affairs, Strategic Studies Institute
• Jeffrey A. White
  Berrie Defense Fellow, Washington Institute for Near East Policy

There are 3 more groups, total 48 advisers. The only Military minds present were the Senior Military Advisers:

• Admiral James O. Ellis, Jr.
  United States Navy, Retired
• General John M. Keane
  United States Army, Retired
• General Edward C. Meyer
  United States Army, Retired
• General Joseph W. Ralston
  United States Air Force, Retired
• Lieutenant General Roger C. Schultz, Sr.
  United States Army, Retired

Well finally.  63 advisers and 10 panel members and only 5 are direct military.

Shameful.  Would you hire a group of lawyers to write the procedures for heart surgery?  They would spend so much time on the legal disclaimers and malpractice loopholes that the project would be a waste.

In the same way, this project was likewise doomed to fail by the nature of it not addressing the matter from a realistic military perspective.

Yes I concede there are some people in the lists who have military service.  But I am talking about Military leaders.  The decisions makers.  The experts on strategy.  The planners. 

Where are former members of the JCS?  The field Commanders? 

The report as near as I can see has some decent recommendations and some foolish ones.  I will let others nit pick it.

But it is clear that the report was designed to find a graceful, diplomatic way out, not to engineer a strategy that would lead to victory.

Jay at STA has an impressive roundup of blogger reactions, including this from Allah Pundit:

Allahpundit says the verdict is…Success is not an option. The defeatist crowd has spoken…America has already lost.

Although the study group will present its plan as a much-needed course change in Iraq, many of its own advisers concluded during its deliberations that the war is essentially already lost, according to private correspondence obtained yesterday and interviews with participants. The best the commission could put forward would be the “least bad” of many bad options, as former ambassador Daniel C. Kurtzer wrote.

An early working draft from July stated that “there is even doubt that any level of resources could achieve the administration’s stated goals, given the illiberal and undemocratic political forces, many of them Islamic fundamentalists, that will dominate large parts of the country for a long time.”…

Much debate in e-mail exchanges among the most outspoken advisers to the study group focused on whether adding troops would help. But most feared that bringing in the large numbers required would break the military, lead to a surge in U.S. deaths and do nothing to better protect civilians.

In the end, the experts did not agree on sending additional forces beyond military advisers for the Iraqi national army. They seemed certain that Bush would reject most of their recommendations and that few could work anyway.

“Very early on, the notion of achieving some sort of victory didn’t take,” said Chas W. Freeman Jr., a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia. “So if victory is not possible and not feasible, even if you could define it, then what you’re left with is to find some way to mitigate defeat.“

The damage is done in one sense.  LGF Reports on the Muslim Reaction:

The Iraq Study Group’s report was the top headline in many Arab newspapers on Thursday, including the Egyptian opposition daily Al-Wafd, which declared: “Bush confesses defeat in Iraq.” The paper’s editor-in-chief, Anwar el-Hawari, predicted that at the very least, the Middle East will not hear from Bush for the coming 24 months.

“Practically, this means that this is the real end of Bush rule, his policies and the neo-conservative groups. This also means that the coming two years left in his term will be a period of a political vacuum,” he wrote.

Joseph Samaha, editor-in-chief of Lebanese opposition daily Al-Akhbar, said that, even before the study group’s report found shortcomings in the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, Arabs had already concluded that Iraq had turned into a “holocaust for American claims.” 

Because of the variety in reactions, with some lawmakers like Reyes and McCain calling for troop increases, and the report recommending drawdowns, Bush has been left in a local quagmire:  A serious case of damned if you do damned if you don’t, as Allahpundit notes:

In the end, the Commission’s using the same strategy McCain is (allegedly), albeit in the opposite direction: he claims more troops will help, they claim fewer troops will. Bush can’t really embrace either option, though, and they know it. As things get worse, each will point to his failure to adopt their own recommendations to explain why things fell apart. Big help, but that’s his fault entirely for not having done all that he could in Iraq when the country still had the political will to do it.

There is some truth there, the war has not been handled well, and I am unsure if there is a way to isolate whether Bush made bad choices or his advisers made bad recommendations.

Sister Toldjah notes that:

Democrats are saying that the ISG’s findings are “consistent” with their proposals. Which pretty much tells me I’m not going to find very much - if anything - in that report to get behind.

Heh.

Regardless, the report is out, the moonbats are feeling full of righteous justification, and our troops are still without real leadership.

We have the finest military on the freaking planet, and they have the resolve to win, and the ability to win.

They just need a leader to lead them and to give them a winning strategy.

Instead we get a recipe for defeat delivered by a bunch of people unqualified to cook.

Rambo had it right: Sir, do we get to win this time?

Not with the help of this report…

More reactions:

The Raw Story, Hot Air, alicublog, One Hand Clapping, INDCJournal, Don Surber, Wizbang, A Blog For All, Wake up America, New York Sun, Atlas Shrugs, Blue Crab and Gateway Pundit

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