The NRO Corner‘s John Podhoretz in this NY Daily News op-ed makes clear that he is not buying into that whole “elder statesman” thing that the NY Times reported last week regarding James Baker, III’s co-chairmanship of the Iraq Study Group:
As Dana Milbank reports in The Washington Post, on Monday the [Iraq Study Group’s] “co-chairmen, James Baker and Lee Hamilton, found time . . . to pose for an Annie Leibovitz photo shoot for Men’s Vogue.”[. . .]
Baker, Hamilton and their crew of old Washington hands (and I mean old, like Metheuselah-level old) are recommending a “gradual pullback” of American troops but without a timetable. That basically translates into a nice, long, slow defeat – the “graceful exit” of which the president spoke so harshly.[. . .]
This is the consensus view of the Iraq Study Group, which is very proud that it reached consensus.