With support from the University of Richmond

History News Network

History News Network puts current events into historical perspective. Subscribe to our newsletter for new perspectives on the ways history continues to resonate in the present. Explore our archive of thousands of original op-eds and curated stories from around the web. Join us to learn more about the past, now.

David Abshire: How he helped arrange for the creation of the Baker-Hamilton task force

In late 2005, three Washington insiders with foreign policy expertise were summoned to a meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice -- a little-known event that may end up changing the course of the war in Iraq. The three men were working to help Rep. Frank Wolf, who wanted to create an independent panel to overhaul the Bush administration's strategy in Iraq, after a recent trip there left the Virginia Republican worried that the war was headed from bad to worse.

The three men, to their surprise, were asked to attend a meeting on Nov. 29, 2005, with Rice, who had been among the core defenders of the Bush administration's war in Iraq. At the end of that meeting, Rice agreed to the idea for the panel and pledged to take the case directly to President Bush. At Rice's urging, Bush embraced what would become the Iraq Study Group, co-chaired by former Secretary of State James Baker.

"It was remarkable that Condi Rice took the lead," said David Abshire, president of the Center for the Study of the Presidency in Washington, and one of four people in the November meeting, including Rice. The Iraq Study Group, he said, "happened with her going to the president."

It has been widely speculated that George H.W. Bush, the president's father, turned to his trusted former advisor Baker to help orchestrate the Iraq Study Group to clean up the Iraq mess. But the little-known story of how the panel came into being began not with Baker, but with a congressman's effort to call it like he saw it in Iraq -- and with Rice's maneuvering to sidestep an entrenched Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. It set in motion the unlikely scenario now playing out in Washington in which an independent panel is about to counsel a White House not typically known as receptive to outside advice on the war.

Wolf contacted Abshire in fall 2005 to discuss assembling the panel after Wolf had returned from his third trip to Iraq. At that time, the message from the White House on Iraq was unequivocally upbeat: Things are getting better. Stay the course.

But Wolf's most recent trip left him with the view that security in the country might actually be deteriorating, despite the rosy message from the Oval Office. "Some things were worse," Wolf confirmed about that Iraq trip in an interview. He wanted some "fresh eyes," he said, on the Iraq situation.

Abshire agreed to help. Abshire began working with Richard Solomon, president of the congressionally funded United States Institute of Peace, and John Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, to pull together a plan.

One challenge was finding the right people. They had to be sufficiently independent. Wolf says that he wanted "people who were not connected to the administration nor connected to the Democratic campaign committee," people who could "honestly" tackle the problem.

Former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton seemed like an obvious choice. A highly respected voice on foreign policy, Hamilton had been vice-chairman of the 9/11 Commission. Abshire called him first, in November. Abshire then contacted Baker, a man with obvious foreign policy credentials, who maintains close ties to the Bush family.

Abshire bristled a bit when asked about speculation in the press that somehow Baker had set up the group as some sort of favor to help out the president's father. "It is sometimes misunderstood that this is a group that Baker formed," he said.

In fact, Abshire says that when he called him, Baker first showed reluctance, immediately pointing out an obvious hurdle. Without buy-in from the White House, the panel would be dead in the water. "I called Jim Baker in November and he said he would do it if the president really wanted him to do it," Abshire recalls. One problem was that the White House could potentially encourage Republicans not to participate in the panel. That could impede access to key officials. The administration could be stingy with documents. It could, in essence, make the panel useless. "They could have stonewalled it," Abshire said. "They could have killed it."

Abshire is an experienced Washington hand himself who held a number of posts during the Reagan administration, including ambassador to NATO and special counselor to the president. He knew that Baker was right: White House cooperation was essential. "They had been very single track," Abshire said, describing the Bush administration's general attitude toward unsolicited advice. "Courageous, but single track," he clarified.

But Rice's summoning of Abshire, Solomon and Hamre to that November 2005 meeting was an opening. Her support was vital in getting around a wing of the Bush administration that could try to kill the panel idea. Rice's uneasiness with the Cheney-Rumsfeld faction on Iraq was beginning to emerge publicly by then, but there has been little if any public evidence that she has acted aggressively on her concerns. "That was a great triumph that this other wing came out on top," Abshire said. ...
Read entire article at Mark Benjamin at Salon.com