Preview of Baker-Hamilton Commission

Powerline has a post on Michael Rubin's preview (here) of the Baker-Hamilton Commission on American Policy in Iraq. Unfortunately, this "bipartisan commission" seems like a 9/11 Commission redux:

Take the four subordinate expert working groups: Baker and Hamilton gerrymandered these advisory panels to ratify predetermined recommendations. While bipartisan, the groups are anything but representative of the policy debate...Many appointees appeared to be selected less for expertise than for their hostility to President Bush's war on terrorism and emphasis on democracy.

Let's look at a few of the "experts" on the panel:

Raad Alkadiri: "has repeatedly defined U.S. motivation for Iraq's liberation as a grab for oil."

Raymond Close: "is actually a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, which, in July 2003, called for Vice President Dick Cheney's resignation for an alleged conspiracy to distort intelligence, which they said had been uncovered by none other than Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV. The following summer, Close posited that 'Bush and the neocons' had fabricated the charge 'that the evil Iranian mullahs inspired and instigated the radical Shia Islamist insurgency.'"

Chas Freeman: Jim Baker's former ambassador to Saudi Arabia; stated in the antiwar documentary Uncovered: The War in Iraq, "that the Bush administration had fabricated its justifications for war."

Other experts: "a plaintiff in the January 17, 2006, lawsuit against the National Security Agency for its no-warrant wiretap program and a think-tank analyst who had not traveled beyond the Green Zone on her only trip to Iraq in September 2003, but nonetheless demonstrated her open mind by declaring the Iraq endeavor a failure in an interview with a German magazine just days before the commission's inauguration."

One other important point is that when the Commission travelled to Baghdad, only one member ever left the Green Zone. I just hope that this isn't the chance Baker uses to let down the Iraqi people for the second time in 15 years.