“Nothing can be done,” to stop the war in Iraq, if the Republicans don’t get on board, the media is now saying. “The Democrats are doing all they can.” Well that was fast. What about impeaching this lying Texas puppet for sending American troops into battle based on cooked-up intelligence? I just don’t get it….

Everyone’s so excited about this Baker-Hamilton “Iraq Study Group” and its upcoming determinations on “what to do” about the war—even columnists who know better, or should. As if giving James Baker a go at it represents any real change in course from the present “full steam ahead to victory!” Victory of the bottom line, for some. It’s just public relations.

I’m so tired of hearing this armchair Freudian mumbo-jumbo about Pappy Bush and Son. It’s all the same people, ultimately, all making the same fist-fulls of dollars, at taxpayers’ expense and at the cost of thousands of young American lives (not to mention hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis).

Just who is James Baker? Well, let’s open to the index of Vanity Fair writer Craig Unger’s excellent House of Bush, House of Saud (Scribner: 2004)—which asks the question, “How did the Bushes, America’s most powerful political family, become gradually seduced and entangled with their Saudi counterparts?”—and look for “Baker, James.”

Here he is, on page 44: “Tall, trim and athletic, Baker, who was forty-eight years old when [George H.W.] Bush began to explore a run for the White House, brought a compelling blend of unlikely characteristics to the Bush team. He chewed Red Man tobacco and wore cowboy boots, but had polish and a certain sartorial elegance. He mixed steely-eyed toughness with an unflappable serenity. He was unyielding, but a realist—the consummate negotiator. He was also the perfect partner for George H.W. Bush.

“If they had never met, Baker would likely have been merely another successful corporate lawyer, and Bush a politician with a fabulous resume. But, like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, they were more than the sum of their parts. Bush provided a genial, clubby exterior and contacts to power and capital at the highest levels in Washington and New York. Tough, decisive, and disciplined, Baker gave Bush the spine of steel he sorely needed.

“Together, the two men masked their enormous ambitions under a genteel, Ivy-covered veneer that was a distinct break from the profane, cajoling, flesh-pressing, arm-twisting, bourbon-drinking Texas political style of the era dominated by Lyndon Johnson and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn. It started, appropriately enough, as a partnership on the tennis court, with Bush’s volley and net play complementing Baker’s strong baseline game so well that they twice took the doubles titles at the Houston Country Club….

“Baker had captained the tennis team at the Hill School, then still a traditional private boys’ school near Philadelphia, before moving on to Princeton, just as Bush had been a baseball captain at Andover before playing baseball at Yale. Likewise Baker had been tapped by Princeton’s most celebrated eating club, the Ivy, as Bush had been for Skull and Bones.

“The Bakers were the stuff of Texas legends. In 1872, Judge James A. Baker, Baker’s great-grandfather, joined Gray & Botts, a major firm that went on to represent railroad magnates and bankers such as Jay Gould and E.H. Harriman…. The Bakers were not of the East Coast establishment, but in their very Texas way, their pedigree was every bit as refined as Bush’s…

“Baker was all smoothness and charm, the Velvet Hammer, always proper, but a man no one wanted to cross. ‘Baker holds you locked in his gaze and Southern Comfort voice, occasionally flashing a wintry smile,’ the New York Times said. “…He is such a fox you feel the impulse to check your wallet when you leave his office.”

And what did the fox get up to after he met George, Sr.? A whole hell of a lot, and none of it suggesting that he would be all that opposed to a somewhat permanent U.S. military presence in Iraq, if not other parts of the Middle East.

More later…