Skipper

James Baker III, aged 76, is one of the most distinguished and experienced of the US Republican 'grandees', having served as Chief of Staff to the White House(81-85) Treasury Secretary(85-89) and finally Secretary of State to Bush senior (89-92). In March this year he was appointed co-chair of the Congressional Iraq Study Group with the blessing of the president. Since a month ago reports have been circulating that Baker's visit to the front line has prompted a report which tells Bush his Iraq policy has been a disastrous failure.

Today in his Guardian column Simon Jenkins witheringly deconstructs the implications of what has been leaked about the report, summed up by the sentence: 'The Vietnam moment is at hand'. The scale of the killing in Iraq is completely out of control. With over 100 civilian deaths a day, an estimated two thirds of a million since 2003 plus over 3000 US servicemen killed, the time for an agonising reappraisal is clearly nigh. Baker was apparently shocked to his core by his visit to Iraq and some of the sights he had to witness. He now looks for a solution between struggling on and 'cutting and running'.

The solutions suggested, like a threeways partition and the possible involvement of Syria and Iran, have the smell of desperation about them; these two countries, after all, were demonised as part of Bush's 'axis of evil' only in January, 2002. I suspect it is the Vietnam ending which awaits-yes,'cutting and running'- the second salutary lesson within a generation for the world's only super power that brute force does not equate with real political power. Meanwhile, we now see how close to the money General Dannat was with his intervention and how feeble Blair's response has been, pretending that he and the general disagree on nothing. As Jenkins notes this resembles the attitude of 'a forgotten outpost in a crumbling Roman empire... [which] dare not respond as no new instructions have arrived from Rome.' Instead he insists on repeating that withdrawal would be 'craven surrender' and would endanger British security.