Ladies and gentlemen, Baker and Hamilton

About a year ago, senior Pentagon officials announced a plan that captured the main headlines for a day, maybe even two. By the end of 2006, they said, meaning in less than a month fro m today, the size of the American force in Iraq will drop to less than 100,000 soldiers. That much. They also explained how this would happen: The Americans would train the Iraqis, the Iraqis would take the reins into their own hands, and the Americans would pull back to training and aid missions. Forward ho, over and out.

And, in fact, this was not even the first time a plan like this was on the agenda. Anyone who rummages through archives that are already beginning to yellow will find similar statements in 2005, 2004 and even 2003. Now an updated version of a familiar situation is taking shape: The Pentagon is making plans and Muqtada al Sadr is laughing. Next year it will be possible to update it again: instead of the Pentagon, henceforth say James Baker. The one laughing will remain the same.

A lot of ego and hot air will fill the crowded room in the Hart Senate Office building adjacent to the Capitol building, where the Baker-Hamilton committee will present its recommendations to the general public. This is a committee that lives on well-orchestrated public relations and unrealistic expectations of a public thirsting for magic keys. Last week its members were subjected to words of scorn, though not enough, for having managed to make time in their crowded timetable to devote themselves to Annie Leibowitz's camera. To market their wares they have also hired the services of a public relations firm that knows how to oil the wheels of the local news industry.

The Baker-Hamilton performance is a huge Hollywood-style production, as is the name of the commission. And in any case, its conclusions have already been trickling out: Train the Iraqis, hand over the reins and start thinning the presence and size of the forces. If it were that simple, it would already have happened a long time ago.

An administration official who talked with Haaretz a few days ago said the seeds of this committee's damages lie in "the false" on which the public image it has created for itself is based. The real dilemma in Iraq is not whether to leave, a decision that voters have already taken both for the president and Baker, but rather what outcome the United States will choose to leave behind once the withdrawal is accomplished.

There are those who say: Let the Iraqis shed each other's blood until they solve the problem for themselves one way or another. But in the administration they aren't accepting this argument. It is impossible to evade the responsibility for the fate of Iraq's inhabitants, they are saying there, and it is also impossible to leave a dangerous vacuum behind. Therefore, it is possible that they will try to avoid bloodshed at the expense of other principles, like that obsolete Western idea that has gone out of style lately called democracy.

Those who are preaching a move of this sort, or something similar, are armed with two arguments that are hard to defeat. One is that the sanctity of life takes precedence over the kind of regime. The other is that a tyrant friendly to the West is preferable to dangerous chaos, or a shaky and hostile democracy. Just as President Hosni Mubarak ensures Egypt's stability without democracy and bloodshed, the "strong man" who will be elected to lead the new Iraq will do the same there. Baker would definitely sign on an idea like this. Perhaps today it will indeed emerge that he already has signed, and along with him, most of the administration people who are doing the work. Those in Israel already would have signed on it three years ago.

The question, according to a senior source involved in the planning groups that are dealing with the issue, is how to make this transition. And whether it is even possible. Among other things, he said, it is necessary to understand whether the elected leaders in Iraq are simply weak leaders or whether the system we have concocted for them is to blame for their failure. In any case, he also had one practical suggestion: When you read the Baker report, he said, don't linger over the dates for withdrawal and thinning the forces, whether or not there are any. Look for the recommendations concerning the structure of the regime in Iraq.