Iraq Study Group Report - Summary Please?

I'm thinking option 2 probably looks pretty good to some involved.

I wasn't sure what to expect with Baker, given his ties to the previous George and Carlysle Group.

So, in the end we get a report that says things are really bad, but the president thinks we can still win, and (Gawd, tell me I didn't hear this correctly) we are now waiting on another report???

I think "long time to repair" is too optimistic.

Not impressed with the report. Nothing even closely to solutions are suggested in the report.

Infrablue, That's the problem with the invastion of Iraq; there are no easy solutions. This administration mismanaged everything from the very beginning, and after more than three years of incompetence, even the "expert" committee came up short. Bush still wants to bring democracy to the Middle East. There's no cure for stupid.

Now here comes Baker-Hamilton with this weird idea of actually trying to talk to them. Who do they think they are dealing with? Those two are not like our staunch ally Saudi Arabia. They are likely to only say they will not support our foes and then do just that behind our backs.

WASHINGTON, Dec 6 (Reuters) - Among the 1,000 people who work in the U.S. Embassy in Iraq, only 33 are Arabic speakers and only six speak the language fluently, according to the Iraq Study Group report released on Wednesday.

"All of our efforts in Iraq, military and civilian, are handicapped by Americans' lack of knowledge of language and cultural understanding," the bipartisan panel said in its report. "In a conflict that demands effective and efficient communication with Iraqis, we are often at a disadvantage."

The report, written by five Republicans and five Democrats, recommended the U.S. government give "the highest possible priority to professional language proficiency and cultural training" for officials headed to Iraq.

While the Bush administration, the media and nearly all the Democrats still refuse to explain the war in Iraq in terms of oil, the ever-pragmatic members of the Iraq Study Group share no such reticence.
Page 1, Chapter 1 of the Iraq Study Group report lays out Iraq's importance to its region, the U.S. and the world with this reminder: "It has the world's second-largest known oil reserves." The group then proceeds to give very specific and radical recommendations as to what the United States should do to secure those reserves. If the proposals are followed, Iraq's national oil industry will be commercialized and opened to foreign companies.
The report makes visible to everyone the elephant in the room: that we are fighting, killing and dying in a war for oil. It states in plain language that the U.S. government should use every tool at its disposal to ensure that American oil interests and those of its corporations are met.
It's spelled out in Recommendation No. 63, which calls on the U.S. to "assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise" and to "encourage investment in Iraq's oil sector by the international community and by international energy companies." This recommendation would turn Iraq's nationalized oil industry into a commercial entity that could be partly or fully privatized by foreign companies.