James Baker

The year-end debate about the Iraq Study Group's unequivocal diagnosis of failure and its grim list of uncertain remedies is the real measure of the hopelessness of the mess America made. The ISG's 79 recommendations - some wise, some impolitic, some impossible - is itself a confession that all the choices are bad. That's not the commission's fault: No one else has a persuasive idea either, least of all the president - the self-proclaimed decider - who started and ran this misbegotten war.