Why Baker is the wrong man to assess the mess in Iraq

Because he is too incestuously tied to the Bush cabal, the Saudis, and the war itself. You don't get someone who supported the war to go and criticize it.

As Glenn Greenwald says:
"If you go to a doctor for an operation and he completely botches your surgery and you lose an organ due to his abject ineptitude and recklessness, you don't go back to that doctor for repair surgery; you find another one. If you go to a lawyer who almost destroys your company through complete ignorance of your basic legal obligations, you don't stay with that lawyer in the hope that he will get you out of the disaster he created for you; you retain another one. All of that is just basic common sense.

Yet here we are, revering and listening to and following the same dense, amoral people who could not have been more wrong about everything they recommended and asserted prior to this war, while we scorn or (at best) ignore those who were so right. As but one example, one of the appointees on the Commission was the wildly extremist, warmongering American Enterprise Institute's Michael Rubin, though he is really different only in degree, not in kind, from most of the other Commission members and "experts" on whom they relied.

Worse, the people to whom we are listening do not recognize they were wrong. They believe they were right and that what we need is more of their great wisdom and advice, in greater doses. As a result, they are using exactly the same premises and assumptions and moral calculus that they used to bring about this tragedy, and astoundingly, there seem to be enough people -- at least in Washington -- willing to embrace the fantasy that somehow, this time around, listening to them will bring about better results."

John Aravosis at Americablog:
"... I do get the sense that the Study Group never really considered the possibility that Iraq is already lost. Simpson and Perry seemed almost surprised when I suggested that they convince me that Iraq isn't already dead. I fear that it's still not PC to suggest in polite company that the war is over, we lost. And I fear just as much that the Study Group may not have seriously considered this possibility - the proposition that nothing we do will matter in the end, and that as bad as it sounds, the only solution is to get out now."