Prominent Republicans who might be seen as father figures to President Bush—including Henry Kissinger and James Baker III, the lawyer who helped put Bush in the White House—disagree with the president on key issues. It showed again in a recent forum organized by the University of Georgia.
The forum, which was sold out, had as participants five former secretaries of state: Colin Powell; Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright, both from the Clinton administration; Baker, who served under the first President Bush; and Kissinger, who was secretary of state during the Nixon and Ford administrations.
Baker, who played a key role in making George W. Bush president by getting the Supreme Court to referee the disputed 2000 election, said during the round-table discussion that the U.S. should close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. Baker expressed himself strongly on the subject: "It gives us a very, very bad name, not just internationally. I have a great deal of difficulty understanding how we can hold someone, pick someone up, particularly someone who might be an American citizen—even if they were caught somewhere abroad, acting against American interests—and hold them without ever giving them an opportunity to appear before a magistrate."
Kissinger called the prison "a blot on us." All five former secretaries of state agreed that Guantanamo should be shut down.
The two grey eminences and their fellow participants also agreed that the U.S. should start talking with Iran, reaching out to other Iranian leaders besides the country's brash president, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.
Baker, who called for talks with Iran in 2006 as a member of the Iraq Study Group appointed by the current President Bush, pointed out that "a chaotic Iraq is not something that's in the interest of Iran." Baker also mentioned that Iran had "helped" the United States in Afghanistan, evidently referring to Iran's support for the Northern Alliance, and by extension the United States, in overthrowing the Taliban in that country.
Kissinger, who secretly negotiated an end to the Vietnam War by conferring with hostile powers in Asia, agreed that the U.S. shouldn't refuse to communicate with Iran and offered an axiom: "One has to talk with adversaries."
