“With High Fidelity”

Even before Baghdad became the target during the early morning hours of January 17, there were those who thought that George Bush’s statecraft had become “the most important factor shaping the post-cold war world,” his “diplomatic calibrations near perfect.” ¹ Yet, at the same time, the concept was somewhat ambiguous, a nice tribute to patriotic pride, but, alas, a goal blocked by formal obstacles posed by post-cold war considerations. Nobody was more conscious of that sort of thing than Jim Baker, who would later call his memoirs “the politics of diplomacy.”