The Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report issued yesterday brings to mind William F. Buckley Jr.'s statement long ago that he'd rather be governed by the first one hundred people listed in the Cambridge, Massachusetts telephone directory than by the Harvard faculty. Buckley's comment comes to mind because the ISG report has all the attributes -- and all of the failings -- of an academic study. It is both theoretically sound and thoroughly inapplicable outside the laboratories of the schools of diplomacy.

First and most importantly, the ISG recommends establishment of an "...international support structure intended to stabilize Iraq and ease tensions in other countries in the region. This support structure should include every country that has an interest in averting a chaotic Iraq, including all of Iraq's neighbors - Iran and Syria among them." It recommends that we negotiate Iraq's future with these nations without regard for the fact that neither is willing to see Iraq able to govern, sustain and defend itself.

What the ISG appears unwilling to see is the fact that Iran and Syria have, since before April 2003, working tenaciously to destabilize Iraq and prevent democracy from taking root there. When I visited Iraq in December of last year, I was briefed by all of our top military commanders, as well as Amb. Khalilzad. With the exception of Khalilzad, all the leaders emphasized that Syria and Iran were infiltrating weapons, money and fighters into Iraq. If Syria were at all interested in a stable Iraq, why has its government refused to take any action to prevent the flow of foreign fighters, weapons and insurgent funding into Iraq, a process which continues to this day? If Iran wished for a stable Iraq, why would it be manufacturing and smuggling into Iraq the deadliest weapon our troops face, the "explosively-formed projectile" IED? And why would it be funding and controlling the activities of Moqtada al-Sadr, the murderous radical Shiite imam whose Mahdi Militia is a powerful anti-democratic force?

The ISG's recommendation to negotiate a positive role for Syria and Iran is willfully ignorant of the goals of Iran and Syria. Their interest is in American withdrawal from the region, not a stable Iraq. They do not wish stability on terms we can possibly accept. Iran has been at war with the United States since 1979. The "stability" Iran seeks in the Middle East is one that precludes any further American interference in its nuclear weapons program and in which America accepts Iran as the regional superpower. Iran is well on the way to achieving that status, which would threaten US security by asserting control of about two-thirds of the world's oil reserves and - within a few years - result in the destruction of Israel.

There will be many more aspects of the ISG that I will write about in the coming weeks. In debating its recommendations, we should remember that the theories of international diplomacy are no more than that: theories. When they collide with reality, they are usually disproved at the cost of many lives. Before we commence adopting the ISG's recommendations, they have to be tested against the facts on the ground. These recommendations - like the 9-11 Commission's - are not delivered to us from Mt. Sinai on marble tablets. They are, in sum, an academic map of the road to defeat in the global war against Islamofascism.