When James A. Baker III and his bipartisan crew of "serious" people rode into Washington last week with their glossy report, they were received by the press and the Democratic Party as conquering heroes. But as warmly as this group of mostly has-beens had been received, when the dust finally settled it was obvious that it was all nothing more than your typical Washington dog and pony show-all bright lights and blather but no meat.

That's because the much-heralded group never seriously bothered to deal with the elephant in the room.

Instead, they told us what we already knew and touted it as some bold new insight. I mean, let's get serious! This group held its first meeting on April 11, visited Iraq for four days in August, and talked with some 171 people "in and out of government." And yet for some reason we are now supposed to view their work as being more valid than that of the people that have lived this experience for more than three years-longer than it took the U.S. to win WWII.

The situation, they wrote, is "grave and deteriorating," and there is neither a "magic formula" nor a "guarantee of success" in Iraq.

"The challenges in Iraq," they said, "are complex." "Violence is increasing in scope and in lethality. It is fed by a Sunni Arab insurgency, Shiite militias, death squads, Al-Qaida and widespread criminality."

"Sectarian conflict," the report noted, is the "principal challenge to stability."

Gee, thanks.

But it didn't stop there. The group also made 79 recommendations to fix the problem-most of which also had a familiar ring to them.

Chief among them, the United States should:

• Find some ways to pull back U. S. combat forces by early 2008
• Focus more U.S. troops on training and supporting Iraqi units
• Set milestones for Iraqi government progress and make it clear that if progress is not made, support will be reduced
• Begin a "diplomatic offensive" by the end of the month and engage adversaries Iran and Syria
• Be committed to a renewed effort to promote a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace process

So were the conclusions of the Iraqi Study Group the groundbreaking copy that it was made out to be? Not hardly.

But in hindsight it was about what you would expect from a group whose members had their heads buried in some post-Vietnam, Gulf War I imposed fog.

The advice of Baker and his colleagues might have made sense some fifteen years ago, but not now. Since then the world has changed in ways that the group either doesn't recognize or refuses to acknowledge.

Because while all of their accumulated wisdom might have indeed been a rational strategy before 9/11, the grave dangers of the new world require a new set of metrics that the old guard doesn't want to recognize.

Unfortunately, the group's 79 suggestions will ultimately lead only to failure, because they do nothing to confront the real problem. There is an elephant in the room and James Baker and his friends have ignored it.

That elephant, of course, is Iran-the real root of all of the problems that we have in the Gulf. It has been at war with us since 1979, and its "Death to America" chants are now something more than mere rhetoric.

Because the truth is that without Iranian interference in Iraq, those purple-fingered people who so bravely voted in Iraq's first election would have been free by now. Instead, Iran's continued subversion of Iraqi stability has kept both the Iraqis and us in chains. So instead of success we now contemplate defeat and retreat.

And in doing so we embolden the Iranians even further.

In fact, just last week, while we were busy debating the merits of what even Baker called "a flawed report," the Iranians were busy rattling their sabers again.

This time it was Iran's national security adviser and chief nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani. He said that the time has come to expel the U.S military from the region and that the remaining Gulf States must form an alliance with Tehran.

It was more ultimatum than mere comment. And it comes from a theocracy that will soon have nuclear weapons if left unopposed. With them, they can indeed wipe nations from the face of the earth, as they have so often promised.

While the Iraqi Study Group believes that these fanatics will somehow help us solve our problems in Iraq, their increasingly hostile rhetoric clearly says otherwise.

With this report, James Baker has simply dusted off his old playbook from the Gulf War and presented it as new. But it won't work anymore, because Iran is working from a different book altogether. Theirs is from the Crusades, and it has a set of rules that are wildly different. It's all jihad, all the time.

It's as plain and as simple as it is obvious. But somehow not everyone wants to see the elephant in the room. Least of all James Baker.

Nobody wants to spend another day in Iraq, but cutting a deal and retreating at this point is not an option.

Those American boots are the only thing that stands between hope and chaos.