Baird's view is what he really sees

Once again he's a sellout, a useful idiot. Or maybe he's a heroic maverick, telling it like it is.

It hasn't escaped Congressman Brian Baird's notice that this time around, his critics and fans on the left and right have simply swapped places.

"I am learning through brutal experience not to let it get to me," Baird sighed, jet-lagged, back in his office at the capital.

Last week, the Democrat from Vancouver, Wash., touched off another foreign-policy furor when he was one of the first U.S. officials in nearly four years to visit the Palestinian Gaza Strip.

He has been blunt in describing what he saw. Especially in Israel, where he got unusually direct with the Jerusalem press the day after his Gaza tour.

"What Israel did to Gaza was a Sherman's March type of destruction," Baird told me, essentially repeating what he said there. "There were whole neighborhoods leveled, 360 degrees, everywhere you looked. These were civilian areas, purposefully, utterly destroyed.

"Schools, hospitals, stores — all rubble. These weren't accidental hits, they were deliberately targeted. I saw an ambulance crushed by an Israeli tank. How do you justify crushing an ambulance?"

I asked Baird if he was accusing Israel, our ally, of committing war crimes in its recent military strikes on Gaza. He didn't answer yes or no, but said this:

"What I'm saying is you can't claim you are surgically hitting Hamas targets and then justify the absolute devastation in some of those neighborhoods. It was far worse than I had imagined. I never would have believed it if I hadn't seen it for myself."

Baird's report didn't go down so smoothly in Israel.

"What audacity, what chutzpa, what falsehoods," read one letter to the Jerusalem Post. In other comments, Baird was called a terrorist appeaser. Some Americans identifying as conservatives wrote in, apologizing to Israel for Baird's existence.

On some left-wing Web sites, Baird was hailed for his courage. For speaking hard truths.

It's the exact opposite reaction he got after he went to Iraq in 2007. He came home and switched from the anti-war side, favoring President Bush's troop surge. Some in the anti-war left said he'd been brainwashed and called on him to resign. Some conservatives praised his gutsy, independent thinking.

What I like about the guy: He goes and sees for himself. What kind of Mideast policy can we be crafting if we haven't even looked at Gaza for four years?

When Baird did this in Iraq, he said he saw a crucial change in strategy by U.S. troops. Protect the Iraqi citizenry from extremists at all costs, even if it means risking the lives of U.S. soldiers. Baird is convinced this stemmed the violence by putting us on the same side as ordinary Iraqis.

It's the opposite of what Israel is doing in Gaza, Baird says.

"They are laying waste to citizen and extremist alike," he said.

Baird also spent a day in the Israeli town of Sderot, interviewing survivors of rocket attacks from Hamas-controlled Gaza. He did not meet with Hamas, which is considered a terrorist group by the U.S.

There's no doubt Israel has a right to defend itself, he said. But the Gaza assault, backed by our weaponry, was so out of scale it was like "an eye for an eyelash."

Israel is losing its way, he said. Kind of like we did after 9/11.

No, people sure won't like hearing that. I'm not saying that makes this congressman always right. But it ought to count for something that when he calls 'em, he's at least bothered first to go see 'em.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.