Wesley Clark believes in working effectively with Allies to solve problems and using force as a last resort.
prospect.org
<<...If Clark runs, his clear raison d'être would be to articulate a more tenable opposition to Cheneyism than the other Democrats can. "The issue to me has been that we have known for a long time that Osama bin Laden is a problem," he says. "The difficulty was always to mobilize the American people and bring enough comprehensive pressure to bear to do something against terrorism. Well, 9-11 did that. But the administration has squandered a lot of the international goodwill that came our way after the attacks and is now squandering our domestic energy by forcing us into Iraq."
For which, he argues, there is no honest military or diplomatic rationale. "The Iranians are further along with regard to nuclear weapons," he says. "The North Koreans are much further along. Iraq is third. We went after this in a reverse order. ... They chose Iraq as a problem before they explained what the problem was."
The substance of Clark's critique of the Bush foreign policy hinges chiefly on two assertions. First, that the administration has offered competing -- sometimes, in Clark's view, dodgy -- rationales for an invasion of Iraq and therefore has not adequately or properly unified the American public behind the idea. He gives the administration points for having done this well with regard to al-Qaeda, which he regards as the more important war to be waging right now. But on Iraq, he says, a rationale for attacking now has "never been clearly and decisively articulated."
Second, Clark feels that if the administration's efforts with regard to U.S. public opinion have been wanting, its attempts to change world opinion have ranged from halfhearted to downright hostile. He disdains the administration's unilateralist bent both as a moral matter -- preemptive war, he says, is something the United States could always do if it needed to, "but we never made it a principle" -- and on the strategic grounds that antagonizing old allies will come back to bite us one day.
"Terrorism is a multilateral problem," Clark says. "You cannot defeat it in one nation. You need international police work, teamwork, international harmonization of laws against terror, a whole series of things. You act unilaterally, you lose the commitment of your allies to make it work. That's the one thing that will kill you in the war on terrorism."
That should ring true to voters coming from a four-star general whose experience has taken him as high up the military and diplomatic chains of command as a person can go. But he will also need to put more meat on the bones of a real alternative vision. If Clark were president, how would he handle Saddam Hussein? He would do what exactly in North Korea? How would he bring about that harmonization of laws? He speaks beautifully of basing the United States' role in the world on an articulation of the nation's better principles: "The United States is a 225-year rolling revolution. ... We are the embodiment of the Enlightenment. If we're true to those principles, then it's a foreign policy of generosity, humility, engagement and of course force where it is needed. But as a last resort."..>> |
