Clark: Attack In Iraq Results From Lack Of Coherent War Plan
nbc11.com
POSTED: 2:47 PM PST November 2, 2003
Clark Campaigns By The Bay
SAN FRANCISCO -- The deadly downing of a U.S. military helicopter in Iraq shows the Iraqi resistance is growing in strength as U.S. forces continue their occupation of the country "without a real strategy for success," Democrat Wesley Clark said Sunday.
Clark, a retired four-star Army general pursuing the Democratic nomination for president, countered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's comments suggesting that the deaths of 15 soldiers in the attack west of Baghdad were a sad but inevitable consequence of war.
Campaigning in San Francisco, Clark called the casualties a result of the Bush administration's failure to develop a coherent plan for the war beyond creating "exciting visuals of U.S. forces advancing into and destroying Saddam Hussein's regime."
"The naive optimism of President George W. Bush himself and his administration, that somehow we would be welcomed as liberators, that democracy would blossom overnight, that there would be no resistance, that other states in the region would fall like a string of dominoes under threats of further American action, was just that," Clark said. "It was naive and it was uninformed, and we are paying in American lives and blood for that."
Clark argued that while many questions remained about the missile assault that caused the helicopter to crash, the fact that the missiles met their target "represents an escalation" in the capabilities of Iraqi insurgents. He predicted that a more sophisticated enemy will make it more difficult for U.S. troops to move safely around the country, limiting American military options both on the ground and in the air.
"There is no reason this won't be repeated," Clark said. "The Iraqi resistance is taking form, strengthening, extending its reach and eliminating those who are cooperating with the United States. It is the difficulty any occupying Army has in a state where they don't speak the language, don't appreciate the cultures and don't have the local roots."
Clark said that although foreign terrorists seeking easy ways to attack U.S. forces are playing a role in the resistance, he also blamed Bush for creating "a regional dynamic" that has fueled anti-American sentiment among Iraq's neighbors. Clark, who has opposed the U.S.-led war in Iraq, said the president committed the American military in Iraq to distract the American people from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He said the U.S. military effort in Iraq was hampered from the start by too few forces and the wrong kind of troops in place.
"It was a case where the so-called 'decisive operations' which the military has planned and worked on for years were less than adequate to achieve the desired end state," he said. "You could defeat the Iraqi armed forces but you did not defeat the resistance that remained in the country, nor set the basis for a peaceful, united Iraqi state."
As of Saturday, 360 U.S. service members had died since the beginning of military operations in Iraq, according to the Defense Department -- and 222 soldiers had been killed on or since May 1, when Bush declared that major combat operations had ended.
Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. |
