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Politics : Wesley Clark -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (98)	9/19/2003 4:48:42 PM
From: Don Green	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1414

Glenn Thanks, unfortunately I feel he ends up doing more harm than good with some of his posts. His rants may turn off others to his candidate of choice. I think Wesley Clark is an interesting person but still too much to learn (The actual reason for this thread) about him to make any choice. Regards Don

To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (98)	9/20/2003 6:20:42 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 1414

Snapping to Attention _______________________________ By BOB HERBERT Columnist The New York Times September 19, 2003 nytimes.com Democrats wandering like outcasts in a desert of disillusion have spotted—— what? Is that a four-star general out there? You say he's from the South? And he's a Democrat who wants to be president? All right, all right, calm down! Yes, the original lineup of Democratic candidates — Dean, Kerry, Lieberman, et al. — was a caravan of disappointments. But some questions must be asked. Is Wesley Clark — first in his class at West Point, Rhodes scholar, former NATO supreme allied commander, holder of the Purple Heart and Silver Star — the real deal, or just a mirage? Is this (by all accounts) brilliant former general really a dream candidate for the parched and leaderless Democrats, or just a dream? In theory, he's almost perfect. He inoculates the Dems against the G.O.P. canard — now more than half a century old — that they are somehow less than patriotic. General Clark was severely wounded in combat in Vietnam and led the successful military operation in Kosovo in 1999. Republicans are not eager to have the general's career contrasted with the military misadventures of George W. Bush, who escaped Vietnam by joining the Texas Air National Guard and who celebrated the alleged end to major combat in Iraq by staging his very own "Top Gun" fantasy aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln. General Clark's instincts (or at least the little we know of them) seem to push him in the direction of bridge-building and cooperative efforts, which would be good for a party in disarray, and even better for a country that needs as many allies as possible in the fight against terror and other threats around the world. With regard to the fight against terror, he has said the first order of business for the U.S. should have been an alliance of the U.S., the United Nations and NATO against Al Qaeda. As for Iraq, in a telephone conversation yesterday he told me the American people deserve to know a lot more about our rationale for invading. "It's important to ask why the administration set the timeline in such a manner that they were unable to wait for an international coalition to emerge and work together," he said. "And why is it that they failed to plan adequately for the postwar task? Certainly the officers in uniform understood very well the difficulties and what could happen afterward. Why is it that the administration didn't want those difficulties aired?" The problem, of course, is that presidencies are not won on paper. It takes awhile — sometimes too long — to determine what's real about a politician, any politician. Lyndon Johnson ran as a peace candidate in 1964. Richard Nixon said he had a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. George Herbert Walker Bush told the voters to read his lips. Bill Clinton said, "I did not have sex. . . ." And George W. Bush assured us he was uniter, not a divider. So we'll scrutinize General Clark, undoubtedly a lot more closely than he would like. Meanwhile, he's the flavor of the moment. He comes across as less angry than Howard Dean (who can give the impression that one-on-one he might put the president in a headlock). He seems more personable than John Kerry, more mature than John Edwards, more telegenic than Joe Lieberman and so on. The general cheered Democrats with this swipe at Mr. Bush on Wednesday: "For the first time since Herbert Hoover's presidency, a president's economic policies have cost us more jobs than our economy has the energy to create." But he also said that while his campaign is committed to asking hard questions and demanding answers, "we're going to do so not in destructive bickering or in personal attacks, but in the highest traditions of democratic dialogue." The comparisons of General Clark to a fellow named Eisenhower are as overblown at this point as they are inevitable. But there's a lot that any candidate can learn from the Eisenhower model: the quick and endearing smile, the optimism, the quiet sense of strength, the ability to read and reflect the national mood. We'll know a lot more about General Clark soon enough. Meanwhile, the Democrats should welcome him not as a savior but as someone with the potential to energize their stagnant field of presidential contenders.

To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (98)	9/20/2003 6:59:47 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 1414

Is simplism the new integrity? I guess it is. (September 20th, 2003 -- 3:02 AM EDT // link) talkingpointsmemo.com According to the prevailing chatter, Wes Clark has been waffling on his position on the war. CBS said as much: "Clark Waffles On War." Frankly, I don't think I've ever heard anything quite so stupid. The idea seems to be that there are really only two positions on the war, the Dean position and the Bush position. Either you were against the war from the beginning, against even threatening force under any and all circumstances, soup-to-nuts, or you were for it, more or less under the same range of conceivable circumstances. If you have a position that falls between these two monochromatic options, you're indecisive, a waffler or a trimmer. I could see this coming when someone sent me this fact sheet from the media watchdog group FAIR, which argues that Clark has somehow been mislabeled as "anti-war" or that he's falsely labeled himself thus. The fact sheet then goes on to catalog various of Clark's statements over the last year and argue that he's stated contradictory opinions at different times. One of these contradictory statements, according to FAIR, was one praising the audacity of the original war-plan notwithstanding his disagreement with launching the war in the first place. This last criticism goes to the heart of the matter -- the difference between thinking that this war was ill-conceived and poorly planned (which I think is Clark's position) and being 'anti-war' in the sense of some broader political ethic (which seems to be how FAIR is defining the phrase.) Expecting a retired four-star general to fall into this latter category seems a bit much to expect. The truth is that Clark's position on the war is at least as consistent as any other candidate in this race. He is one of the few candidates who strikes me as having given any serious thought to the question -- outside the context of the politics. And he is the only one who's written extensively on the national security challenges which face the country, Iraq, and the strategic and diplomatic shortcomings of the president's policy. (In other words, not just "me too!" or "no way!") And -- imagine that -- his arguments are the same now as they were a year ago. Republicans and a number of Democrats who support a certain candidate have teamed up -- made common cause, really -- to argue that it's not possible to have voted to authorize the president to use force and then to criticize the circumstances and manner in which he chose to do so. The supposed flip-flop isn't one at all. What he's saying is that he probably would have voted to give the president the power to use force but never would have voted for the war he actually ended up waging. (We'll discuss in a later post why there's nothing necessarily contradictory about this.) To my mind, Clark came off quite well in the articles in today's Times and the Post. Word I got from various groups he spoke with at University of Iowa today gave similar reports. And I suspect he'll continue to do well so long as he doesn't let himself get drawn into this foolishness. -- Josh Marshall

To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (98)	9/20/2003 8:38:23 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 1414

Esquire's Feature Story On General Wesley Clark esquire.com <<...Accountability is the value that he hopes to export from military to civilian life, the value that informs even his most fledgling attempt to formulate a platform, the value by which he hopes America's education system will be rebuilt, with teaching professionalized in the new century the same way soldiering was at the end of the last. And it is the value that makes whatever policy disagreements he has with President Bush seem strangely personal, for it is the value that distinguishes a warrior from, well, a warrior president. They have met but once, and that was for a few minutes at some kind of Washington function, and yet they seem made for some epic confrontation. One is from the meritocracy, one from the aristocracy; one served, and one found ways not to; one worked in government all his life and, despite the inevitable frustrations, ultimately believed it worth fighting and dying for, while the other's proper dream of government is to make it beholden to business and religion. They are polar opposites in nearly all ways, except one: They have both brought the overwhelming force of the United States armed forces to bear. Indeed, although the general can go into any fight with Bush claiming to have done what Bush has done, Bush can claim to have done what the general has done, in spades. What is the difference between the two men, then, in matters of war? The answer is that the Bush administration has liberated war from the yoke of NATO, the UN, and international alliances; the general, though constrained by that yoke when he was SACEUR, prefers it to the alternative: war unleashed, war unbound, war that becomes too easy to fight and to tolerate and to rely on. "We read your book," a Bush administration official told him once. "No one is going to tell us where we can or can't bomb." To the general's mind, however, the difficulty of allowing NATO ministers to tell you where to bomb is offset by the power and legitimacy that international support confers. What is galvanic about the prospect of an electoral contest between the general and the president is that it becomes a referendum on the future of war and—since we are going to be at war for the foreseeable future—a referendum on the future of this country. Could the general ever claim the right to make such weighty decisions, given his lack of political experience? Well, the president has claimed the right to make such weighty decisions without the benefit of military experience, his spotty record as a fighter pilot for the Texas Air National Guard notwithstanding. In General Clark's world, the importance of having served in the military has much less to do with the courage required for combat than it does with the courage required for full accountability. "In the Navy, when a ship runs aground, the commanding officer is relieved of duty, no matter what the reason. Now, I'm not saying we ought to hold politicians to that standard, but still. . . ." President Bush was the Commander in Chief during the greatest security failure in this nation's history. He has not had the courage to be held accountable and indeed has done his best to prevent even a review of what happened on that day. And yet he wears a flight suit with COMMANDER IN CHIEF on the front and claims prestige as a warrior president? It is something no soldier could countenance. And it makes him vulnerable to a candidate in whom the value of accountability is ingrained and for whom the question the Commander in Chief doesn't want to hear—the question of what he knew about 9/11 before 9/11 even happened—is the question that must be asked as a matter of military honor...>>