Some days he makes it easy
Some days he makes it hard
It's not that he's wrong. He's right. But try getting anybody to see the long run and see it thoroughly. This is the man I want to run for president in 2008. This is the man I trust can save this country. Getting through the next primary hell to the GE, the GE he would win if only the Democrats have the sense to nominate him, looks more and more remote when he does things like this. But then, politicians tend to finesse the truth and soldiers don't. And I guess it's not the worst part. The worst part is that the circumstances in Iraq are far, far worse than we can ever imagine from our keyboards. Why else would Wesley Clark defy all political reason to tell us we can't make something so terribly hard into something easy?
Mixed reviews: Kevin Drum; Moderate Voice; Taylor Marsh; The Broad View; Secular Blasphemy; Mahablog; Realist Dem; Yglesias TAPPED; Donklephant;
The Next Iraq Offensiveby Wesley K. Clark
Doha, Qatar
WHILE the Bush administration and its critics escalated the debate last week over how long our troops should stay in Iraq, I was able to see the issue through the eyes of America's friends in the Persian Gulf region. The Arab states agree on one thing: Iran is emerging as the big winner of the American invasion, and both President Bush's new strategy and the Democratic responses to it dangerously miss the point. It's a devastating critique. And, unfortunately, it is correct.
While American troops have been fighting, and dying, against the Sunni rebels and foreign jihadists, the Shiite clerics in Iraq have achieved fundamental political goals: capturing oil revenues, strengthening the role of Islam in the state, and building up formidable militias that will defend their gains and advance their causes as the Americans draw down and leave. Iraq's neighbors, then, see it evolving into a Shiite-dominated, Iranian buffer state that will strengthen Tehran's power in the Persian Gulf just as it is seeks nuclear weapons and intensifies its rhetoric against Israel.The American approach shows little sense of Middle Eastern history and politics. As one prominent Kuwaiti academic explained to me, in the Muslim world the best way to deal with your enemies has always been to assimilate them - you never succeed in killing them all, and by trying to do so you just make more enemies. Instead, you must woo them to rejoin society and the government. Military pressure should be used in a calibrated way, to help in the wooing.
If this critique is correct - and it is difficult to argue against it - then we must face its implications. "Staying the course" risks a slow and costly departure of American forces with Iraq increasingly factionalized and aligned with Iran. Yet a more rapid departure of American troops along a timeline, as some Democrats are calling for, simply reduces our ability to affect the outcome and risks broader regional conflict.
We need to keep our troops in Iraq, but we need to modify the strategy far more drastically than anything President Bush called for last week.
