According to Fox News, Wesley Clark is going to announce his candidacy for president. Given his performance as a talking head, I think he’s wasting his time, but what I’m especially curious to see is how the press treats Clark’s numerous waffles and bizarre accusations (like the implication that the White House told him to blame Iraq for 9/11 — a claim that Clark had to quickly retreat from).
For example, Clark seems to want to capture the same Left wing Democratic voters who are inspired by Howard Dean’s anti-war rhetoric. So Bloomberg reported in August that Clark said the war against Iraq was waged “under false pretenses,” adding that,
You’d be taking him to the Better Business Bureau if you bought a washing machine the way we went into war with Iraq.
But the problem is that Clark himself all but endorsed the administration’s pre-war claims of Iraq in offering pessimistic analyses of possible outcomes of a war with Iraq.
For example, here’s Clark in an October 2002 interview in which he correctly predicts that one scenario is a quick war with minimal U.S. casualties, but that there was a more pessimistic alternative (emphasis added),
The high-end casualty assessment is that Saddam sees us coming as we’re staging in Kuwait. He says, “I’ve never liked those Shias anyway,” and unleashes on them all his biological and chemical stocks, such as anthrax by the truckload, south of the 33rd parallel. When the Americans drive through on their way to Baghdad, we will ingest all that dust and it will present a high risk to us.
But more importantly it will affect the Iraqi people themselves. And Saddam will try to say to say we caused it. Here we are talking about 12-14 million people at risk in southern Iraq. Even if we have our protective suits on, how are we going to take care of all the sick and dying?
Saddam may also try to use his few remaining Scuds to strike Israel. The Israelis will shoot back with their anti-missile systems. And we will also be attacking the Iraqis to neutralize the threat from the Scuds. Still, there is always the possibility that a Scud loaded with anthrax spores might slip through and strike Israel.
And in that event, say the Israelis, they would have to respond against Iraq. This is the recipe for tens of thousands of civilian casualties.
Was Clark acting under false pretenses when concocting a scenario where Hussein uses chemical/biological weapons and Scud missiles, neither of which have yet to be found in post-war Iraq? Or was he, like the administration, making a reasonable guess based on sketchy intelligence and other information about a dictatorial regime known to have used such tactics in the past? I’d really like to see Clark square this round hole.
Also, there is an interesting quote at the end of Clark’s interview about American foreign policy,
Somehow we have to overcome the legacy of fear and anxiety from the events of 9/11. While we must remain strong, and occasionally take actions to anticipate and eliminate immediate threats to us, we must also recognize that our greater security will be achieved not by killing our opponents and destroying their regimes but by supporting our friends and reinforcing those who share our values.
We should do both — support our friends and allies and kill our enemies and destroy their regimes. Unfortunately the Bush administration’s biggest flaw is that it excels at the latter, while bungling on the former.
Sources:
General Clark Accuses Bush of `False Pretenses’ in Iraq War. Bloomberg, August 17, 2003.
CLARK: FIGHTING WITH IRAQ COULD BE OVER IN TWO WEEKS; AMERICA CAN’T BE ‘NEW ROME’ WITH VOLUNTEER ARMY. New Perspectives Quarterly, October 7, 2002.