Wes Clark's overture to insurgents
Thursday, Dec 8, 2005
By John Brummett
It turns out there's another leading Democratic presidential prospect for 2008 with strong Arkansas ties who resists the party's crassly opportunistic congressional agenda to pull out of Iraq or at least set a timetable.
Hillary Clinton is not alone in saying we can't make a perfect mess of a place, then simply leave with cavalier disregard both for the mess and the lives sacrificed.
Retired Army Gen. Wes Clark, just back in Little Rock from an around-the-world trip during which he visited the Middle East, published one of those prestigious op-ed articles Tuesday in The New York Times. It carried a Qatar dateline.
He wrote that the Bush administration had Iraq all wrong with this stay-the-course business, but that Democrats were wrong as well with this "rapid-departure" business.
A four-star general widely extolled for directing the NATO air war in Kosovo, Clark surely felt an obligation to outline strategies and tactics that would get between the Bush's administration's failed policy and the Democrats' foolhardy answer.
That's precisely the kind of thing Democrats need. They must fashion opposition to the Bush administration that is not transparently opportunistic and impractical, but credible, responsible, courageous in defiance of the base and, as important as anything else, consistent.
If the Democrats run someone for president again who is on all sides of something as epic as war, then they'll meet the same result. What the more pragmatic Democrats ought to realize is that the more the extremist base gets offended, the more responsible the Democrats begin to appear to the eventually decisive center.
Clark wrote that we need to redeploy many of our troops and more of our air resources to all of Iraq's borders to make it harder for outside jihadists to enter the country. Then, he said, we need to spend less time trying to kill Iraqi insurgents and more time trying to "assimilate" them.
He wrote that a Kuwaiti academician had explained to him a few days ago that killing one's enemy is pointless among Muslims. It merely creates more enemies and makes those enemies more fervent and murderous.
What works - what is in one's best interest, Clark said the Kuwait had explained - is a kind of co-opting of one's enemies, with some limitation. You don't make a deal with Osama bin Laden, of course. But nor do you kill every enemy in sight.
Over lunch Tuesday in Little Rock, Clark elaborated.
"You kill him, then you've got his four brothers to deal with," he said. "That's where the female suicide bombers are coming from."
All we've managed to do so far, he said, is to strengthen the bordering militant theocracy in Iran and frighten our friends in the region into thinking we may cut and run and leave Iran the big winner.
One answer, Clark wrote, is to seek a peaceful coexistence with local Iraqi insurgents and enlist their alliance in resisting outside jihadists. He suggested "deeper discussions" about offering amnesty to those Iraqis willing to lay down their arms.
Clark, you may recall, was against this war. He called it "elective surgery" that was ill-advised because it was undertaken without European alliances and at the expense of a more essential emphasis on espionage and police work to chase Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida to the ends of the earth.
There is no inconsistency in opposing a war in the first place, then resisting cutting and running nearly three years later. In fact, there's a common thread of logic, responsibility and candor.
It's the kind of thing that might convince American voters that Democrats, given the opportunity, could actually govern. It's precisely where those voters are, current polls indicate.
http://www.arkansasnews.com/archive/2005/12/08/JohnBrummett/331698.html
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