hi
Clark posted the following entry to his blog on August 25, 2005
*
Hi everyone!
I'm back in the office in Little Rock for a rare three days at home, and just wanted to thank all of you for your support, and for following the issues so closely.
I particularly appreciated your thoughts on Iraq, and your ideas and suggestions.
I've been working on Iraq pretty intensively for some months, and I want to tell you about some of this. First, I was called up to DC to brief the Senate Democratic Policy Committee in July. And I met a couple of times with former SecDef Bill Perry, former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, and former SecState Madeleine Albright over the summer, too.
I was concerned that the Administration wasn't very forthcoming with the facts about the state of our effort in Iraq, and so I was calling for a set of "benchmarks" which could guide the withdrawal....And preparing to write some, if the administration wouldn't produce these. We had them during the Bosnia operation of course. Congress demanded them!
Then I realized that we really have no authority in Iraq...none, except that the Iraq government has said we can stay. There's no legal mandate, apparently, now that we've turned back authority to the Iraqis. So the the idea of benchmarks on issues like, rule of law, effective local governments, trained judges and functioning courts...is sort of meaningless....though of course we'd like to see progress in each of these areas.
At the same time, I've been frustrated that since June, when I was attacked by the Wall Street Journal editorial saying that I and other Democrats have no strategy. I wrote out my strategy -again- and sent it to them, but it wasn't published.
Of course, it is hard for democrats to have a strategy, since Democrats don't have access to the information, and since the strategy is really the responsiblilty of the party in power.
But never mind, I updated my views last weekend and sent them in...Hopefully they'll be published soon, in a different newspaper.
In the meantime, I'm doing my best on fox to get across the idea that you can't fix Iraq just by working inside Iraq - - you have to deal with Iraq's neighbors.
The clock is ticking against us...
But I don't believe it's totally lost there yet...we can at least avoid a regional war if we work the right way now...so I don't favor a pullout, an announcement of a pull-out, or a timeline for exiting yet....though I am certainly sympathetic to those who want this thing over.
As I've said from the beginning, going into Iraq was a strategic blunder. But if we come out the wrong way we'll make matters worse.
