Mark Warner And Wes Clark - A Fork In The Road For The Democrats?
Taken from Mark Warner And Wes Clark - A Fork In The Road For The Democrats?, by Bernie Quigley
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The other option is from Wesley Clark. There is much that would appear to bring these two men together, Warner and Clark, and perhaps there is here even a fork in the road for the Democrats.
General Clark's position should be the Democratic Party's position and it should be the country's position. It took two years of chaotic fighting in random surges and retreats before the North truly faced the situation in the Civil War. It took several years of conflict abroad and a direct attack on Pearl Harbor before America faced its fate in World War II. We faced a difficult situation after 9/11 and again after the invasion of Iraq. We face a difficult situation today.
When he signed the register to enter the New Hampshire primary, Clark held a news conference for the few reporters present and told them that he would engage the Saudis and seek their help in going after Osama bin Laden. He opposed the Bush administration's invasion of Iraq at every turn, but accepted the new realities of America's situation in the Middle East as the situation unfolded. Recently, he has been appearing on Sunday talk shows and has posted an op-ed in The Washington Post, expressing his position very clearly. "In the old, familiar fashion, mounting US casualties in Iraq have mobilized increasing public doubts about the war," he writes. "Now, more than half the American people believe that the invasion of Iraq was a mistake. They're right. But it would also be a mistake now to pull out, start pulling out, or set a date to pull out. Instead we need a strategy to create a stable democratizing and peaceful state in Iraq - a strategy the administration has failed to develop and articulate."
From the onset, he says, we needed a three-pronged strategy in Iraq - diplomatic, political and military. And we needed to engage Iraq's neighbors to ensure that a stable, democratizing Iraq was not a threat to them. He gives a highly detailed approach to stabilizing Iraq, the kind of thing that often tested reporters looking for 30-second sound bites during his campaign in New Hampshire.
But as Iraq faces a descent into chaos if the Sunni's fail to find appropriate representation, a notion upon which the Bush administration is staking its claim to victory, Clark takes a different approach.
"The U.S. should tone down its raw rhetoric for U.S-style democracy as an answer to all problems and instead listen more carefully to the many voices within the region," he says.
Clark calls for a public U.S. declaration forswearing permanent bases in Iraq which would also be helpful in engaging both regional and Iraqi support at this point. And in addition, he says the U.S. needs a legal mandate from the government to provide additional civil assistance and advice - along with additional U.S. civilian personnel aimed at strengthening the institutions of government. There will be continuing need for assistance in institutional development, leadership training and international monitoring for years to come and all of this must be made palatable to Iraqi sovereignty.
Countries far away like Canada, France and Germany should be called in to assist and the Gulf States should also provide observers and technical assistance. Ten thousand Arab Americans with full language proficiency should be recruited to assist as interpreters and over time, American forces should be pulled back into reserve roles and phased out.
"The growing chorus of voices demanding a pull-out should seriously alarm the Bush Administration," writes Clark. "For President Bush and his team are repeating the failure of Vietnam - failing to craft a realistic and effective policy, and in its place, simply demanding that the American people show resolve." General Clark literally came home from Vietnam a basket of near-fatal wounds and broken bones but, as he has shown in Vietnam and Kosovo, he is nothing if not tenacious. And the issues he presents will not go away. His reemergence in the press may be a sign that we are beginning to face the mess we created when more than 75% of voters in our country approved of this mind-boggling fiasco in Iraq. It has been my feeling from the beginning that when we are ready to face the music we will turn to Wesley Clark.
The Democratic Senators who voted for the war on Iraq and now want to pull out will not be convincing to the American public. In the next election the Democrats will look for a governor. Mark Warner may be the right choice.
Both Warner and Clark represent a new kind of politics for the Democrats, a politics that sees management solutions to problems and comes from the world of management. We live today in a descending quagmire of interacting crises and in a politics of denial and revenge, but in the end it comes down to a crisis of management.
It is only these two among the Democrats who propose management solutions.
