Clark's remarks in Salon, oft quoted at DU

Pepperbelly

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Sun Sep-28-03 02:23 PM
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Clark's remarks in Salon, oft quoted at DU

As usual, the Clark bashers are always quite selective in the comments they choose to share from Clark. Of course, as usual, there is much that they do not tell you. This excerpt is what they almost always quote:

"I like all the people who are there. I've worked with them before. I was a White House Fellow in the Ford administration when Secretary Rumsfeld was White House chief of staff and later Secretary of Defense, and Dick Cheney was the deputy chief of staff at the White House and later the chief.

Paul Wolfowitz I've known for many, many years. Steve Hadley at the White House is an old friend. Doug Feith I worked with very intensively during the time we negotiated the Dayton Peace Agreement; he was representing the Bosnian Muslims then, along with Richard Perle. So I like these people a lot. They're not strangers. They're old colleagues."

I will take a closer look at that in a moment. First though, here is the part that follows that they leave out, Wesley speaking in Academic-speak about Bush:

"I disagreed with them on some specific aspects. I would not have gone after the war on terror exactly as did and I laid that out in the . But I also know there's no single best plan. You have to pick a plan that might work and make it work. That means you've got to avoid the plans with the fatal flaws. This administration came into office predisposed to use American troops for war fighting and to realign American foreign policy so it focused on a more robust, more realistic view of the world than the supposedly idealistic view of the previous administration.

But the views that President Bush espoused recently at the American Enterprise Institute, if his predecessor had espoused that view he'd have been hooted off the stage, laughed at, accused of being incredibly idealistic about the hard-nosed practical politics of the Middle East. So this is an administration that's moving in a certain direction, and now that that's the direction they've picked they've got to make it work. Like everybody else, I hope they'll be successful. It's too important; we can't afford to fail."

Now, what does this mean?

First, he disagreed with their choices in dealing with terrorism. In his estimation, Bush did not pick a plan without 'fatal flaws.' He also clearly views their supposed 'pragmatic' view with disdain. Remember, he was not a politician at the time and is not the kind of person to take cheap shots at others. In Wesley-speak, this is a solid condemnation of the plan.

Then, horror of horrors, he expressed a hope that since Bush selected this direction, that it works. Imagine that! An American hoping that the policy chosen by the government is not the cluster-fuck that he fears that it is. IOW, he would rather see the nation successful than to be proven right in his criticism.

What would Clark have done differently? First, he notes:

"But is there anything you would do differently?

You should go back to my article -- what I've said is international cooperation, harmonization of laws, and so forth. One of the things about the war on terror that I am disturbed about is that we've essentially suspended habeas corpus. Which is something that's only been done once in American history and then only for a very brief period.

When I go back and think about the atmosphere in which the PATRIOT Act was passed, it begs for a reconsideration and review. And it should be done. Law enforcement agencies will always chafe at any restriction whatsoever when they're in the business of trying to get their job done. But in practice we've always balanced the need for law enforcement with our own protection of our constitutional rights and that's a balance that will need to be reviewed."

Yep, he sure sounds like a wild-eyed PNACer in that one, doesn't he?

Now, as far his words of praise for PNAC, perhaps damnation by faint praise is a concept beyond some but not all of us. If you read what he said, basically he said that he liked them and had worked with them off and on for a long time. He even noted that Feith and Pearle had advocated for the Bosnian Muslems during the Dayton negotiations.

Yep, he's a real apologist for these guys. And what did he say of Wolfie: "Paul Wolfowitz I've known for many, many years." What an endorsement!

http://archive.salon.com/news/feature/2003/03/24/clark