Reply #25: You misread this. [View All]

[Tom Rinaldo]

Clark believes that it is in the Democrat's and America's best interest to force Bush to openly describe and defend his foreign policy for that entire region, because the unspoken strategic "thinking" (if I can use that word to describe it) that Bush still embraces there is a total catastrophe which actively is spawning further disasters not limited just to Iraq. The approaching war with Iran is a very obvious example of this. The way it is going we are letting Bush get away with driving the agenda for public debate.

Prior to the U.S. invading Iraq the comparison to now might be Democrats not disputing with Bush whether Hussein posed a major strategic threat to the United States, not disputing with Bush whether Hussein was definately building nuclear weapons, not disputing with Bush Hussein already being in bed with Al Quada, but just arguing with Bush about whether a decision to invade Iraq needed to be made that summer or whether it could wait until Spring or the Summer after to decide. For the most part now Democrats are not exposing the ideologcal ineptness and danger posed by Bush's neocon dominated foreign policy. We keep the debate fixed only on how quickly troops can or can not be pulled out of Iraq.

Clark does not expect Bush to come up with a winning strategy on Iraq. Since Clark, like all of our leading Democrats, cares about this nation and the world, he and many other Democrats have long pointed out mistakes the Bush Administration was making in Iraq, after first pointing out the mistakes about invading Iraq in the first place. A good example right out of the box was urging that the administration of Iraq immediately after the invasion be immediately taken out of the hands of the United States and instead given to an international institution. There are other examples, like calling for the reverse of the extreme aspects of de-Baathification that the U.S. under Bremmer imposed inside of Iraq while we literally administered their government. These ideas just made good sense and would have helped mitigate the disaster for Iraq's people, advocating for them was the responsible thing to do, it had nothing to do with trusting Bush.

In Clark's recent statement regarding Iraq he spelt out that Congress needed to start defunding the war if Bush could not produce a "winning strategy" for the region. Clark fully expects that Bush will not produce one, but it is essential that the misguided strategy that Bush continues to embrace be exposed to the public, and the only way to do that is to force Bush to try to defend his strategy. Then we can rip into it. The way it is Bush deflects criticism about what he is up to in the Middle East by diverting it into whether or not Democrats are willing to give our Generals the time they say they are asking for to make "the surge" work. Bush is off the hook that way, he spins it so that we are fighting with generals in Iraq, not with Bush Administration policies. We are giving Bush a free ride on that and in my opinion the price we may end up paying for that stupidity is war with Iran. Clark is trying to force Bush to defend his current and future wars, it's his Administration that is still making the calls on all the big issues of war and peace in the region, and making them wrong.