Clark’s Rx

Kevin Drum discusses Clark’s views on Iraq and points to this post by Phil Carter in which he says that he’s impressed with Clark’s vision but sees a necessity for Clark to get specific on strategy and tactics, and frets that it will be extremely difficult for him to implement his vision in any case.

Kevin doesn’t think specifics are necessary because he is more interested in the candidates’ instincts and judgements, and I happen to think that fixing the problem will be surprisingly easier once Bush is defeated, particularly if the campaign has been waged in open opposition to the Bush Doctrine.

But if Carter wants some specifics, I’ve got his specifics for him, right here.

Clark appeared on the newshour last Thursday and discussed this and more at some length:

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Let’s turn to Iraq. More attacks today. There have been horrific attacks this week. If you became president tomorrow, what would you do to restore some sort of security there?

WESLEY CLARK: Well, the first thing I would do is get the big picture right. And what you’ve got is a regional dynamic in which both Syria and Iran are working consciously against the United States in the region because they believe that this administration intends to handle them next.

So that a U.S. success, however it’s defined in Iraq, means that then the United States is free to put more pressure on them. So they don’t want us to have that success so the regional dynamic needs to be worked inside Iraq. We would go immediately back to Kofi Annan at the United Nations and say let’s talk again about what the United Nations or an international organization could do. I would remove that occupying power, that authority there. I’d put it under the United Nations or an international organization. I would ask the Iraqi governing council to take more responsibility for governing Iraq.

One of the things we want to do is we want to avoid the emergence in Iraq of more intense sect feelings. You have the Kurds in the North. They’re armed; they kept their army. They’re very concerned if the Turks were to come in. They’re prepared if anything should go wrong in the rest of Iraq, they’re prepared to say, okay, we have got our independent Kurdistan. You have the Shia in the South. They’ve never gotten really organized and they’re not… they have not been traditionally as radicalized as the Iranian Shia population has, but they’re organizing. There’s a 500,000 man army of god in Baghdad. There’s others and there’s jostling for position and there’s been some assassinations and assassination attempts in there. If that goes the wrong way, we could have real violence in Iraq.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Let’s go back to something you just said, though. Are you saying that the coalition authority that Paul Bremer heads now, you would transfer that authority to the U.N.?

WESLEY CLARK: Yes, I would.

MARGARET WARNER: Would you retain U.S. authority over the military aspect?

WESLEY CLARK: Yes, you must do that. The United Nations cannot do the military piece, but I believe that you can put the United Nations or you can form an international organization as we did in the case of Bosnia to do the political development and the economic development, and you can take Halliburton out of the expanded nation building role it has and let it do what it normally does which is provide some of the logistics back up for the American troops.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. But are you saying you would do this because you think then that would encourage foreign countries to send serious numbers of troops to help?

WESLEY CLARK: I think you do it for three reasons. First, because it takes the United States off the blame line in the eyes of the Iraqi people and especially in the Islamic world. So now it’s not a U.S. occupation. It’s a lot of the different nations who are simply there trying to help because remember it’s not only the international authority but you make the Iraqi governing council immediately take more responsibility. Then number two, I think it improves your chance of getting more significant, more immediate grant economic assistance. Number three, I do think it makes it more likely you’ll get more substantial numbers of foreign troops.

MARGARET WARNER: President Bush said in his press conference Tuesday, we’re not leaving, quote unquote, until Iraq is stable. Are you suggesting that the U.S. would ever leave militarily before the situation was stable?

WESLEY CLARK: I think we have to be very careful about leaving. We don’t want to leave prematurely. We don’t want Iraq to fall apart, but there is a window in there in which we’ve got the optimum chance for stabilizing and after which if we don’t handle things right, it could go downhill and be counterproductive for us.

MARGARET WARNER: So when you say, as you said in the debate Sunday night, you said you want the president… let me get the exact words…you’re waiting for the president, to quote, have a strategy to get out. What is your strategy to get out?

WESLEY CLARK: Well, what I do is first of all I’ve just described it. I put the international authority in. I reduce the influence of the U.S. occupying authority. I put the Iraqi governing council more in charge. I work for the constitution of the Iraqis in the long term. I keep the U.S. in charge of the security situation. I build up the Iraqi security forces. And I would… I do it all the same way we did it, let’s say, in the Balkans. We put out a matrix. You said here’s your political. Here’s your economic. Here’s your military. Here’s what you’re going to do this month, that month, so forth. Here’s where you want to be. Here’s your objectives. Here’s how much it’s going to cost. Show it to the American people.

MARGARET WARNER: Here’s what I’m trying to get at. Do you agree, for instance, with the Bush administration that until the Iraqis have a constitution and a government elected under that constitution that they can’t run the show themselves?

WESLEY CLARK: No, I don’t agree that they’ve got to have a constitution. I mean it took the United States of America seven years after its independence to get a constitution finished. I mean, we started with the Articles of Confederation. So they may work for a long time on a constitution. We don’t want to be there running the show in Iraq for seven years.

There are a couple of interesting things in this. First, in the big picture, I think he has pinpointed one of the biggest mistakes of this war in his remarks about Iran and Syria.

The most obvious example of the immature intellectual psychology of the neocons was the absurd idea that the “shock and awe” of this invasion would force the other countries in the region to cower and capitulate for fear of being next. ( Indeed, their reliance on swaggering trash talk and threats reminds me of no one so much as Saddam himself.) This was always a case where leashing our power — showing cool, controlled international leadership would have been far more effective in keeping terrorists and potential nuclear powers on their guard than impetuously unleashing it for spurious reasons and thereby proving for all to see that we are not the omnipotent colossos that our superpower status implied we were.

America looks much weaker, not stronger, in the eyes of our enemies than we did two years ago when we invaded Afghanistan.

Clark points out in the interview that in the case of Iran and Syria we made a grave error in how we dealt with them after we toppled Saddam. In the embarrassing high fiving euphoria of our preordained military victory (over a 4th rate dictatorship we’d systematically weakened for 12 years) we let the neocon hawks loose in the region to threaten Syria and Iran even more forcefully than we had before. In doing so, we’ve given them reason to become more aggressive in these early days than they otherwise might have. It was stupid and useless. Had we shut the likes of John Bolton’s pie hole for him, we might have been able to keep the Syrians and the Iranians at least off balance and wondering. Instead, we threw down the gauntlet and gave them every reason to get involved from the get-go.

The other thing he said that intrigued me was this:

…you can take Halliburton out of the expanded nation building role it has and let it do what it normally does which is provide some of the logistics back up for the American troops.

What did he mean by that? Is this a reference to the military privatization issue or is there more to it? I think the Halliburton thing is a good campaign issue — it’s one of those one word symbols that, I think, can speak to the working class voters who might swing our way. (Edwards has some good rhetoric on this.) I’d be very interested in what specifically Clark was talking about because the idea of privatizing the military by giving billions to Halliburton cuts right into the patriotic, pro-military image of the GOP.

As for Clark’s ability to implement his policy prescriptions, as I’ve said, I think it will be possible for anyone other than Bush to get more international cooperation (which Clark, of all those in the race, knows full well can be like herding cats) and I agree that it is the single most important key to getting the Iraq situation on track. As long as it’s America vs Arabs, we are fucked.

Clark is very well equipped to deal with the challenges presented by a fractious international coalition. Indeed he may be the most qualified American in the country to do that as President and Commander in Chief of the military.