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THE LONG CLUELESS GAZE OF WESLEY CLARK

Former General Wesley Clark continues to demonstrate his cluelessness about the world with recent remarks drawing a flawed analogy with the US rivalry with the Soviet empire and the present-day struggle with Islamo-Arab imperialism. He talked about his anger with the alleged mishandling of Iraq, as if vanquishing one of the world's strongest sanction states of international terrorism, replacing it with democracy, and seeing to the rooting of that democracy amid outside attack via guerrillas sanctioning by Iran and Syria - and all at a fraction of the cost of one year during most other wars - was some kind of fiasco.

Clark's remarks about how "the fine art of negotiations" has been abandoned reveals his cluelessness, because negotiations have been a way of US foreign policy life for decades with nothing productive to show for it. His remarks about how in Vietnam he was wounded and was still deeply angry about being shot and that the war itself had been such a disaster further show his cluenessness because Vietnam was not a disaster but a victory betrayed by liberal "realists." One needs to be wary of people, especially those claiming to be Vietnam veterans, who claim the war was a disaster because it never jibes with the reality of that conflict, as real Vietnam veterans can attest.

Negotiation is a dead-end because it leaves the enemy alone. Clark refuses to realize that victory is what wins hearts and minds - a Vietnam veteran would understand that winning is what wins hearts and minds because he'd have seen that firsthand - and that talking to the enemy does nothing but enable the enemy to fight harder. When he and others claim the military should never be anything but the very last option they are fools because so often the military is the only option. Clark needs to realize the US is in Iraq because it has to be, and it went into Iraq in 2003 because it had to; it wasn;t because of oil or some perverse joy out of war.

His remarks betray a disgrace he has become to the uniform, for a real military man would recognize that negotiation is a dead-end and that winning is what is needed.

Learn more about this author, Michael Daly.
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