Reply #129: I would because Bush can be blamed on the Republicans

[Tinoire]

from which such obscenities are to be expected and that inarticulate frat-boy is so clumsy that they get caught and the entire machination exposed. With Bush we know exactly what we're up against but Clark is not an inarticulate frat-boy, he's a brilliant Rhoads scholar who knows exactly what he's saying. No, this, while I was out protesting these people, this I can NOT forgive:

March 2003

Of the people who are running this war, from Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and Powell on down, in terms of the political appointees, are there are any who you particularly like who you would work with again, hypothetically, in some ...

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.

(Deputy Secretary of Defense) Paul Wolfowitz I've known for many, many years. (Deputy National Security Advisor) Steve Hadley at the White House is an old friend. (Under Secretary of Defense for Policy) 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 (Pentagon advisor) Richard Perle. So I like these people a lot. They're not strangers. They're old colleagues.

Do you disagree with them on their worldview?

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.

But certainly you're contemplating running for president -- I understand you haven't made a decision -- so even though you root for their success, you can't agree with their methods.

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