Reply #73: Sorry But I Dont' See Your Point

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

I read the entire article twice in fact and I think it makes the very opposite point of the one you purport that it makes.

Earlier in the article, Clark was asked this question:

"...You've referred to the campaign against Iraq as "elective surgery"; I imagine that means that you support disarming Saddam in principle, just not with the same urgency the Bush administration feels..."

Clark makes it clear that he didn't support the Bush go-it-alone modus operandi and sided with the rest of the world, including the French, Germans and Russians:

"...My view on it was and has been that at some point you're going to need to take actions to deal with the problem of Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. But those actions didn't have to necessarily be military and they didn't have to be now. It's the administration that chose to do this set of actions at this time. And the reason they've had problems persuading people of the necessity for doing it has been because they couldn't address the urgency..."

Elsewhere in the article, in fact, Clark references the fact that Colin Powell wanted to impose "smart sanctions" against Iraq to get them to comply but that the Bush administration blew it by not backing him and choosing war instead. At another place in the article, Clark references any potential occupation by U.S. forces as a "colonial presence", certainly not a flattering or supportive view of Bush's prospective war at that point in time. Also, he opines that there would be no beneficial "dominoe effect" of Democracy spreading throughout the Arab world as a result of an Iraqi occupation by the United States.

The portions quoted in your own post further make the point. He specifically choose his words carefully in saying that he disagreed on specific points regarding the world view of the Bush Administration. Clark is a careful speaker and uses the word "supposedly" regarding the "idealistic view of the previous administration". He is making it clear that this is the Bush or Republican supposition about Clinton's world view, not his. His world view in fact coincided with that of Clinton. He also states point blank that if Bill Clinton had chosen the same plan for the Middle East that Bush had and had gone before the American Enterprise Institute, he would have been laughed off the stage, clearly suggesting that Bush has gotten away with this flawed world view because he is a conservative doing it.

Clark does say that he likes the people in the Bush Administration and he wants them to succeed. Meanwhile, he has strongly criticized the actions of these people. I see nothing unprogressive about this. Later in the article, when asked about the Democratic leadership, he also says "I like them. I've got friends on both sides of the aisle". Later in the article, Clark condemns the Bush Administration's Patriot Act: "One of the things about the war on terror that I am disturbed about is that we've essentially suspended habeus corpus".

Sorry, but by any reasonable reading of this article, it supports the notion that Clark criticized the Bush's Administration's world view and particularly their unilateral approach to Iraq and that they did not make the case a war he clearly calls "elective". I have not spun anything in this dissection of the article. It's all there in black-and-white.