Courtesy of Matt Drudge
Sounds like a Bush backer to me.
Now this is all rather odd. These statements have been part of the public record for 18 months, and only now surfaced? Clearly, Wes Clark has some 'splainin to do. So does Kerry, for that matter. So do a vast majority of the American people, who believed Fearless Misleader when he served them a horseshit souffle. So does anyone who continues to defend an Administration so slavishly devoted to its own self-righteousness that it ignores evidence to the contrary.
At least Wes Clark has changed his mind, when contrary evidence becomes clear. Have you?
As Josh Marshall kindly points out, Drudge did a bit of cherry-picking. (Marshall quotes the extended portion of Clark’s speech containing the specific quotes.)
Interspersed gems that Drudge left out:
That’s hardly an endorsement of Administration policy. Quite the opposite, aside from (a) agreeing that Saddam has bio/chem weapons, and (b) agreeing that the military option ought not be excluded.
Full transcript here (in PDF, unfortunately).
If you’d rather stick to sound-bite level, here is a summary of his views (don’t know about the orientation of Issues2000, though).
He was for using the UN first, against unilateralism, for having a proven factual reason first. Clear now?
I don’t see the significance of these additional quotes. I don’t see anything in RTF’s quotes that Bush himself would disagree with. Everyone ostensibly favored UN or other diplomatic solutions, if practical. (Elvis’ quotes merely deal with Clark’s post-candidacy weaseling).
The significant point seems to be that Clark felt there was an immediate threat from WMD (and an Iraq-Al-Qaeda link) which justified military intervention. This seems to be fundamentally opposed to the position of the anti-war group, then and now.
Seems to me that he left himself some wriggle room on the finer details, and is now using this to portray himself as having been “against the war” from the start. Disingenuous.
I figured this would make you like him more.
WTF, Izzy? When did Bush ever give a damn about the UN, or about completing the inspections first? Where the hell did you get that idea?
Also, there is no non-kneejerkingly-partisan way to say Clark was weaseling, but it’s no surprise that you would think so anyway. If you want to have credibility here, you’re not helping yourself at all.
Let’s review, shall we?
Sure seems like weaseling to me…
If you supported it at the time, admit it. Don’t just hop on the bandwagon when things look good, like they did when we first rolled over Iraq, then claim you never wanted to do it when things look bad. Feel free to say that Bush is screwing it all up, but don’t dare give us an “I told ya so” when you didn’t.
It can seem that way any time you make your quotes short enough to strip them of context - which unfortunately for you has already been provided in this thread and shows you’re spinning as madly as Izzy. If you can find where he said he’d go to war despite anything the inspectors found or didn’t find, then let’s see it. If you can find where the Congressional resolution he would have voted for (and so would I, for that matter) was intended to authorize unilateral offensive action despite any UN actions or votes, let’s see it (it didn’t). He did say, based on the same self-serving and filtered info from Bush that fooled so many others, that Iraq “absolutely” had the bad stuff - but still wanted it to be found first before wading in with guns blazing. He would not have voted to do what Bush did anyway, and Congress didn’t vote for that either, ya know.
His policy position was as I summarized it. Only those who are looking to find ways to call him a weasel anyway would think so.
Under what context does “President Bush and Tony Blair should be proud of their resolve in the face of so much doubt.” or “Can anything be more moving than the joyous throngs swarming the streets of Baghdad? Memories of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the defeat of Milosevic in Belgrade flood back. . . . Liberation is at hand. Liberation—the powerful balm that justifies painful sacrifice, erases lingering doubt and reinforces bold actions.” fit into an unwavering anti-war stance? link
Not to derail this too much, but it was never just Bush who believed that Saddam had WMD. Clinton believed it as well, he just wasn’t willing to go to war over it. linky-poo Bush may well be wrong, but he didn’t invent the Saddam=WMD idea.
Cheesesteak, I was happy about the alleged joyous throngs in the streets of Baghdad. Actually, I still shed no tears over Saddam’s fall at all.
But that’s not what’s at issue here. The problem is it became clear within short order that the WMDs didn’t exist. That stripped the war of legitimacy, and without that, you have a rather large problem getting international cooperation.
It turns out that the French, Scott Ritter, and Saddam were all right: there were no WMDs in Iraq. Under those circumstances, and having suffered a horrific bombing in Baghdad of their Iraqi headquarters, the UN is being far less than cooperative about Iraq.
In other words, you could make a case for taking down Saddam. But the way you do it is as important as the action itself, especially since wars have a terrible tendency to invoke the Law of Unintended Consequences in particularly brutal ways.
This, I think, is the correct way to look at Wesley Clark’s positions, because they parallel the way I thought as well. I was never totally pro-war, but you could actually dig up (on another message board) a message in which I speculated, Brutus-like, that maybe they wanted Iraq because if you looked at a map it seems like an obvious place from which to pressure Syria and Iran. Come to think of it, I might even have said something like that here somewhere along the way. None of that would mean that I in any way agree with lying to go to war. I can’t imagine a more stupid, incompetent way to spend blood and treasure than this. No gain for US interests, hundreds of soldiers dead, tens of billions of dollars down a rathole, our credibility shot to hell, and our military readiness around the world seriously compromised because so many of our troops are tied down occupying Iraq.
Any sane person would
a) be able to make a case for taking down Saddam in theory and
b) completely disagree with the idiotic way this President went about doing it.
Clark, last time I checked, was quite sane.
Perhaps Clark, like a great many of the rest of us, actually believed that the Bush Administration would not lie its way into a motherfucking war, you asshole.
I saw this today and I’m really not sure what to make of it. Actually I kind of feel that way about Wesley Clark in general.
I don’t buy into the “he got fooled like the rest of us” thesis, though. It certainly seems to me that Clark’s statements before congress make him part of the conspiracy if we are to posit one rather than a dupe.
Than again, I don’t have a problem with Clark doing a 180 in his beliefs. The willingness to change and adapt is a virtue, IMO. I respect it, whether or not I agree.
Nor am I sure what to make of his record as head of Nato or in Kosovo, or how to reconcile his analogies of Kosovo to Iraq with his current stances.
Nor do I understand Clark’s role in this process. Some have said he’s a spoiler to ensure Bush gets elected to give Hillary a clear run in '08. This last sounds far off, IMO, but so does so much about this man.
But at any rate, I don’t hold his 180 turn against him.
I wish only to point out that the righties must be afraid of Clark if this is the best they can come up with.
The reason I get so pissed about this bullshit is that about once every sixty days someone runs into Great Debates or the Pit with a revised edition of why Wesley Clark is a waffler. And I know exactly where it is coming from, which is from that nincompoop radio shill Neal Boortz and his SAympethizers from another message board which posits ideology over facts.
It’s horseshit. And unfortunately, since I cannot now figure out how to make this new search engine work I cannot show the precise turning moments when Clark began to publicly change his position without my looking the basic cites up and posting them yet the fuck again.
One example is when someone tried to flame Clark here for claiming that he learned the Bush Administration was actually planning–as in plotting, as in Iraq-style plotting–to knock over half a dozen other countries.
I pointed out (and I won’t repeat again in detail) how you, the average American, can deduce the exact same fucking thing by reading just two government publications: the Patterns of Global Terrorism and the National Security Strategy of the United States.
If you bother to look you will find that Iraq was put in the top two of the President’s hit list one week after September 11, 2001. You will find that one year almost to the day later Bush signed off on the NSS linked above. That was the justification for the invasion of Iraq, not any goddamned weapons of mass destruction or imminent threat, just a fucking theory that if you knock over the goons in charge, freedom will sprout like volunteers in a freshly turned garden.
I’ve read it over and over and I’ve decided it’s a stupid theory, ignorant of considerations of local culture and religion and therefore doomed to exactly what we are experiencing in Iraq right now. And that is why it is our volunteers which are being nipped off by the vermin which were uprooted by and attracted to the disturbed Iraqi soil.
Someone told Clark what many someone elses have been telling me. We know what these guys are up to now. The problem is that the President didn’t actually, personally, officially espouse these ideas until late last year, long after Iraq was overthrown for vastly different reasons than those stated.
We of the Straight Dope have been repeating this to you, over and over and fucking over for a year now. We told you that was the plan before it happened. We told you why it really happened when it happened. We’ve shown you this shit over and over again. And some of you still refuse to believe it.
And now you’re trying to give Wesley Clark shit for being a good soldier, perhaps even thinking that the guy running the show is working from a plan based upon principles, rather than the exact reverse, and then seeing the writing on the wall just like we did, and calling bullshit on it. That’s not waffling, that’s outrage, something some of you apparently lost the last time your cock was vicariously sucked.
I see the term Bush-bashers is in vogue. But Clark and some of us are still trying to explain that our leadership is ignorantly and incompetently inviting the very destruction of the underpinnings of the country I love by pursuing a rash and untested world management theory which day by day is proving itself unworkable in real life.
And you dare to question those who have changed their minds about this mess. People like me, and maybe Wesley Clark, too. We may not win, but we are correct, and though you’ll retreat ever further into the redoubt of pseudo-reality that was rebuilt by Reagan after the Nixon castle fell, we know you’re full of shit.
Don’t know if this qualifies as an update perzactly, as freind Rufus has already mentioned it but Mr. Josh Marshall, of Talking Points Memo (without which no citizen can hope to be well informed) has more on this
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/ including this quote from KnightRidder
“Clark’s congressional testimony was further distorted Thursday by cyber-gossip columnist Matt Drudge, who quoted selected portions of Clark’s testimony and added sentences that don’t appear in the transcript on his Web site Thursday. Drudge didn’t respond to an e-mail request for comment…”
Kind of looks like Ol’ Matt stepped on his dick.
(There are certain, rare circumstances when gloating can be indulged in without incurring bad karma. Good clean fun.)
I don’t know, I tend to think if all Clark was doing in testifying before Congress was relying on Bush, there would not be much point in his testimony. I would expect that if you bring in a senior military figure from a previous administration to testify you would expect him to give his own assessment.
Wishful thinking on your part. Actually I think most of the Democratic candidates are fine candidates, who might well win an election in another year, Clark no more or less so than the others. I don’t think they’ll win this time out though, because I don’t think Bush can be beaten. This does not represent any part of a campaign against Clark, so it’s not necessarily the best I can come up with - just something of interest that I happened to notice.
elucidator, all I see is a guy stating that Drudge took things out of context - he doesn’t actually show a different context or show anything Drudge added. In looking at the transcript I see other Clark quotes along the same lines, e.g. this:
Cheesesteak, you simpleton, there was and is no reason to shoehorn the situation into pro-war vs. anti-war, even though you’re manfully trying along with Izzy in this attempt to prove a point you’d like to make. IF there had been a real threat, THEN war might have been needed. It WAS necessary to go find out the facts FIRST, before issuing the order. Bush did it anyway, not caring what the facts were. THAT is what Clark, and most of the world for that matter, was for. Got it? If not, try actually reading the links you’ve been given.
“The man who does not read has no advantage over the man who cannot read.” - Mark Twain
You know, maybe ‘weaseling’ is not the right word for it. He’s afraid to say he would have supported it if he had the vote. At the time, seems to me, he was supportive of the action, because he thought the WMD thing was true, and that was his reasoning for going in.
Now that the WMD thing isn’t panning out, he’s acting like he knew all along that there were no WMD when he didn’t. The administration he served under, Clinton, believed the WMD existed, there was no evidence that Saddam had destroyed them, and Clark himself said he thought they existed.
Right on Sofa King!