NYTimes Op/Ed - Wes Clark challenges us to "change the course"

[Dread Pirate KR Read]

Wes Clark is proposing a real plan for success, and even as a Democrat, Clark argues that it must be a bipartisan offensive that directly challenges the politicking of war under the Bush Plan that only leads us to disaster.

Clark's plan may not be popular for many here who are "against the war" and believe that a pull out now is the only option. However, Clark challenges us and our leaders to do what's best for the country and challenge the incompetencies of this President, by doing what's best for our national seurity interests. He's challenging us to critically address our own perspectives on Iraq, to consider the whole picture relative to regional security and its geopolitical consequences. This is a different "offensive" that doesn't rely on slogans. The offiensive is not necessarily reliant on the belief that American military might is right, but on a plan that relies on our values that "doing it right" is our might.

The Next Iraq Offensive
by Wes Clark

Excerpt:

Doha, Qatar

WHILE the Bush administration and its critics escalated the debate last week over how long our troops should stay in Iraq, I was able to see the issue through the eyes of America's friends in the Persian Gulf region. The Arab states agree on one thing: Iran is emerging as the big winner of the American invasion, and both President Bush's new strategy and the Democratic responses to it dangerously miss the point. It's a devastating critique. And, unfortunately, it is correct.

While American troops have been fighting, and dying, against the Sunni rebels and foreign jihadists, the Shiite clerics in Iraq have achieved fundamental political goals: capturing oil revenues, strengthening the role of Islam in the state, and building up formidable militias that will defend their gains and advance their causes as the Americans draw down and leave. Iraq's neighbors, then, see it evolving into a Shiite-dominated, Iranian buffer state that will strengthen Tehran's power in the Persian Gulf just as it is seeks nuclear weapons and intensifies its rhetoric against Israel.

The American approach shows little sense of Middle Eastern history and politics. As one prominent Kuwaiti academic explained to me, in the Muslim world the best way to deal with your enemies has always been to assimilate them - you never succeed in killing them all, and by trying to do so you just make more enemies. Instead, you must woo them to rejoin society and the government. Military pressure should be used in a calibrated way, to help in the wooing.


http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/06/opinion/06clark.html?hp