More on the Clarke-Kerry bluff
Andrew Sullivan:
"...Let's put the best gloss on Wesley Clark's ever-shifting position on the Iraq war and glean a coherent case within it. He would have voted for the Congressional Resolution - but only as a way to increase pressure for a diplomatic solution through the U.N. But wasn't that Tony Blair's position? Blair had all along preferred the U.N. route. He and Bush won an amazingly unanimous vote on the first resolution. He almost burst every blood vessel trying to get the Security Council to agree to the second. He wanted unanimous U.N. support precisely for the reasons Clark says he did as well - so as to avoid war. So what happened? He was double-crossed. The French declared that they would veto a second U.N. resolution promising war, regardless of what Saddam did. I've been reading the excellent inside account of the Blair government's attempt to forge this middle way in the winter and early spring of this year. It's revealing - not only about the good intentions of Blair but about the treachery and intransigence of Paris. The question for Clark and Kerry is therefore: where do you disagree with Blair? If Blair came to the conclusion that there was no way that the French were prepared to sign on to serious enforcement of 1441, why does Clark think otherwise? Is he simply saying that he would have had superior diplomatic skills and talked Chirac around? Superior to Blair's and Powell's? I think history will judge that there was no way on earth that France would ever have acceded to serious enforcement of 1441 by Western arms, under any circumstances. If that's true, would Clark and Kerry have acceded to Paris and called the war off? If so, they should say so. But it would have been a huge blow to American credibility, deterrence and the war on terror. And since they favored the process whereby the French were given a veto, what exactly did the Bush administration do wrong? I wish I knew. I suspect these people are playing cheap rhetorical games in the midst of a dark and dangerous conflict. That alone casts doubt on their fitness to be president."
Andrew Sullivan:
"...Let's put the best gloss on Wesley Clark's ever-shifting position on the Iraq war and glean a coherent case within it. He would have voted for the Congressional Resolution - but only as a way to increase pressure for a diplomatic solution through the U.N. But wasn't that Tony Blair's position? Blair had all along preferred the U.N. route. He and Bush won an amazingly unanimous vote on the first resolution. He almost burst every blood vessel trying to get the Security Council to agree to the second. He wanted unanimous U.N. support precisely for the reasons Clark says he did as well - so as to avoid war. So what happened? He was double-crossed. The French declared that they would veto a second U.N. resolution promising war, regardless of what Saddam did. I've been reading the excellent inside account of the Blair government's attempt to forge this middle way in the winter and early spring of this year. It's revealing - not only about the good intentions of Blair but about the treachery and intransigence of Paris. The question for Clark and Kerry is therefore: where do you disagree with Blair? If Blair came to the conclusion that there was no way that the French were prepared to sign on to serious enforcement of 1441, why does Clark think otherwise? Is he simply saying that he would have had superior diplomatic skills and talked Chirac around? Superior to Blair's and Powell's? I think history will judge that there was no way on earth that France would ever have acceded to serious enforcement of 1441 by Western arms, under any circumstances. If that's true, would Clark and Kerry have acceded to Paris and called the war off? If so, they should say so. But it would have been a huge blow to American credibility, deterrence and the war on terror. And since they favored the process whereby the French were given a veto, what exactly did the Bush administration do wrong? I wish I knew. I suspect these people are playing cheap rhetorical games in the midst of a dark and dangerous conflict. That alone casts doubt on their fitness to be president."
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