NYT op-ed: "The Next Iraq Offensive," by Wesley K. Clark

Op-Ed Contributor
The Next Iraq Offensive
By WESLEY K. CLARK
Published: December 6, 2005

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.

If this critique is correct - and it is difficult to argue against it - then we must face its implications. "Staying the course" risks a slow and costly departure of American forces with Iraq increasingly factionalized and aligned with Iran. Yet a more rapid departure of American troops along a timeline, as some Democrats are calling for, simply reduces our ability to affect the outcome and risks broader regional conflict.

We need to keep our troops in Iraq, but we need to modify the strategy far more drastically than anything President Bush called for last week....

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

Gutsy. He comes out swinging at the DC nonsense...from both parties.
Rationality is such a precious commodity these days....

Jeez, enough wars already. I don't like Clark's saber rattling against Iran in this article.

I suppose???

Good bad or indifrent I'm not sure.

He is for ignoring false threats, and preparing for real ones. He is for avoiding unessasary conflicts, defusing growing ones, and winning unavoidable ones when necessary.

One thing Clark never does, because it goes against all of his military experience where real lives are lost if you do not face reality as you find it, is ignore a problem because it is uncomfortable to dwell on the implications of it.

ramifications of the mess Bushco made and is offering a multi-pronged approach to stabilizing the situation before we can get out....

He was just talking to Arabs in the region at a meeting in Qatar...they are scared shitless of what could happen in the region....

THIS IS A BIG PICTURE APPROACH to the problem...it is necessary that Americans wake up to that fact.

Let me say this as clearly as I can, and since I'm on pain killers right now, that may be a hopeless cause, but...

Clark is not a hawk. I do not believe he is calling for any military action against Iran, although I knew that is exactly how many would interpret what he is saying.

For some time he has expressed concern about the growing tensions with Iran, the involvement of the Iranian government with the Shia in the south and the potential for civil war in Iraq. He has spent a good deal of time in the region and his ability to see the present, even the possible and extrapolate what the future may hold is a matter of record as far as Iraq goes, often to a scary degree of detail. I've shared his concerns because it was obvious to me that the clerics in the south were playing a waiting game with the US and biding their time until we left to make a power grab. Now, those who feel we should pull out now, regardless of what happens in the aftermath, won't care what Iran does.

But those who think that a civil war, the involvement of Iran, Syria and even Turkey and the Kurds in some sort of regional power vacuum and subsequent power grab with all the violence that would create is something that should be avoided at all costs, especially since it is a by-product of an illegal invasion by the U.S, can look at it differently.

I think that Clark views this as an inevitable scenario, given the present circumstances. What seems like saber-rattling is really nothing more than a hard diplomatic stance, one that seeks to avoid conflict and to pressure Iran to co-operate in building an independent Iraq. The other states in the region are just as concerned about the possibility of an expanded Iran and they should all be brought to the table before this gets out of hand.

Obviously, Clark is not in charge and I doubt that Bush is going to take his advice. If he was, I would not doubt that all possible means to a peaceful resolution of this whole disaster would be attempted. However, with the current administration in place, I'm afraid what he is warning of is exactly what will come to pass regardless of what those who will criticize his answer to the problem think of it. And the results will be far less optimistic and far more violent, for us and for the entire region.

I hope you're feeling better!