Posted on 12/05/2005 9:12:28 PM PST by ncountylee
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
So how does he explain his glorious victory in Kosovo and BHGV?
"...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."
Yeah, right. We need to woo the terrorists and dictators of the world. Toppling dictatorships, killing the terrorists, and encouraging democracy works better. WOO WOO!
Clark, like Murtha, has withdrwn from reality..
I'm sure this man probably makes a decent administrative assistant.
under the desk type
......and wtf do you think we are doing weasley?....excuse my french, but I'm pissed. After talking with a guy who was leaving for Iraq (returning) this week, to go up in the NW area near Syria, who told us about how the IRAQI's LOVE Americans and what they are doing.....I consider this POW (piece of work) wesley clark a TRAITOR.
| What a dork. He tells us we can draw down to 130,000 troops after the election. The last two elections we beefed up troop strength by 30,000 and drew them back down after the election. This man is a real genius to figure that out. He also thinks we need to beef up the borders with Iraqi troops. DUH! I can see how this man became a General. He co-opts the plans and ideas of others when it appears they are working and proclaims them to be his own profundity. |
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Weasely Clark makes me sick. He argues using premisses he knows are ridiculous, because he thinks his audience is too dumb to know any different. What a contemptible little man!
Ah yes... and his little adventure in the former Yugoslavia didn't give Jihadists a new home for training and recruitment... no way!
---Bush was aware of the Iran's danger. They are part of the axis of evil that Bush identified in 2002. By being in Iraq and Afghanistan, we have Iran surrounded.---
We're in position to drive a stake right through their evil hearts. We're right where we should be,
"The Arab states agree on one thing: Iran is emerging as the big winner of the American invasion"
Dopes. They'd prefer we hadn't invaded so they could face both an armed and dangerous Saddam and an emergent Iran?
Brilliant. Gets his talking points from Madonna.
Bet his point of view would change if he was in one of those hostage videos.
Yes, Wes trying to appear "above the fray"
Another Phony.
Wesley Clark is stupid. I've seen guys like that in industry; handsome, articulate, able to control a meeting, and with no faint hint that they are talking nonsense.
The Shiites in Iraq are in competition with the Shiites in Iran. During the Iran-Iraq war, there was never a shadow of Iraqi-Shiite collaboration with the Iranian Shiites. The two groups plain don't like each other, and anyone interested in the area, with sense, knows it
Some people on this thread think that WC is being disingenuous; I don't. I think he's really stupidly arrogant enough to believe the claptrap he's speaking.
Actually, he makes some sense in this article.
But he's calling for a 30k troop withdrawal after the elections, like all the rest of the Rats are... Problem with that is, it was announced months ago, that after the election, troop levels will go back to it's 138k base.
Arrggh.
I honestly thought we were done with metrosexual generals when Bathrobe Bernie Rogers retired.
He was the original "perfumed prince."
Wussy Wesley Clark is the perfect successor.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
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