Wes Clark says it's time to stop living under threat of fear [View All]

[CarolNYC]

Wes Clark spoke last week at Stanford University. The editorial board at The Stanford Daily, although not necessarily that optimistic about his running in '08, seemed impressed. I like their editorial on the speech, titled "2008 Candidates should heed Clark".

In a revealing moment, Clark bitterly recalled how he was commissioned to write a plan for deploying troops into Rwanda while serving as a strategic planning official in the Pentagon, only to be told by his commander that it was politically impossible. “That’s haunted me,” he said, adding that the experienced helped fuel his commitment to taking action in Darfur. Clark currently serves on the board of the International Crisis Group, one of the main advocates for international intervention in the Sudanese genocide. When asked what he would do to resolve the situation, he nailed the response, declaring that he’d have already deployed NATO troops on the ground.

(snip)

Perhaps Clark’s most important message — and one worth taking to heart — is that “we’re going to solve the national security question.” In other words, Al Qaeda is not the existential threat to the U.S. that the Bush administration has portrayed. The United States was able not only to survive, he argued, but to prosper during the Cold War decades that saw thousands of nuclear missiles aimed at the country every day. “We weren’t petrified by it, we weren’t cowed by it, we weren’t intimidated by it,” he said. Acknowledging terrorism as a challenge, Clark argued that paranoia is unhelpful and unnecessary. “We’ve lived five years under the threat of fear, and the threat has been manipulated.”

Even if Clark is not ultimately a presidential hopeful this cycle, the other candidates would do well to integrate some of his points into their own campaign platforms.

http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2007/5/29/editorial2008CandidatesShouldHeedClark

I like Clark's comments on 'the national security question', paranoia and living in fear. Hopefully, there will be a complete transcript available sometime soon...or video or audio or something.