Clark Recommended war resolution

[sandnsea]

Once and for all, Kerry followed the exact course Clark recommended. Nobody KNEW what Iraq did or didn't have in 2002. NOBODY.

"I'm sure he has a rationale for what he's doing, but we don't always know it. He does retain his chemical and biological capabilities to some extend and he is, as far as we know, actively pursuing nuclear capabilities, though he doesn't have nuclear warheads yet. If he were to acquire nuclear weapons, I think our friends in the region would face greatly increased risks as would we. Saddam might use these weapons as a deterrent while launching attacks against Israel or his other neighbors."

"The problem of Iraq is not a problem that can be postponed indefinitely, and of course Saddam's current efforts themselves are violations of international law as expressed in the U.N. resolutions. Our President has emphasized the urgency of eliminating these weapons and weapons programs. I strongly support his efforts to encourage the United Nations to act on this problem and in taking this to the United Nations, the president's clear determination to act if the United States can't -- excuse me, if the United Nations can't provides strong leverage for under girding ongoing diplomatic efforts."

"I'd like to offer the following observations by way of how we could proceed. First of all, I do believe that the United States diplomacy in the United Nations will be strengthened if the Congress can adopt a resolution expressing U.S. determination to act if the United Nations can not act. The use of force must remain a U.S. option under active consideration.

Such congressional resolution need not, at this point, authorize the use of force. The more focused the resolution on Iraq, the more focused it is on the problems of weapons of mass destruction. The greater its utility in the United Nations, the more nearly unanimous the resolution, the greater its utility is, the greater its impact is on the diplomatic efforts under way."




http://www.iraqwatch.org/government/us/hearingspreparedstatements/hasc-092602.htm

[HFishbine]

1. Nobody Knew

Exactly! But some people voted for war without evidence. Some people voted against war because of the lack of evidence.

http://kucinich.us/DennisKucinichWasRight.pdf

[sandnsea]

3. Dennis wanted inspections

You don't want inspections unless you think there's some reason to inspect. Dennis DID NOT KNOW.

[Paulie]

5. Dennis wanted PROOF, can't find proof unless you go LOOK for it!

No one had PROOF, they had either bought the administrations line that he HAD WMD's, or just rolled over.

Justify the death and destruction all you want, doesn't change anyone's VOTE or their remarks on the RECORD.

[sandnsea]

16. Why?? The Vote got the PROOF

Dennis had no plan to do anything to get the proof. That's why I can't throw 100% support behind Dennis. You can't say somebody is dangerous enough to need inspections and continued restrictions on arms purchasing and then have NO plan to do anything about it. The vote got the inspectors back into Iraq, exactly like it was supposed to. George Bush ignored everything that came out afterwards.

[Paulie]

39. The plan was to certify Iraq was free of banned weapons, per the UN

That was the plan. Blix said he needed another 6-12 months to FINISH his job. The IAEA said Iraq was in COMPLIANCE.

[sandnsea]

48. How??? How??

How was Dennis going to get the inspectors in there to do that? And if he KNEW there was no WMD, why bother at all???

[Tinoire]

12. Sorry. Dennis knew. Just go throught the investigative hearings.

He made that rather clear.

[sandnsea]

17. Then why inspections?

Why should weapon sales to Iraq be tightly restricted if there was not threat whatsoever? Sorry, Dennis' explanations don't wash either.

[Desertrose]

43. In addition to proof, inspections were also a way of buying time.

why would you *not* restrict the weapons sales?

Just becuse there may not have currently been a threat ...why continue to sell weapons? Of course they should have been restricted.

Peace
DR

edited to add back disappearing part of subject line..

[sandnsea]

50. Why?

We don't restrict weapons sales to every country in the world. If Dennis wasn't worried about Iraq, why???

[hilzoy]

2. Recommending A resolution

is not supporting THE resolution actually offered. Clark consistently urged the adoption of a resolution expressing in principle the willingness to use force if efforts to work through the UN failed, but REQUIRING the President to come back to Congress.

[sandnsea]

4. Not what he says here

I don't care what he says now, that's not what he said then. The course of action HE recommended is what Congress took.

[Shanty Oilish]

6. You're quoting Clark, not Kerry

Just confirming. It's not clear in your opening post, but the link shows these are Clark's words.

[sandnsea]

9. Exactly, Clark recommended this

He recommended a resolution to express the U.S. determination to act, to use military force, if the UN wouldn't. That's EXACTLY what the IWR says.

[Leilani]

31. You sound familiar

I've heard this already....

from Drudge, RNC, FOX News, Brit Hume, Mort Kondrake, Fred Barnes, Chris Matthews, & other assorted media & other whores.

You are not making fans with this post.

The only time I have posted negatively, is when someone attacks my candidate with lies.

I think you should worry about the story in the Washington Post about Mr. Kerry's history of accepting money from special interests.

[sandnsea]

33. Making fans???

rotfl. I gave up making fans a very long time ago. Clark IS a special interest, so I wouldn't try throwing that one very far.

My only point is that there was a course of action on Iraq and Clark and Kerry agreed on that course of action right down the line.

Bush ignored the inspectors, etc., etc.,

[bicentennial_baby]

7. That must be why Richard Perle said this:

" seems to be preoccupied, and I'm quoting now, with building legitimacy, with exhausting all diplomatic remedies... So I think General Clark simply doesn't want to see us use military force and he has thrown out as many reasons as he can develop to that but the bottom line is he just doesn't want to take action. He wants to wait."

Richard Perle, Iraq war-mongerer, before congress Sept. 26, 2002

[Shanty Oilish]

32. Duh Perle! Of course Clark wanted to wait

Some people are just not as ravenous for blood as Mr. Perle. :shrug:

It's called eyeballing. The strong intimidating the weak. It works fine unless the weak are also feeble-minded. Someone fouled up and didn't notice Saddam was more skin than snake. But the way the game is played, you always wait, because the payoff is certain. Saddam was supposed to be pragmatic, supposed to read his cards and make the proper assessment. And it's not Clark's job to uncover Saddam's true mental state.

[sandnsea]

38. Clark wanted to be pragmatic

He wanted to build legitimacy into the process. Take a pragmatic course that included a resolution. Not Rush To War. Where have I heard that before??

In addition, he didn't know Saddam didn't have WMD. And if he didn't know, sure as hell NOBODY on this board knew.

[gulliver]

8. Um, nope.

Clark never recommended a resolution in which Bush would get a blank check. Sorry. I don't see anywhere in your quotes where Clark said that he would advise a resolution that did not require the president to come back to the Congress before going to war.

Kerry did, however. It was IWR, and Kerry got mugged by Bush.

[sandnsea]

10. Nope

He recommended a resolution to let the UN know the US WOULD act. That doesn't hardly mean a weak one that would require the President to come back to Congress. That's NO resolution at all.

[bicentennial_baby]

14. Did you see my post above?

or are you ignoring it?

[sandnsea]

19. Right wing propaganda?

Ignoring it. Wes Clark had the right plan, including a Resolution, and Perle was trying to discredit him at the time. I can't believe people are dragging out Perle to defend Clark. Unreal.

[bicentennial_baby]

20. No, it was congressional testimony

that followed Clark's.

[sandnsea]

26. Yeah, Perle smearing Clark

Right in the hearing.

[windansea]

30. Clark wasn't running for Prez then

why would Perle smear him...the fact is that Perle seems to understand what Clark said better than you do and that you are trying to smear Clark

[sandnsea]

34. Because Perle wanted to go to war

Clark was a voice of reason. Of course Perle wanted to smear him.

And I'm not remotely trying to smear Clark at all. I'm just trying to get people to look at what was really happening around this war vote. Clark recommended the damned resolution, he ought to have the gonads to say so.

[windansea]

22. your post is either invisible or unrefutable

:)

[NV1962]

11. Clark's position has always been

in favor of a credible threat to back up diplomatic and other efforts to keep trouble makers in line.

Unlike some others (e.g., Lieberman) Wes Clark considers waging a real war only as a last resort option, and not as a matter of making a "justifiable" case alone (which is nothing more than Bush's script in the conquest of Iraq / Halliburtistan, which sadly still finds supporters among Democrats such as Lieberman.)

[sandnsea]

21. Kerry's position too

Kerry just had to make the vote.

[Bad Thoughts]

13. Completely False

The interpretation that you are advancing is a Drudge smear and ought to be labeled as such. There have been plenty of good refutations (all well referenced) of this smear.

Josh Marshall #1
Josh Marshall #2
Knight Ridder Papers
Salon
Columbia School of Journalism
Washington Post

[sandnsea]

23. They're HIS words

This was his recommendation. Sorry.

[Bad Thoughts]

29. These are also Clark's words

"We need to take advantage of all resources at our disposal, not just the military."

Please don't engage a limited hermeneutics in order to smear a candidate.

[sandnsea]

35. I'm not smearing Clark

I'm just saying that part of the resources at our disposal was a war resolution that he recommended. That's all. Both Kerry and Clark supported the exact same course of action in Iraq.

[Bad Thoughts]

41. Clark's honest words:

"We have time to build the force, work the diplomacy, achieve the leverage before {Hussein} can come up with any military alternative that's significant enough ultimately to block us, and so that's why I say time is on our side in the near term. IN the long term, no, and we don't know what the long term is. Maybe it's five years. Maybe it's four years. Maybe it's eight years. We don't know. ... "

" ... we've got to have the patience to work with it and we've got to twist some arms and bend some elbows and do all the kinds of things that I guess domestic political leaders do in their home constituencies and in their races. I mean this is about leadership. It's not just about a threat."

What did John Kerry not understand?

[Bad Thoughts]

46. Why did Kerry not heed this advice from Clark:

"We have time to build the force, work the diplomacy, achieve the leverage before {Hussein} can come up with any military alternative that's significant enough ultimately to block us, and so that's why I say time is on our side in the near term. IN the long term, no, and we don't know what the long term is. Maybe it's five years. Maybe it's four years. Maybe it's eight years. We don't know. ... "

" ... we've got to have the patience to work with it and we've got to twist some arms and bend some elbows and do all the kinds of things that I guess domestic political leaders do in their home constituencies and in their races. I mean this is about leadership. It's not just about a threat."

[sandnsea]

51. That was BUSH's job

This is what Kerry said all along. This is the way to do it. Go to the UN with the resolution, then do ALL the stuff above with that threat of force in hand. George Bush didn't do it.

What do you think Kerry has been referring to all these months when he says Bush didn't exhaust all diplomatic means??

[bain_sidhe]

15. Again, followed by...

A few paragraphs below the part you selectively quoted:

The president and his national security team have got to deploy imagination, leverage, and patience in working through the United Nations. In the near term, time is on our side and we should endeavor to use the United Nations if at all possible. This may require a period of time for inspections or the development of a more intrusive inspection regime such as Richard Perle has mentioned, if necessary backed by force. It may involve cracking down on the eroding sanctions regime and countries like Syria who are helping Iraq illegally export oil enabling Saddam Hussein to divert resources to his own purposes.

We have to work this problem in a way to gain worldwide legitimacy and understanding for the concerns that we rightly feel and for our leadership. This is what U.S. leadership in the world must be. We must bring others to share our views not be too quick to rush to try to impose them even if we have the power to do so."

And, as Mr. Perle said later at that same hearing:

SCHROCK: Sure, I would love to know Mr. Perle's, you know, the general said time is on our side. My guess is you do not believe that.

PERLE: No, I don't believe it and frankly I don't think he made a very convincing case in support of that cliche but it was one of many cliches. At the end of the day when you sought to elicit from him a reconciliation of the view that time is on our side with what he acknowledged to be our ignorance of how far along Saddam Hussein is, he had no explanation.

He seems to be preoccupied, and I'm quoting now, with building legitimacy, with exhausting all diplomatic remedies as though we hadn't been through diplomacy for the last decade, and relegating the use of force to a last resort, to building the broadest possible coalition, in short a variety of very amorphous, ephemeral concerns alongside which there's a stark reality and that is that every day that goes by, Saddam Hussein is busy perfecting those weapons of mass destruction that he already has, improving their capabilities, improving the means with which to deliver them and readying himself for a future conflict.

So I don't believe that time is on our side and I don't believe that this fuzzy notion that the most important thing is building legitimacy, as if we lack legitimacy now, after all the U.N. resolutions that he's in blatant violation of, I don't believe that that should be the decisive consideration. So I think General Clark simply doesn't want to see us use military force and he has thrown out as many reasons as he can develop to that but the bottom line is he just doesn't want to take action. He wants to wait.

(emphasis added)

[sandnsea]

25. Kerry's position down the line

That's my point. The resolution was party of the WHOLE course of action. You can't take it out of the picture or nothing would have been accomplished at all. There was a pragmatic way to do this.

Trying to compare Perle's desire to rush to war with Clark's pragmatic approach just doesn't match up. Using Perle's spin on Clark's words, which were used to smear his pragmatic approach at the time, is just sad.

[snyttri]

37. Those were the 2 sides of the debate Congress asked to hear.

Clark offering the side against the war. Not offering Kerry's statements is sad. Is because they were so hawkish?

[corporatewhore]

18. kucinich knew and there is no reason why kerry shouldnt be heldtothe same

standerd

[Shanty Oilish]

24. Here's the real intelligence failure

(IMHO...)

"I'm sure he has a rationale for what he's doing..."

While I'm no Clark supporter, I think his remarks here are entirely appropriate. The problem is, "Saddam Hussein is not only malevolent and violent but he is also to some large degree unpredictable at least to us. I'm sure he has a rationale..."

He was wrong. Everybody was wrong. The strong leverage of US determination to act, did not work because Saddam was in his dotage and nobody knew it. (Well I suspect Putin knew it but that's no help to us.)

When Saddam was captured and asked WTF, he explained that he resisted the demand to open all doors and lay it all out BECAUSE he didn't want his palace privacy invaded. That's not very pragmatic. In his heyday Saddam would have shown better political sense.

The man was becoming hollow and nobody spotted it. What Clark described was the way things are done, always. Pure realpolitik. And it will always work if the players are mentally sound (by the standards of tyrants).

I have plenty of issues with Clark but he was expressing the best policy, the only effective course, given what we knew. Clark is an extremely intelligent military man with a global perspective. What he says here can be taken straight to the bank, as in fact the majority in Congress did.

[Toucano]

27. Oh, really?

Such congressional resolution need not, at this point, authorize the use of force. The more focused the resolution on Iraq, the more focused it is on the problems of weapons of mass destruction. The greater its utility in the United Nations, the more nearly unanimous the resolution, the greater its utility is, the greater its impact is on the diplomatic efforts under way."


This didn't work for Ed Gillespie, and it won't work for you.

[sandnsea]

28. Need not

Not should not. But the threat of force has to be in the resolution or the resolution isn't any good at all. Clark knows that, he's not stupid.

[Toucano]

47. You're not serious, are you?

Do you contend that Clark saying the the resolution NEED NOT authorize force rather than SHOULD NOT authorize force equals "Clark recommended it"?

The key word, the word that makes the big difference, is the NOT.

You don't recommend something by telling people not to do it.

[sandnsea]

53. He recommended a resolution

That said we would use force if the UN didn't handle Iraq. He meant that we didn't need to have a timetable in the resolution, an actual date. Just a threat of force if the UN didn't disarm Iraq. That is exactly what we got.

[bigtree]

36. Clark Says He Would Have Voted for War

General Clark said that he would have advised members of Congress to support the authorization of war but that he thought it should have had a provision requiring President Bush to return to Congress before actually invading. Democrats sought that provision without success.

"At the time, I probably would have voted for it, but I think that's too simple a question," General Clark said.

A moment later, he said: "I don't know if I would have or not. I've said it both ways because when you get into this, what happens is you have to put yourself in a position — on balance, I probably would have voted for it."

"I want to clarify — we're moving quickly here," Ms. Jacoby said. "You said you would have voted for the resolution as leverage for a U.N.-based solution."

"Right," General Clark responded. "Exactly."

General Clark said he saw his position on the war as closer to that of members of Congress who supported the resolution — Representative Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri and Senators Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, John Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina — than that of Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who has been the leading antiwar candidate in the race.

Still, asked about Dr. Dean's criticism of the war, General Clark responded: "I think he's right. That in retrospect we should never have gone in there. I didn't want to go in there either. But on the other hand, he wasn't inside the bubble of those who were exposed to the information."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/19/politics/campaigns/19CLAR.html


Clark Explains Statement on Authorization for Iraq War

"I never would have voted for war," he said here this afternoon in an interview and in response to a question after a lecture at the University of Iowa. "What I would have voted for is leverage. Leverage for the United States to avoid a war. That's what we needed to avoid a war."

Speaking about the resolution on Thursday, General Clark said, "At the time, I probably would have voted for it, but I think that's too simple a question."

He then added: "I don't know if I would have or not. I've said it both ways, because when you get into this, what happens is you have to put yourself in a position. On balance, I probably would have voted for it."

About Iraq, he said "There was never an imminent threat," and called the war "a major blunder."

"We're not the sort of `you're with us or against' kind of people," he said.

"We're a come-and-join-with-us kind of people," he told a crowd of 1,000 in the main lounge of the Iowa Memorial Union. "Americans know in their hearts that you don't make our country safer by erecting walls to keep others out. You make us safer by building bridges to reach out.

"We also have to recognize that force should be used only as a last resort, when all other means have failed."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/20/politics/campaigns/20CLAR.html

[Bad Thoughts]

42. It is his congressional testimony that is at issue. eom.

[Shanty Oilish]

45. As leverage.

"You said you would have voted for the resolution as leverage for a U.N.-based solution."

"Right," General Clark responded. "Exactly."

The resolution as leverage. It was assumed we were playing poker with a master of the game. The resolution was supposed to work as leverage, and as such Clark would have approved of it.

[Bad Thoughts]

40. What Kerry should have heeded from Clark's testimony:

"We have time to build the force, work the diplomacy, achieve the leverage before {Hussein} can come up with any military alternative that's significant enough ultimately to block us, and so that's why I say time is on our side in the near term. IN the long term, no, and we don't know what the long term is. Maybe it's five years. Maybe it's four years. Maybe it's eight years. We don't know. ... "

" ... we've got to have the patience to work with it and we've got to twist some arms and bend some elbows and do all the kinds of things that I guess domestic political leaders do in their home constituencies and in their races. I mean this is about leadership. It's not just about a threat."

Clark's Testimony

[snyttri]

44. Kerry's pre-Iraq statements do not seem readily apparent on his

website. Is he proud of his judgement on the issue?

[sandnsea]

54. read everything

It's all right here.

http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/speeches/index.html

[sandnsea]

55. We needed the resolution first

That would give us the leverage to do this. That's what he said. That's the way they both thought this should have been handled.

[zulchzulu]

49. Dean would have voted for IWR based on his opinion at time of vote

Just to add in...

Howard Dean: Face the Nation 9/29/02

"...There's no question that Saddam Hussein is a threat to the United States and to our allies."

"And if Saddam persists in thumbing his nose at the inspectors, we are clearly going to have to do something about it."


The vote for IWR was a week LATER. How someone can say with a straight face that Dean would not have voted for it if in a position to vote...

[corporatewhore]

52. But Kucinich did not and i hold kerry to the same standered