Wesley Clark Warns Against War with Iran

Au contraire, Toddarino, not by any stretch did Wesley Clark warn against war with Iran.

By the way, General Clark somehow forgot to mention his brutal 78-day bombing of Belgrade in 1999, including the destruction of bridges railways, roads, electric power, and fuel and fresh water supplies. President Carter said: "the decision to attack the entire nation [which] has been counterproductive, and our destruction of civilian life has now become senseless and excessively brutal. [And that there] is little indication of success after more than 25,000 sorties and 14,000 missiles and bombs, 4000 of which were not precision guided."

As for Iran, Clark says: "The Next War. . .It's always looming. . .Today, the most likely next conflict will be with Iran, a radical state. . .that now threatens to further destabilize the Middle East . . .and far-reaching support for radical Shiite militias in Iraq. . .seems to draw closer to acquiring nuclear weapons . . .Think another war can't happen? Think again. . . The next war would begin with an intense air and naval campaign. . . .Iran is not the only country where the next war with the United States might erupt. . . China . . .Don't ever, ever go to war unless you can describe and create a more desirable end state. And doing so takes a whole lot more than just the use of force. . .we need to safeguard our troops. . .United States' top generals must understand that their duty is to win . . .So, steady as we go. . . War is the last, last, last resort." Clark then goes on about how officers should get PhD's like Petareus but political leaders shouldn't hide behind generals. Wow.

The war-hawks are circling. War is inevitable--"always looming". Clark has just endorsed Clinton, who said long ago that, in regard to Iran, all options are on the table. Bush has apparently promised Rice that he will consult with congressional leaders before he does it, but that seems a formality. The Dems are more AIPAC-ized than even the Repubs. Gates will go along. Admiral Fallon might be a bit of a problem, but I suppose he'll do what he's told. Hold on tight--here we go.

You mean the bombing that stopped the Serbian act of genocide? Or is the the American far left now in favor of genocide.

Presidents have all options on the table is not the same as invading Iran. It is a mature reality that one not give away choices in advance.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

No,I mean the bombing that started the Serbian act of genocide. The point is that Clark, who is backing Clinton, is an experienced bomber.

Regarding Iran and Senator Clinton, she made that remark some time ago, and the clear context was that an attack on Iran was okay with her. Given her strong support of Israel, and the fact that Israel wants to whack Iran, this is entirely plausible. She will have to make her position clear anew. I believe that she will favor an attack on Iran, and that Clark will back her up based on the words in this op-ed.

Can you do more than try to find fault? What do you think Clark was saying and what do you think Clinton will do?

AJM,
That's an easy one--fast, waist-high, a bit outside--and it's out of the park! Clark's op-ed is not a warning at all, it's a prescription for war. The "more desirable end state", as Clark has conveniently told us, is an Iran that doesn't support Iraq Shiite militias and can't acquire nuclear weapons. That's it. Bombs away on army camps, weapons factories and nuclear sites and the more desirable end state will thereby be created. By golly, it worked in Yugoslavia, didn't it, and Wes ran the show.

AJM,
There has been no talk of a senate vote. Many believe that the AUMFs of Sep 18, 2001 and Oct 2, 2002 are sufficient. If there is a senate vote I fully expect to be as disappointed in our senators as I was in October 2002. We can always continue to hope that senators will do the right thing but they've shown little propensity for acting rationally.

Howard. OT? Maybe, but I have finally come across some details on the Israeli raid over Syria and posted an excerpt on1983merman's Blog plus some other stuff.
http://tinyurl.com/33octn

Oh hell, here's the excerpt:

"Amid the confusion there were troubling details that chimed uncomfortably with the known facts. Two detachable tanks from an Israeli fighter were found just over the Turkish border. According to Turkish military sources,they belonged to a Raam F15I - the newest generation of Israeli long-range bomber, which has a combat range of over 2,000km when equipped with the drop tanks. This would enable them to reach targets in Iran, leading to speculation that it was an 'operation rehearsal' for a raid on Tehran's nuclear facilities.

Finally, however, at the week's end, the first few tangible details were
beginning to emerge about Operation Orchard from a source involved in the Israeli operation. They were sketchy, but one thing was absolutely clear. Far from being a minor incursion, the Israeli overflight of Syrian airspace through its ally,Turkey, was a far more major affair involving as many as eight aircraft,including Israel's most ultra-modern F-15s and F-16s equipped with Maverick missiles and 500lb bombs. Flying among the Israeli fighters at great height,The Observer can reveal, was an ELINT - an electronic intelligence gathering
aircraft."
http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=36053

The author of the Observer/Gaurdian article is of the opinion that "Operation Orchard" was a "dry run".

Actually, it's more like "Stee-rike Three!" Does the following passage (from the same Op-Ed) sound to you like someone describing an achievable end-state--or more like someone warning about its extreme uncertainty and unlikelihood?

But if it's clear how a war with Iran would start, it's far less clear how it would end. How might Iran strike back? Would it unleash Hezbollah cells across Europe and the Middle East, or perhaps even inside the United States? Would Tehran goad Iraq's Shiites to rise up against their U.S. occupiers? And what would we do with Iran after the bombs stopped falling? We certainly could not occupy the nation with the limited ground forces we have left. So what would it be: Iran as a chastened, more tractable government? As a chaotic failed state? Or as a hardened and embittered foe?

And while you're at it maybe you have an explanation for why someone who is supposedly so eager for war with Iran would help start a Web site called StopIranWar.org?

Back to the dugout, slugger.

They apparently thought cruise missiles were an awful lot smarter than Bush reading "My Pet Goat."

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

I don't care WHO says it, Cheney and Bush are bound and determined to STAY in the Middle East, even if that means taking on Iran. What do they care, it will only be in their HISTORY they will experience any pain from it.

It's usually those that have never fought a war that tend to BOAST the war is NEEDED.

Coonsey's View

HTTP://WWW.FREEWEBS.COM/COONSEY/

was there any sign of [Bush's] brain during the recent colonoscopy?

Just remnants. He squashed it long ago when he sat down. LOL!

Best, Terry

Fascinating entry on Brugioni, whom I had never heard of. Loved the three quotes at the bottom...very eery.

If the genociders know you're bombing them BECAUSE of what they are doing, doesn't that act as a deterrence, if not an outright incentive to stop?

If the genociders are getting bombed, doesn't that give them something more important to focus on than killing civilians whose deaths won't help them survive? In other words, don't they turn to saving their own hides rather than taking the hides of non-combatants?

If so, does it matter that you're not bombing genocide-specific sites, such as concentration camps, as long as you're bombing--or otherwise hurting--the genociders, e.g., their military and associated resources?

If the genociders are getting bombed, doesn't that give them something more important to focus on than killing civilians

Genociders may decide to stop genociding because bombs hurt. But bombs hurt genocidees too. Genocidees have no choice in the the matter except to get beaten, raped, mutilated and/or murdered. Doesn't seem right somehow to bomb them too.

Best, Terry

Clark's op-ed is hardly a "warning against with Iran." Rather it's point is to argue that if we do go to war with Iran, we should apply various "lessons" from Iraq so that the Iran war will not go as badly as the Iraq war.

First, Clark is singing entirely in tune with the current White House talking points on Iran. His interpretation of the the current state of Iranian affairs is no different that that of any other Iran hawk:

Today, the most likely next conflict will be with Iran, a radical state that America has tried to isolate for almost 30 years and that now threatens to further destabilize the Middle East through its expansionist aims, backing of terrorist proxies such as the Lebanese group Hezbollah and Hamas in Gaza and the West Bank, and far-reaching support for radical Shiite militias in Iraq. As Iran seems to draw closer to acquiring nuclear weapons, almost every U.S. leader -- and would-be president -- has said that it simply won't be permitted to reach that goal.

He then says that Iran is one country where war with the United States might "erupt". (I love this kind of language from our leaders. Rather than let on that war with Iran might actually be planned, decided on and then deliberately executed, Clark would have us think of it as a volcanic act of God that is out of our hands.)

Clark then proceeds to draw various "lessons" from the Iraq fiasco. Lesson One is don't go to war with Iran unless we are ready to see it through all the way to the construction of a new Iranian order:

Here, the lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan couldn't be more clear: Don't ever, ever go to war unless you can describe and create a more desirable end state. And doing so takes a whole lot more than just the use of force.
.
.
.
Nation-building, however ideologically repulsive some may find it, is a capability that a superpower sometimes needs.

This is the chief Iraq-related gripe of the liberal interventionists. They believed Iraq should have been a far more comprehensive war cum nation building extravaganza, a far-reaching Americanist social and cultural overhaul of the foreign nation of Iraq. Iraq wasn't an inherently bad idea, in their view, but failed because the Bush administration went in with limited military aims and no "post-conflict" nation building plan.

Lesson Two is that in the years prior to Iraq, we focussed too much on high tech modernization, geared at the "big fight" rather than "low-intensity conflicts" and let our ground forces grow too small. We need more of them, according to General Hillary Clark, and it won't be cheap:

Bulking up these forces, perhaps by as many as 100,000 more active troops, and refitting and recovering from Iraq could cost $70 billion to $100 billion.

Lesson Three is a bit harder to interpret. But the idea seems to be that our soldiers need to be trained differently, since each one is not just a killing machine, but a low-level local diplomat and sales rep for US Inc. as well. While they are dispatching one Hottentot with the left hand, they should be shaking the right hand of the next one, and selling Americanism to the surviving natives:

Somehow, in the past decade or two, we began to think of ourselves as "warriors." There was an elemental purity to this mindset, a kill-or-be-killed simplicity that drove U.S. commanders to create a leaner force based on more basic skills -- the kind that some generals thought were lacking in Vietnam and in the early years of the all-volunteer military. Now, in an age when losing hearts and minds can mean losing a war, we find ourselves struggling in Iraq and Afghanistan to impart the sort of cultural sensitivities that were second nature to an earlier generation of troops trained to eat nuoc mam with everything and sit on the floor during their tours in Vietnam.

Lesson Four is that we need to extend our "staying power" by shoring up public support for our wars. And the way to do that is to do a better job protecting our troops:

One of the most important lessons from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan -- and Vietnam, for that matter -- is that we need to safeguard our troops. The U.S. public is more likely to sour on a conflict when it sees the military losing blood, not treasure. So to keep up our staying power, our skill in hunting and killing our foes has to be matched by our care in concealing and protecting our troops. Three particularly obvious requirements are body armor, mine-resistant vehicles, and telescopic and night sights for every weapon. But these things are expensive for a military that has historically been enamored of big-ticket items such as fighter planes, ships and missiles. Many of us career officers understood these requirements after Vietnam, but we couldn't shift the Pentagon's priorities enough to save the lives of forces sent to Iraq years later.

Once again, Clark lets us know, this won't be cheap. This point connects up with discussions that were prominent in the run-up to Iraq. It was argued that while Americans have shown themselves ready to sacrifice great stores of wealth and millions of lives in WWII-style conflicts that the public judged as vital to the national defense, they have shown themselves unwilling to sustain even modest casualties in discretionary conflicts that they judge somewhat less than vital. Rather than draw the conclusion that we should probably refrain from fighting non-vital, discretionary wars, our ruling military-political class prefers to draw the lesson that we must reduce US casualties even further so that we can sustain public backing for these discretionary conflicts.

Lesson Five is that our generals need to be more accountable for winning, and more aggressive about demanding the tools they need in order to prevail:

At the same time, the United States' top generals must understand that their duty is to win, not just to get along. They must have the insight and character to demand the resources necessary to succeed -- and have the guts to either obtain what they need or to resign. If they get their way and still don't emerge victorious, they must be replaced. That is the lot they accepted when they pinned on those four shiny silver stars.

So when war "erupts" in the skies over Iran, let our generals not be shy in demanding sufficient shares of the national loot, and all the men and hardware they need to complete the job of turning Iran into the Persian States of America.

Lesson Six is a Clauswitzian reminder that the military is but one "tool" of statecraft. It's one of the devices we use to get our way, but not the only device:

Above all else, we Americans must understand that the goal of war is to achieve a specific purpose for the nation. In this respect, the military is simply a tool of statecraft, one that must work in tandem with diplomacy, economic suasion, intelligence and other instruments of U.S. power. How tragic it is to see old men who are unwilling to talk to potential adversaries but seem so ready to dispatch young people to fight and die.

Indeed. And yet how tragic it is also to see old generals enabling those old civilian men by contributing to the climate of hysteria and exaggeration surrounding the discussion of said adversaries.

Lesson Seven is that even as we go about fighting our discretionary neo-imperialist wars and low-intensity conflicts - well, low intensity for our side at least - we must never forget to continue to mouth banal and insincere "war is the last resort" pieties along the way:

So, steady as we go. We need to tweak our force structure, hone our leadership and learn everything we can about how to do everything better. But the big lesson is simply this: War is the last, last, last resort. It always brings tragedy and rarely brings glory. Take it from a general who won: The best war is the one that doesn't have to be fought, and the best military is the one capable and versatile enough to deter the next war in the first place.

From what I gather, the current bunch heading up the Turkish military is far more independent of the AKP government than the ones formerly in charge. The Turkish population wouldn't favor a strike on Iran at all and I don't think the politicals would either, but they may have no choice in the matter. There were rumors that Turkish intelligence aided the Israelis. Turkey is one of the best customers for Israel's defense industry but also relies on Iranian supplies of natural gas.

"I'm not sure how this would play against Kurdish insurgency."

Which one? The one in northern Iraq or the one in Turkey?

Cynically, I speculate that if there is some REAL action to address the PKK in Kurdistan, it could signal a tit-for-tat agreement between DC and the Turkish military.

French Foreign Minister Kouchner is warning that the world and French citizens must be prepared for war against Iran if they don't do the usual blah blah blah. He's hinting that the French military could get involved. Could be a diplomatic psyops move on the run-up to the next meeting of the UN Security Council.

Before WWII, airpower theorists like Giulio Douhet assumed that bombing a city would cause a collapse of morale. The US Strategic Bombing Surveys of both Japan and Germany, as well as the British experience, showed otherwise, at least given the capabilities of WWII bombers. There is misery, but morale doesn't collapse.

When you talk about the genociders being bombed, you need to give me an idea what kind of targets are being hit, and how important they are to the genociders -- and how likely it is that the genociders themselves are to be hurt.

In Rwanda, you essentially had gangs with machetes mingling with civilians. In Darfur, you have raiders on camels, horses, and an occasional pickup truck swooping down on villages. Yes, there are occasional airstrikes in Darfur, but they don't define the combat.

If you picture the genociders as light cavalry like Apaches (mind you, I have an Apache friend and I thought they were the good guys in "Fort Apache"), what is there to bomb?

If there are large military installations, critical industry, and the like, which are supporting the genocide, bombing might make a difference. If Serbian irregulars in trucks, armed with rifles and machine guns, round up civilians and shoot them down, what is there to bomb that's going to affect them? You can't just randomly blow away every truck, because you have no way of knowing who is in them.

Precision air attack did take out the Iraqi regular military, first destroying their air defense, then their command & control, then tanks and artillery. That left us with people going around setting IEDs. Sure, those insurgents can't stand against regular forces, but they aren't trying to do so.

So if the genociders don't have things that are critical to them, and are dispersed enough that you aren't going to have bodies of troops that can be attacked, air attacks won't deter them. The argument about bombing the industrialized Nazi death camps was that the gas chambers and crematoria would take a long time to rebuild. There were requests to attack the railroads taking people to the camp, but rail lines (as opposed to bridges and tunnels) can be repaired with amazing speed.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

This is not the first time that I've started to think that Clark is militarily deranged, certainly by retirement. Not too long ago, he was throwing around numbers of troops to throw into Darfur, which could not possibly be supported there without defensible roads or rail lines, and probably fuel pipelines, being built -- not an overnight project, and what should be obvious to anyone who looks at a terrain and transportation map of Darfur.

Now, taking a quote

hree particularly obvious requirements are body armor, mine-resistant vehicles, and telescopic and night sights for every weapon.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Do you have any evidence that Clark's is being "insincere" in offering that final lesson? Here, as elsewhere, he certainly seems to lay a great deal of stress on it. What makes you suppose that this stress is merely rhetorical, whereas everything else he says is functional and pragmatic?

And as you answer that question, please be aware that whatever support you summon for your view will have to be weighed in the balance, by any fair-minded reader, against Clark's established record of very publicly sounding the alarm that we are headed for war with Iran, and of calling for that war to be averted--a record that culminated in his co-founding of StopIranWar.org.

As to the supposed banality of the lesson that "war is the last, last, last resort": Well, I suppose it depends on what you have in mind in calling it that.

It is certainly not a new idea, I'll give you that. Indeed, it's part of a very old family of ideas that are in some sense as commonplace as those associated with, say, "limited government" or "checks and balances" or "human rights". The idea's value and power are another matter. I can only say that it seems to have retained enough of both, that the administration felt compelled to make a pretence of believing in it themselves, in late 2002 and early 2003, before utterly violating it in the event.

Yep -- and the use of nukes in that T-like incident.

"...Policy on the Possible First Use of Nuclear Weapons

"...The United States has never ruled out the possible first use of nuclear weapons. Although it has pledged that it would not attack non-nuclear weapons states with nuclear weapons under most circumstances, it has maintained a policy of “studied ambiguity” about the circumstances under which it would consider nuclear retaliation and the type of response it might use if a nation attacked the United States with WMD.

In its nuclear posture review (NPR), the Bush Administration did not alter the U.S. policy on the first use of nuclear weapons. However, with its emphasis on the emerging threats posed by nations armed with weapons of mass destruction, the administration did appear to shift towards a somewhat more explicit approach when acknowledging that the United States might use nuclear weapons in response to attacks by nations armed with chemical, biological, and conventional weapons. The Bush Administration has stated that the United States would develop and deploy those nuclear capabilities that it would need to defeat the capabilities of any potential adversary whether or not it possessed nuclear weapons.

Specifically, in its briefing on the Nuclear Posture Review, the Administration stated that the capabilities needed in the U.S. nuclear force structure “are not country-specific” and that the United States “must maintain capabilities for unexpected and potential risks.” The focus will be “on how we will fight, not who we will fight.”32 This does not, by itself, indicate that the United States would plan to use nuclear weapons first in conflicts with non-nuclear nations. However, General Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated in an interview that the scope of the destruction, not the weapon used in an attack, would affect a U.S. decision on whether to respond with nuclear weapons. He included high explosives, i.e. conventional weapons, in the list of “weapons of mass destruction” that might bring a nuclear response..."
CRS Report for Congress: U.S. Nuclear Weapons: Changes in Policy and Force Structure (Updated August 10, 2006)

And the Democrats response on this Congressional Report?

Yes, a number of prominent neocons are Jewish. Do you realize how close to antisemitism that brings you, when you use this fact as an opportunity to attack Israel?

By the way, where is your similar anger at Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, two countries whose governments are without question contributing to the chaos in the middle east?

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

If Clark is still opposed to war against Iran, then why did he not bother to say, in the 20 paragraphs given to him by the Wall Street Journal, something as direct and as straightforward as "I oppose a war with Iran." If Clark still thinks we must avert a war with Iran, then why did he not say, "We must avert a war with Iran"?

Could it be that he takes one position when addressing us yahoos in the loony left over the internets, or reaching out for political support to antiwar activists, and takes another position when writing for the Very Serious People who read the Wall Street Journal?

The dictum that "war is the last resort" is, as used by politicians, absurdly vague and close to content free. Perhaps you could suggest a precise rendering of that dictum.

Watch out for a so-called "false flag" incident.

Criticizing the foreign policy of the Israeli government in not anti-Semitic

We have not had any president seeking out Texans in the government for firing as enemies of the state though perhaps we should have.

Anti-semitism has an ugly history in this country that has not been fully erased. Such a history creates extremism on both sides.

Surely one need not support atrocities of the Israeli government to understand the precarious position of Israel in a sea of hostility.

Should that be of any concern to the U.S.?

Dunno frankly.

I worry more about when we finally do the right thing and return Texas to Mexico. Then every patriotic American can support building a wall along the border to keep such destructive foreigners out.

Best, Terry

Amileoj,
New inning. I'm up again.

First, I never said Clark was "eager for war", although I inferred that he's a hawk and of course he's endorsed HRC who is not shy about military matters. He eagerly described what ought to be done in this new war.

My main points are that Clark is an experienced bomber, he didn't warn against war and he has endorsed HRC.

Clark does express thoughts on what Iran might do with terror cells, Iraqi Shiites and what Iran would be like after an attack, but this is hardly warning against war, is it? Does Clark ever write: Don't do it because these counter-actions would outweigh the "benefits" of bombing? No, he merely notes some factors which should be taken into consideration.

If Clark was seriously warning against war he would mention potential blockage of the Strait of Hormuz, which would severely impact oil supplies, and also the potential that the Iranians have to sink not only tankers but also US warships with cruise missiles, mines and torpedoes. He didn't.

Clark's piece is half a prescription for war, describing what must be done militarily, and secondly some irrelevant bromides on generals going to school.

Todd forgot to mention it, but Clark's op-ed was entitled: The Next War. The title was not: Stop Iran War. This piece doesn't stop a war, it accepts it and promotes it.

Speaking of cluster munitions, no wonder Israel refuses to release targeting data as the Big Satan's militia, NATO, is being hounded hard to reveal the same data re cluster bombs over Serbia:

Nato comes clean on cluster bombs
Eight years on, Serbia is finally told where munitions fell
By Brian Brady, Whitehall Editor
Published: 16 September 2007

"Nato chiefs will this week finally tell the Serbian government where they drop-ped thousands of cluster bombs during the Kosovo campaign, more than eight years after the bombardment finished.

Allied commanders have bowed to mounting pressure from foreign governments and pressure groups and will hand over full coordinates for the hundreds of bombing sorties. Belgrade hopes this could pinpoint thousands of unexploded munitions still littering parts of the country.

The pledge from Nato's Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (Shape) will end a delay condemned by human rights groups and described as "shameful" by one British minister.

The US, Britain and Holland are believed to have dropped more than 2,000 cluster bombs – containing 380,000 sub-munitions – during Operation Allied Force, the three-month campaign to end Serb oppression in Kosovo in 1999. The RAF dropped 531 RBL755 cluster bombs, designed principally to destroy tanks and other armoured vehicles.

But furious condemnation erupted after at least 23 Serb civilians were killed by cluster munitions during the campaign. Since the operation, the Allied forces have admitted the bombs had a failure rate of at least 5 per cent, meaning up to 20,000 unexploded bomb-lets may be strewn across Serbia and Kosovo.

snip]

But British ministers confessed this summer that, despite Serb requests, the co-ordinates of RAF bombing raids had not been given to Belgrade. Baroness Royall of Blaisdon said Britain had given the information to Nato, but it had not been passed on. She added: "I do think it is rather shameful."

Tory peer Lord Elton, a leading campaigner against the bombs, said ministers had confirmed in mid-May that the co-ordinates had been supplied to Nato and Nato "would in due course hand them to Serbia". He added: "That's eight years for children to blow their feet off. Why can't we send our co-ordinates direct and get others to do the same?".

Now critics claim it may be too late recover thousands of ageing, unstable munitions. The UK has contributed £86,000 to the Serbian Mine Action Centre for equipment; in Lebanon, Britain gave £2.7m to help the clean-up after the Israeli attack last summer.

A Foreign Office spokes-man said: "Nato now have everything they need and intend to share it with the Serbs in the next week."

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/politics/article2966970.ece

Intend? weasel word alert...

Do we just have more Clark bashers here? You know, you don't need to do that any more --- he's not running. Or is it that prejudice some people insist upon sporting against anyone ever in uniform?

No one has tried harder than Clark to stop a war with Iran. As noted, that's why he started up a web site, StopIranWar.com . He has been working behind the scenes for years now trying to convince people not to go to war. There is ample evidence of this. He has written other op-eds in the past that were quite explicit. Presumably, the Washington Post said they didn't want another piece just like that. So he tried something different. He's not giving away anything by telling people how such a war would proceed. And he's very clearly not advocating that war.

He is up against it here. Didn't you read the sentence where he says that all of the presidential candidates are indicating that they won't allow Iran to do certain things? When Clark has written on this matter before, he has made it clear that we should consider accepting a world where Iran has nuclear capability --- that this is one of our options. I remember when all of the Democratic frontrunners made their speeches before groups that lobby on behalf of Israel's hardline government. How they all threatened Iran.

Clark is trying to be a sane voice here. To caution that there is no reason to think that we can gain anything by going to war with Iran, but that there is reason to think that we can lose much, just as we have in Iraq.

So can the Clark harassers give it a break? Don't you have other candidates to attack?

Don, Let's revisit my opening sentence, with the operative clause emboldened:

You don't have to plunge too far beneath the lines to see that Wesley Clark, in his WP op-ed, thinks disastrous war with Iran might well be on its way.

Clark is a general, so you would't expect from him a piece on the wrongness of all war.  But let's think about it.  This is how Washington conducts its signaling.

And always remember:  Writers don't choose their own headlines.  Ever.

Todd Gitlin

Clark is trying to be a sane voice here. To caution that there is no reason to think that we can gain anything by going to war with Iran, but that there is reason to think that we can lose much, just as we have in Iraq.

Could you please point to the place where Clark says there is no reason to think we can gain anything by going to war with Iran? The closest I can find is one paragraph where he lists several questions that must be answered if we do go to war with Iran. It looks to me like he has perhaps given up. The "warnings" in the op-ed are muted at best, with the bulk of the piece is devoted to outlining the military lessons that should be drawn from Iraq and Afghanistan, and applied to a war with Iran.

Starting with Todd's post, several of the comments on the op-ed piece seem to be reading things into it, based on their knowledge of Clark's earlier "Stop the War" bit, that simply are not present in the actual piece.

To say that Israel isn't behind the pressure on the US to attack Iran, just as Israel pushed the US into attacking Iraq, is simply laughably false:

Israel To U.S.: Don't Delay Iraq Attack
Sharon Government Urges Prompt Action Against Saddam
JERUSALEM — Israel is urging U.S. officials not to delay a military strike against Iraq's Saddam Hussein, an aide to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Friday.

Israeli intelligence officials have gathered evidence that Iraq is speeding up efforts to produce biological and chemical weapons, said Sharon aide Ranaan Gissin.

"Any postponement of an attack on Iraq at this stage will serve no purpose," Gissin said. "It will only give him (Saddam) more of an opportunity to accelerate his program of weapons of mass destruction."

And...

Israel Says War on Iraq Would Benefit the Region by James Bennet New York Times February 27, 2003 "Israelis have also suggested that that an Iraq war may salvage their economy and even prompt the opposition Labor Party to join Mr. Sharon's coalition in a new government of national unity.

Expressed in its broadest, vaguest terms, that theory has come in for the sort of mockery that the idealistic vision of Oslo's effects suffered from the right. The accusation is the same: fuzzy, wishful thinking..."

AND...

Attack Iran the Day Iraq War Ends, Demands Israel
by Stephen Farrell, Robert Thomson and Danielle Haas The Times Tuesday, November 5, 2002
ISRAEL’S Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has called on the international community to target Iran as soon as the imminent conflict with Iraq is complete...

There is no question that maps covering drops of cluster submunitions that may have active and dangerous devices left must be made available after the end of fighting. Technical assistance to disarm them, or, more often, to destroy them in place, is also quite appropriate.

My one slight flag is that not all cluster submunitions are dangerous; there are types other than antipersonnel, "dual purpose" antipersonnel/antivehicular, and antitank. The true antitank, rather than dual-purpose, are fairly unlikely to be a hazard even to civilian vehicles.

I'm not sure what was meant by "too late", unless it refers to some munitions that have buried themselves. Antipersonnel cluster submunitions are not designed to create minefields, but the existing ones tend to do that; their fuzing is such that they expect to hit a hard surface at 60 degrees or so to detonate. That's fine when you are attacking an airfield, but, in other terrain, up to 20-30% may not go off. A dud antipersonnel munition, however, is so delicately fuzed that technicians would rarely try to disarm it. They will usually put a small explosive charge next to it, surround it with sandbags if it's in an area that can't be cleared, and then detonate it.

I do believe that it is technically possible to design antipersonnel bomblets that do not create minefields, but that hasn't been done. Still, while I support the ban on antipersonnel mines, I am less prone to ban cluster munitions that have been designed to fail safe. The older ones do need to be banned.

Some used in the Balkans, for example, spooled out carbon filament strands that temporarily shorted out the electrical system. Others have limited-time electronic jammers. Yet others spread propaganda leaflets. My point here is these are less-than-lethal that should not necessarily be discouraged; they are a hazard only if they hit people on the head. I would have been much happier, for example, if the Israelis had used carbon filament weapons in Lebanon, rather than blowing up electrical power stations and substations -- it's far easier to restore civilian power after temporary shorts than when the transformers and generators are in little pieces.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

As of a short while ago, Wesley Clark, at StopIranWar.com, was still asking visitors to sign a petition, to be sent to President Bush, opposing military force against Iran in the near term. (I don't know whether the text of the petition is available somewhere without first giving one's personal information; I have not seen the text.) Hillary Clinton should expect to be asked, if she hasn't been, whether she has signed the petition. If she has signed or does sign the petition, the petition's statement will be compared to her other statements concerning Iran.

Good post. One point to add, however.

The fighting involves nomading Baqqara Arabs against the Nilotic, non-Arab, pastoralist Fur people and other ethnicities also non-Arab.Actually both the nomadic tribes and pastorol ones have been living in the same region for centuries and their ethnicity is very close. The use of 'Arab' and 'African' are more political identifications rather than ethnic ones. And these identifications are recent, happening after the Fur people started to agitate for Darfur independence, they identified themselves as African to help make their case for independence.

It is true that there was coexistence for some time, between the pastoralists and nomads. I think it's fair to say that the al-Bashir faction used the Baqqara as "enforcers" in the nineties, in attempted ethnic cleansing of Dinka, Nuer, and Shilluk in the oil-producing areas. This is surprisingly little known in the West, although the Dinka-Nuer reconciliation process that began at Wunlit was further advanced by a Christian-brokered meeting in Washington DC.

Darfur independence is a factional issue even among the Fur (and other pastoralists). It's hard to track all the factions, but, the SLA wanted to stay part of Sudan while the JEM wanted independence, with both fighting the janjaweed.

Would you agree that the triggering event for reaction and identification was the forced Arabicization pushed by al-Turabi? While the African-Arab distinction gets blurry, I tend to think that the linguistic difference is significant. The Fur, Masalit, and Daju all speak Nilotic languages as a first language, with multiple dialects present. As I understand, many Fur and a good many Daju, but few Masalit, speak Arabic as a second language, but none wanted to be forced to use Arabic.

African identification, however, has a much stronger case in South Sudan, with the SPLM government.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

A couple of years ago, I had a consulting assignment to look at the telecommunications infrastructure of Sudan, and I became utterly fascinated with the country, which has far more conflicts than Darfur. It had an on-again-off-again civil war starting in 1955, a year before it became independent, and finally settled with the Power-Sharing Agreement of 2005. There was a pause between 1972 and 1983, causing some people to speak of 1983-2005 as the Second Sudanese Civil War.

I tend to think of it as continuous, watching some of the factional jockeying, and ignoring the assorted coups in the Arab-identified North. The South, with many factions but the SPLM becoming the dominant one (not to be confused with the SPM, SLA, SLPA (army of the SPLM), etc., often too fast to track).

There is a character named Hassan al-Turabi whom, had he been transmitted to the Renaissance, would have made the Medici look like political beginners. One of the things about Sudan that is different than most turbulent countries is that the elite seems courteous(?) to one another. In most other countries, al-Turabi would have been shot years ago.

He is a Muslim theologian with some definitely unusual opinions. For example, he believe that participating in lesser jihad (i.e., physical war) is equivalent to the requirement for the Hajj. He wants Islamist law, but his interpretation of Sharia, once implemented, is rather liberal.

al-Turabi, at various times speaker of the parliament and a prisoner, was the chief advocate of forced Arabic language and conversion to Islam. Omar al-Bashir, the president (by military coup) is more of a pragmatist, and once he saw that taking Arabicization and Islamic coversion was a means of reaching a coalition with the South, he moved in that direction, cutting al-Turabi out of power.

When you start following al-Turabi, it became unsurprising to find him in simultaneous alliances with Saddam and with Saddam's Kurdish opposition. He apparently was the patron of al-Qaeda in Sudan, but isn't extremely anti-Western; I believe he speaks English fluently. According to the 9/11 Commission report, al-Bashir, ever the pragmatist, evicted al-Qaeda in 1998.

JEM is a Fur movement that wants independence, although few areas are less self-supporting than Darfur. The 2005 Power Sharing Agreement calls for a referendum, in 2011, if South Sudan splits off. South Sudan is already issuing its own currency and conducting its own foreign policy. Darfur more or less is the western part of South Sudan.

JEM's calls for independence have nothing to do with the North-South potential split. Just to confuse everyone, al-Turabi, out of prison again, was saying nice things about JEM.

I think al-Turabi fits, for me, into the same class of people as G. Gordon Libby -- I'd like to have dinner with them, back to the wall and with a food taster, and expecting a fascinating conversation.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Don,

I meant writers in newspapers. You can properly hold me responsible in the exceptional self-headlining world of TPMcafe. I stand by my belief that Clark was warning, though I cannot refute the notion that he might have been (also) protecting himself in the event of eventual war. If the latter were the case--and I have no way to know whether it is or not--it would not be ignoble.

Clark is not a tool of the incumbent mis-government. But I assume that he's privy to lots of signals, and that the high military brass must be very, very worried about a double-or-nothing war with Iran.

Todd Gitlin

I think the reason Clark did not say those things here is because, in this Op-Ed, he was speaking in the voice of a professional strategist offering candid advice to decision makers. (It is a mode with which anyone who has watched his Congressional testimony on Iraq, or his military affairs commentaries on Fox or CNN, will be immediately familiar.)

I mean to say that Clark was, in this Op-Ed, among other things, modeling the behavior he was calling for on the part of top military leaders--to be straight with political decision makers about the costs and risks of a policy they (that is, the decision makers) are contemplating. Hence the warning: "if it's clear how a war with Iran would start, it's far less clear how it would end."

I take it Clark would not exactly be wrong to suppose that some significant chunk of WaPo readership is indeed already contemplating a policy of war with Iran--or soon will be. I further take it that he wants those readers to know what kind of dangers and uncertainties such a policy would entail--not to spur them on, but rather to get them to stop and think.

This strikes me as a far more natural interpretation of his words here, and of their fit with his prior public statements, than to suppose that he is trimming his sails in hopes of gaining favor with hawks in the foreign policy establishment. Who, after all, would be fooled? Presumably, even Very Serious People can use Google--or at least have research assistants who can do it for them.

As to your question about the "precise rendering" of the dictum that war must be the last resort: I suppose it depends on what you will accept as "precise". The idea of "last resort" is not subject to context-free definition; any statement of it will necessarily leave a wide field for the judgment of particular cases. Examples are probably of more use here than categorical statements. (For Clark, for instance, Kosovo and Afghanistan met the test; Iraq did not.)

Also, as I indicated before, this idea is part of a family of ideas; it is difficult to elucidate any member of that family without touching on all the others. In that spirit, here is Clark own attempt at an answer, this time in another of his modes--that of the part-time academic with a professional interest in the Theory of Just War.

Wouldn't it be a less strained interpretation to read this Op-Ed as a (thinly) veiled restatement of his earlier warnings--here given in the persona of a professional military man offering unvarnished advice to the political decision makers (namely, us)?

Again, your argument seems to be that Clark must be warning WP readers against war with Iran because he has issued such warnings in the past. But you are unable to justify your interpretation from the internal evidence of the op-ed piece itself.

Almost 90% of the piece is devoted to detailing the lessons we should learn from Iraq and Iran. Nothing one reads in these lessons would allow a neutral reader to infer any conclusion one way or another on the wisdom of attacking Iran. They are just a series of recommendation to war-planners, to be applied in the next war whenever it erupts.

The closest one comes to a "warning" in the piece is an early paragraph that raises various questions about an attack on Iran. Again these questions don't amount to any kind of argument against an attack. A rational defense planner would ask the same questions in planning a war.

I think you are overlooking the context here. Clark just threw his support to Clinton. Clark is also a well-connected and well-informed guy, and surely hears a lot from his friends in the Pentagon about what is coming down the road. I would suggest that you should consider the interpretation that he is packing it in on the war opposition front, having concluded opposition is a lost cause, and has decided to move on to a new stage in his public positioning.

You seem to believe that the warning is there, but it is highly subtle, and embedded in some sort of Washington code that those in the know can decipher. But this imagined subtlety is really a magical projection of intentions and meanings onto a piece of writing, based on what you wish were there, but is not really discernible in the piece. Anyway, has opposition to war really been been reduced to this sort of imaginary cryptography? Maybe I should read the piece backwards. Will I then find the "War with Iran is a bad idea" message woven in along with "Paul is dead" and "Soylent Green is people"?

I'm less of an authority of the decisionmaking in the Balkans. My impression, in part, was that the military were sufficiently independent that they could tell Milosevic that they would stop supporting him if they lost all their toys. In that particular climate, bombing may have been the right pressure technique based on political intelligence.

In other situations, however, the genocide won't be stopped by bombing, because there are no targets that either directly support the genocide, or are really valuable to the Bad Guys. While the decision not to bomb WWII Nazi camps was very complex, one of the factors was a belief that the most direct way to stop the killing -- the extent of which was not fully appreciated at the high command level -- was to defeat Hitler.

I'm open to suggestions about things that could have been bombed in Cambodia, Rwanda, or Darfur. In the former two, I really don't think there were any. With Sudan, yes, some airfields might be attacked -- but that could utterly screw up the delicate diplomacy to let peace forces enter Darfur. The air aspect isn't critical.

You were quite right, however, to call me for generalizing -- there are very few things that can be generalized about war, except that the best plan rarely survives contact with the enemy, who don't do what you wanted them to do.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

What scares me is a scenario in which a Tonkin-like incident gives Bush-Cheney a pretext for war, and a Senate vote be damned. I grant, this would be utterly deranged for all the reasons Clark specifies (whether or not anybody approves of the Serbia-Kosovo war, a completely distracting question here). Anyone reassured that Bush and Cheney would never do anything deranged?

Todd Gitlin:

The scenario is entirely plausible, in my view. The Bush administration might well start a war against Iran using some Tonkin-like incident as a pretextual justification. I agree that this would be deranged. (There are many other grounds for criticizing such an action, in my view.) The proposition that “Bush and Cheney would never do anything deranged” is rebutted, and disproved, by their actions, so it doesn't reassure me.

Zbigniew Brzezinski expressed similar concerns in his testimony to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on Feb. 1, 2007.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=4921

[T]he war in Iraq is a historic strategic and moral calamity undertaken under false assumptions. It is undermining America's global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties, as well as some abuses, are tarnishing America's moral credentials. Driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability.
[...]
If the United States continues to be bogged down in protracted, bloody involvement in Iraq -- and I emphasize what I am about to say -- the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran, and with much of the world of Islam at large.

A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks, followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure, then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the United States blamed on Iran, culminating in a quote-unquote "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire, eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Indeed, a mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potential expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about WMDs in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the decisive ideological struggle of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated America's involvement in World War II.

Brzezinski cited the Downing Street memo for addtional support that his concerns were well founded:

Let me draw your attention to something that ... might be of interest to ... members of this committee. And that's a report in The New York Times dated March 27, 2006[,]... on a private meeting between the president and Prime Minister Blair two months before the war, based on a memorandum of conversation prepared by the British official present at this meeting.

And in it, according to this account, the president is cited as saying that he's concerned that there may not be weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq and that there must be some consideration given to finding a different basis for undertaking the military action.... The memo stated, "The president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq."

This is two months before the war.

"Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation."

And he described, then, several ways in which this could be done, and I won't go into that. I don't know how accurate these ways were. They're quite sensational, at least one of them.

And if one is of the view that one is dealing with an implacable enemy that has to be removed, that course of action may, under certain circumstances, be appealing.

I'm afraid if the situation in Iraq continues deteriorating, and if Iran is perceived as in some fashion involved or responsible -- or the potential beneficiary thereof -- that temptation could arise.

In the course of Brzezinski’s appearance before the committee, various Senators of both parties expressed a range of views about the Iraq, Iran, and related matters, and engaged in dialogue with Brzezinski about his views and testimony. It struck me as significant that no Senator took issue with Brzezinski’s views or statements regarding the possibility that the administration might start a war with Iran on false pretenses. No Senator said that the administration would never do such a thing; no Senator said that if the administration made such an attempt, they wouldn’t get away with it.

I can see why such things weren’t said. The implications are scary and discouraging, and go beyond US-Iran relations.

It sounds like monday morning quarterbacking to me Howard. (The conspiracy theory that the concentration camps were intentionally not bombed.)

"U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum historian Peter Black's response to McGovern's argument was that had the rail lines been destroyed, the Nazis might have shot the Jews instead. He also said the government couldn't pinpoint where the gas chambers were and would have had to carpet-bomb the camp."

There were many camps as well, and resources in the war were limited. Strategic targets I'm sure were the priority in terms of winning the war which was the overall objective.

I just don't buy into the notion that the allied commanders were as evil as Hitler and the SS, which is basically what this conspiracy theory is implying.

Howard: In Carl's post you were simply a stand-in for the long anti-semitic strain which holds that Muslim deaths caused by Israelis are a moral horror and Muslim deaths caused by Muslims are ignorable.
If the attack on the camp in Lebanon had been conducted by Israelis rather than the Lebanese government you can imagine the outpouring of high minded outrage from the Left especially.l This was notably lacking in all commentary -- left, right and center that I have seen.

That you are more even handed about which outrages you find distressing and that you do your homework about this is admirable but this does not obviate the fact that the strain of reasoning that Carl is objecting to is out there and that pretending that you disprove this by showing you are not part of it clears you but does not otherwise deal with this strain of Anti-semitism to which part of the Left is subject.

Carl was not arguing that because all do it the Israeli actions were right -- which is the tu quoque defense -- but rather the logically distinct position that people who criticize only Israeli misbehavior show an Antisemitic bias. If the Nurnberg trials had only dealt with Japanese War crimes and ignored German ones it would have been fair to say that we were anti-Asian and that would have implied no endorsement of Japanese war offenses.