I'm just the guy that can't stand cant. ___________

 
WILL THE DEMOCRATS WIN WITH WESLEY CLARK?: Will the Democrats nominate the presidential candidate that is most electable or the one that is best on the issues? The Democrats might end up doing both if Wesley Clark lives up to his potential.

Clark’s announcement that he will seek the Democratic nomination for president could be the answer to the Democrats’ prayers for deliverance from the reign of Bush. On paper, Clark seems like the ideal candidate to face Bush. He is a retired four star general and Rhodes scholar from the South with moderately liberal views. Coming from a former supreme commander of NATO, Clark’s criticisms of Bush’s clueless approach to Iraq could attract voters across the political spectrum.

But it’s often tricky figuring out whether a presidential candidate that looks stunning on paper will actually click with the voters in a specific election year.

Clark would undoubtedly like to be thought of as the Democratic Eisenhower, another non-politician general whose status as the one of the architects of victory in World War II was enough to sweep him into the White House in 1952, when America was mired in the Korean War.

The last presidential contender to called the Democratic Eisenhower, however, did not find it easy to live up to the metaphor.

On paper, Senator John Glenn looked like a dream candidate for president in 1984. As an astronaut, Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth at the height of the Space Race and the Cold War. He was an authentic America hero. In a cover story, The New Republic said he could be the Democratic Eisenhower.

When he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination, however, Glenn’s star power was outshone by the blinding charisma of Walter Mondale.

Glenn just didn’t connect with the voters in 1984, and found that his impressive resume didn’t satisfy any particular yearning of the electorate. In contrast, in 1952 General Eisenhower, who pledged to go to Korea, fit the bill for voters weary of the stalemate in the Korean War.

Clark’s challenge is to satisfy some yearning of the voters as Eisenhower did, and not relive Glenn’s fate of being viewed as little more than an impressive resume.

While Clark lacks the popularity and heroic aura of Eisenhower, or even Glenn for that matter, his credibility on military issues – and his common-sense approach to foreign policy – could make him the right fit for voters next year. Bush demonstrated in the midterm elections last year that he is not above exploiting national security fears – and impugning Democrats’ patriotism – for electoral gain. The composed and competent Clark could calm such fears.

One factor that may make Clark attractive to much of the Democratic Party is just how bad the Bush presidency has been for America.

In races for presidential nominations, there is often a split between a political party’s idealists, who back a candidate for his stance on the issues, and the party’s realists who back the candidate they think is most electable.

Clark is likely to appeal to many of these “electability” realists. Clark may well be the most electable Democratic candidate given his potential to neutralize Bush’s strongest asset – the perception that he is strong on national security issues.

I think there is also a good chance that the “issues” idealists of the Democratic Party will also gravitate to Clark. Clark could appeal to issue-oriented Democrats because the biggest issue for such idealists should be defeating Bush.

Calling the Bush presidency a series of disasters is closer to understatement than to hyperbole. Bush and his radical right-wing ideology have resulted in disaster after disaster.

First, consider a few of the economic “achievements” of the Bush administration. Bush has transformed the largest federal budget surplus in history into the largest deficit. Bush has pushed through tax cuts that shift the tax burden from the wealthy to the middle class and poor. Bush has presided over the loss of 3 million jobs in America – the first net loss of jobs since the Hoover administration.

Next, consider some of the Bush administration’s foreign policy “achievements.” Bush led the country into war on the basis of lies. Bush has failed to devote sufficient forces to pacify Iraq due to a naive belief in neo-conservative fantasies that Iraq would be easy to democratize. Bush has alienated much of the world to such an extent that America is facing the burdens of stabilizing Iraq largely on its own. Bush has neglected the reconstruction of Afghanistan, failing to commit the resources necessary to find Osama bin Laden and stamp out the remnants of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, who continue to operate in Afghanistan.

For idealistic Democrats – indeed, for all Americans that care about either a strong economy or national security – the most serious issue facing America is ending the Bush maladministration. Bush is so bad, the defeat of Bush dwarfs all other issues in importance.

In order to achieve the essential goal of defeating Bush, many party idealists are likely to gravitate to the most electable candidate. Thus, Clark’s perceived electability could gain him the support of many idealists as well.

While I don’t subscribe to the notion that Dean is unelectable, I don’t think he would be as strong a general election candidate as candidates with more impressive national security credentials, such as Clark and Kerry.

Although I previously thought that Kerry might be the Democrats’ strongest presidential candidate, lately there has been an unmistakable Muskie smell emanating from the Kerry campaign. Unless Kerry figures out a way to generate some excitement for his candidacy, Kerry seems destined to follow the path of Muskie, another Lincolnesque New England Senator whose impressive credentials and frontrunner status were no match for the fervor of a more passionate antiwar candidate.

In my opinion, the key question remaining about Clark’s candidacy is whether he can connect with the voters. All of Clark’s strengths on paper will not save him if he fails to click with the voters.

Since Clark has never run for office, it is an open question how much he will appeal to voters. As a television commentator, he has come across as telegenic, poised and thoughtful on military issues. I think Clark has to demonstrate fairly quickly that he has a command of domestic issues as well. Clark does not have a lot of time to demonstrate such domestic expertise given the lateness of his entry into the race for the Democratic nomination.

If Clark can come across as articulate and passionate about the domestic damage caused by Bush’s policies and their effect on Americans’ lives, he has an excellent chance to become the Democrats’ frontrunner and perhaps even their Eisenhower.
posted by Gary at 9:34 AM

 
BUSH’S VIETNAM SYNDROME: President Bush’s bullheaded refusal to rethink his approach in Iraq reveals that he is suffering from his very own strain of Vietnam Syndrome.

Bush’s Vietnam Syndrome is decidedly his own variant of the ailment. In its most common usage, Vietnam Syndrome refers to a reluctance to use American forces out of fear of repeating America’s mistakes in the Vietnam War. Bush, however, seems to be suffering form a mutated form of the ailment in which he chooses the policies most likely to repeat America’s errors in Vietnam.

The question of whether Iraq will turn into a Vietnam-style quagmire is most timely given the combination of continuing guerrilla attacks on American forces, Bush’s recent request for an additional $87 billion to continue the struggle and Bush’s inability to articulate any clear plan of how to pacify Iraq. As today’s New York Times reports:

A week after President Bush's speech seeking to rally support for the campaign in Iraq, the nation appears increasingly anxious about the war effort and worried that the United States may be trapped in an adventure from which there is no evident exit, according to interviews during the last five days with Americans across the nation, historians, social scientists and pollsters.

Some people went so far as to suggest a comparison with an earlier military action that had an unhappy history: the war in Vietnam.

One of the main reasons that the Vietnam comparison is being made is that Bush is stubbornly refusing to face the harsh realties America is facing in Iraq. Retired Air Force Colonel Mike Turner (link via TBOGG) recently listed some of the more disturbing similarities between Vietnam and Iraq in an online Newsweek article :

Some of the similarities between the two wars are obvious. The Vietnam War began when senior White House officials used overblown and distorted threat assessments as an excuse to commit U.S. troops to an action they’’d already decided upon months before. The operation was a unilateral, conventional, U.S. military operation against a Third World power which, in the final analysis, posed only an indirect and peripheral threat to U.S. vital interests. The operation lacked formal United Nations backing and broad international support, two factors that eventually sapped U.S. will and drained our resources. Mission success was ill-defined, and administration officials, assuming a quick victory, adopted and stubbornly adhered to a tragically simplistic and naive view of the both the military forces required to achieve military victory and the level of societal change necessary to win and sustain the peace.

While it is easy to compare Bush’s Iraq approach (I question whether it is coherent enough to qualify as a “policy”) to America’s Vietnam policy of four decades ago, it is also a little unfair. Unfair to the architects of the Vietnam War, that is.

America faced far greater obstacles in dealing with the Vietnam War than it now faces in Iraq. America is currently encountering scattered resistance from guerrillas or isolated forces in Iraq. In Vietnam America confronted both the Viet Cong’s well-organized guerrilla army and the regular army of North Vietnam. Even more significant, these communist forces were backed by the Soviet Union and China.

In the Vietnam War, America’s leaders decided not to extend the war into North Vietnam, which was supplying most of the communist troops and military hardware. America’s leaders feared that any extension of the ground war into North Vietnam would carry too great a risk of escalating into a military conflict with China – as the Korean War did – or even with the Soviet Union.

The decision not to invade North Vietnam meant that as long as North Vietnam was willing to continue sending soldiers to die in the south, the war would continue no matter how many clashes America won on the battlefields of South Vietnam. The war became a waiting game over which side was willing to continue to shed blood without end in Vietnam. America had no strategy for how to actually win the war if North Vietnam did not get tired of the killing before America did.

While America’s leaders made profound errors during the Vietnam War, they had to confront some extremely difficult decisions in the midst of the Cold War, when a misstep could have increased the chances for a nuclear war.

By contrast, America is now having to confront difficult decisions thanks to a combination of the Bush administration’s arrogant dismissal of the need for international cooperation in confronting Iraq and its naive wishful thinking that the postwar reconstruction of Iraq would be quick and easy.

As I discussed in "BUSH'S DEADLY WISHFUL THINKING", a successful reconstruction of Iraq is likely to require a much greater force than the approximately 150,000 troops currently in Iraq. According to Slate, James Dobbins, Bush’s special envoy to post-Taliban Afghanistan and currently a policy director at the Rand Corporation, has concluded that based on the number of troops used in past successful postwar occupations, America would need at least twice as many troops to stabilize Iraq.

The Bush administration, however, is not about to admit that its plans have proved to be grossly inadequate. As the Washington Post reports, Vice President Cheney refused to take off his rose-colored glasses in discussing Iraq on Meet The Press yesterday:

Cheney vigorously defended the level of U.S. troops in Iraq at a time when lawmakers have said more than the current 130,000 American and 20,000 foreign troops are needed. Asked about his earlier dismissal of Gen. Eric K. Shinseki's prewar view that an occupation force would have to be “on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers,” Cheney replied: “I still remain convinced that the judgment that we will need, quote, ‘several hundred thousand for several years,’ is not valid.”

In fact, Shinseki had not mentioned “several years” in his testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee on Feb. 25.

Given the Bush administration’s denial of reality, I am not optimistic about our efforts to build a peaceful society in Iraq. While America is obviously in a far stronger position, and facing a far weaker foe, in Iraq than in Vietnam, our current strategic thinking suffers from the same basic flaw as four decades ago. Rather than having any realistic plan of how to achieve our goals, we just plan to hang around – bleeding money and actual blood – until America wins.

Ironically, though its own ineptitude, the Bush administration has maneuvered America into repeating the Vietnam policy of bloody endurance without any strategic vision of how to actually win.

Bush’s Vietnam Syndrome is primarily a self-inflicted ailment. The arrogance and incompetence of this administration led it to war in Iraq without significant international backing. That same arrogance and incompetence leads it to believe that it can succeed in creating a peaceful Iraq without any substantial international contribution.

I agree with Colonel Turner’s assessment that international assistance is vital to America’s effort to stabilize Iraq:

And though I believe long-term victory in Iraq is, at very best, a long shot, we have a sacred responsibility to the military men and women who have been and will be lost to finish the job. Indeed, the enduring lesson of Vietnam was not, “Never engage,” it was “Engage responsibly.” What does that mean? It means winning this time. It means returning to the U.N. and obtaining U.N. backing at any price. It means going to the allies we have arrogantly disregarded and asking for help. It means dramatically internationalizing the force and, more importantly, the reconstruction of Iraq. This is, quite simply, the only way we will ever get our troops home.

During the years that America was bogged down in Vietnam, America’s leaders could not think of any new approach that would increase the chances for victory without also increasing the chances for World War III.

America does not need to repeat history since it can increase its chances for victory in Iraq by making a serious and all-out effort to internationalize the rebuilding of Iraq. However, such an approach would mean a tacit admission of error and loss of absolute control by the Bush administration.

Unfortunately, the Bush administration acts as if it fears any admission of error or loss of control as much as more responsible leaders feared World War III.
posted by Gary at 2:44 PM