Reply #50: Thanks for Adam Nagourney's article on this......... [View All]

[FrenchieCat]

But please remember this part of same article....."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."

That is consistent with Clark's statement that he would have supported the Levin Amendment as opposed to the Blank Check IWR. In addition, Wes Clark did state the following immediately after he saw what Mr. Magourney had done with the initial interview.....

"The retired four-star Army general and former NATO commander....said his comments had been taken out of context.

"I would have never voted for war," Clark told Reuters before delivering a foreign policy speech at the University of Iowa. "I'm a soldier. I understand what war's about, but I would have voted for the right kind of leverage for the president to head off war and avoid it."
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0919-10.htm

At the CNN debate, Clark had this exchange with moderator Judy Woodruff:
Clark: Let me tell you what my story is. I always supported taking the problem of Saddam Hussein to the United Nations and bringing international resolve to bear. I would never have voted for war. The Congress made a mistake in giving George Bush an open-ended resolution that enabled him to go to war without coming back to the Congress . . .


"The thing was, I would have voted for it for leverage, but had I been there and been part of that process, I would never have voted for it for war. The resolution I wanted was a resolution that would have brought them back to the United States Congress and showed cause before you went to war."

Retired Gen. WESLEY CLARK: Well Bob, I bobbled the question. I mean, I bobbled it once and I guess it's the nature of these campaigns. This is an issue that just haunts. It was a discussion and I talked about really the complexity of this. You know, Saddam Hussein was never an immediate threat. I never said he was an imminent threat. I was one of the people that ran the air operations against Saddam during the time I was in Europe. But I never saw the urgency of going to war with Saddam Hussein. I've been very consistent on that. But I did believe that it was important, if we wanted to deal with this problem to deal with it through the United Nations. And I've been very, very consistent on this, and so I would have supported leverage to go to the U.N. I just wouldn't have supported going to war.
http://www.npr.org/programs/specials/democrats2004/transcripts/clark_trans.html

I do believe that Clark fucked up in how he answered that particular question on the particular day that he announced, of that there is no doubt. I never said that the man was perfect.....but I also believe that based on all that he had said prior to this interview he would not have voted for the Blank Check resolution. For Wes Clark upon entering politis, this was his big gaffe....and he suffered for it, but in terms of what he believed and what he advocated, the consistency of what he actually was saying in 2002 (not what he was saying once he started running is what is most important here) tell the story much more than 3 sentences strung together by a NYT reporter.

This is what Wes Clark was saying back in 2002, which again is consistent with all that he said except for that one interview (and so, I choose to believe him and not the media reporter considering Clark's consistency otherwise):
http://www.rapidfire-silverbullets.com/2006/12/what_wes_clark_said_prior_to_t.html
http://www.rapidfire-silverbullets.com/2006/12/the_iraq_war_resolution_did_cl.html

and so it goes that Wes Clark was NOT an enabler in getting us to Iraq....and that is the point of this thread; enablers--Not what people said after the fact as an admitted gaffe one year later.