Does Wes Clark endorse the PNAC plan? - Democratic Underground

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Does Wes Clark endorse the PNAC plan?

Origins of Regime Change in Iraq
Proliferation Brief, Volume 6, Number 5
Wednesday, March 19, 2003

Long before September 11, before the first inspections in Iraq had started, a small group of influential officials and experts in Washington were calling for regime change in Iraq. Some never wanted to end the 1991 war. Many are now administration officials. Their organization, dedication and brilliance offer much to admire, even for those who disagree with the policies they advocate.

We have assembled on our web site links to the key documents produced since 1992 by this group, usually known as neo-conservatives, and analysis of their efforts. They offer a textbook case of how a small, organized group can determine policy in a large nation, even when the majority of officials and experts originally scorned their views.

In the Beginning

In 1992, Paul Wolfowitz, then-under secretary of defense for policy, supervised the drafting of the Defense Policy Guidance document. Wolfowitz had objected to what he considered the premature ending of the 1991 Iraq War. In the new document, he outlined plans for military intervention in Iraq as an action necessary to assure "access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil" and to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and threats from terrorism.

The guidance called for preemptive attacks and ad hoc coalitions but said that the U.S. should be ready to act alone when "collective action cannot be orchestrated." The primary goal of U.S. policy should be to prevent the rise of any nation that could challenge the United States. When the document leaked to the New York Times, it proved so extreme that it had to be rewritten. These concepts are now part of the new U.S. National Security Strategy.

Links to Likud

In 1996, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser, now administration officials, joined in a report to the newly elected Likud government in Israel calling for "a clean break" with the policies of negotiating with the Palestinians and trading land for peace. They said "Israel can shape its strategic environment…by weakening, containing and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq…Iraq's future could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly." They called for "reestablishing the principle of preemption."

In 1998, 18 prominent conservatives wrote a letter to President Clinton urging him to "aim at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power." Most of these experts are now officials in the administration, including Elliot Abrams, Richard Armitage, John Bolton, Paula Dobriansky, Zalmay Khalilzad, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz.

A Rising Chorus

(snip)

Neo-conservative writers began to urge regime change as part of a larger strategy for remaking the Middle East. In June 2002, Michael Kelly wrote that a democratic Iraq and Palestine "will revolutionize the power dynamic in the Middle East…A majority of Arabs will come to see America as the essential ally."

"Change toward democratic regimes in Tehran and Baghdad would unleash a tsunami across the Islamic world," claimed Joshua Muravchik in August of that year. Michael Ledeen on September 4, 2002, called for the US to launch "a vast democratic revolution to liberate all the peoples of the Middle East…It is impossible to imagine that the Iranian people would tolerate tyranny in their own country once freedom had come to Iraq. Syria would follow in short order."

Democracy experts, including Carnegie's Tom Carothers, call this vision "a dangerous fantasy." But on September 12, President Bush embraced the strategy when he told the United Nations, "The people of Iraq can shake off their captivity. They can one day join a democratic Afghanistan and a democratic Palestine, inspiring reforms throughout the Muslim world." The president seems to have absorbed the entire expansive strategy. Now, for him, regime change in Iraq is not the end, it is just the beginning.

From: The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Joseph Cirincione is a Senior Associate and Director of the Non-Proliferation Project at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

http://www.ceip.org/files/nonprolif/templates/Publications.asp?p=8&PublicationID=1214

From the official Clark website:

After the storm we must wait for blue skies

General (ret.) Wesley K. Clark
May 1, 2003

Times of London

AFTER the thunderstorm of Iraqi freedom, it is only natural that it should take time before blue skies appear. But the fight was never just about weapons of mass destruction, whatever the rhetoric. Rather, the war was the inauguration of a new US strategy for the region.

The strategy begins with Iraq, where more than 100,000 US troops, and hopefully 15-20,000 Brits, will help Iraq to achieve a democratic government that is anti-terrorist and will turn over any weapons of mass destruction.

No theocracy. It may be difficult - already more troops have been ordered in to help to secure Baghdad - but the Secretary of Defense has said that we are not leaving until it is done.

Then there is Syria, long-branded a terrorist state. Those troops in Iraq send out a strong signal. The case against Bashir al-Assad is mounting. That pressure alone may force change in Syria. Already it has closed its borders with Iraq, turned in at least one Iraqi official and vowed to expand co-operation.

The visit to Damascus by Colin Powell, the Secretary of State, might extract more, although the list of potential demands - expelling Hezbollah, leaving Lebanon, ending support for terrorism and giving up chemical weapons - is certainly more than Syria will agree to, short of some larger regional settlement. But the more Syria resists, the easier to justify US actions, at least to an American public still recovering from the September 11 attacks on the United States.

Next is Iran, supporting terrorism and needing perhaps another two to three years to assemble its first nuclear weapon. The strategy here will be to act indirectly, weakening the mullahs by cutting off support to Hezbollah and attempting to fuel internal resistance. A pre-emptive strike against nuclear facilities remains an option, perhaps a bit in the future.

Then there is Saudi Arabia. Here the strategy is to reduce the US presence in order to free the Saudis to take stiffer measures against their own extremists. This is feasible now that the US is inside Iraq and, with the promise of Iraqi oil, has the advantage of suggesting to the Saudi Government that it is no longer so indispensable to the US.

Finally, there remains the challenge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There the Administration is proceeding on two fronts: directly with the "road map", designed as much for European consumption as for the region, and indirectly through pressure on Syria and others to end support for the Palestinian resistance. The pace here is measured: many believe that this problem becomes more manageable only as US pressure against Arab states grows. Any real agreement requires Israeli concessions, unlikely before the November 2004 elections.

You won't find this strategy outlined in any official public document, but don't doubt its appeal. Americans are still basking in the afterglow of military triumph. There's little tolerance for questions about justifying the war, its conduct or the aftermath. A friend watching CNN e-mailed me: "Please tell them to quit showing all these scenes of looting in Baghdad; it's too disturbing."

You can be certain that the US strategy will not go unchallenged. The shootings at Fallujah are the strongest incidence yet of popular Iraqi resistance to American presence. Iran appears not have been behind this incident, but she and others will certainly note US vulnerabilities.

One hundred thousand Americans on the ground in Iraq present a tempting target for asymmetric warfare. Every student of Middle East politics realizes that undercutting their legitimacy with demonstrations that provoke forceful US reactions provide the most viable counter-strategy.

Unfortunately others outside the region appear to be reinforcing that counter-strategy. President Putin's refusal to help to lift the Iraqi sanctions is part of a broader effort to deny the US and Britain support and legitimacy for post-war tasks in Iraq.

And no matter how their leaders might protest, the four NATO members who met in Brussels to call for more EU planning and headquarters capabilities must have intended to force a wedge of greater separation from the US: not helpful as NATO begins discussions about its possible role in Iraq.

This military action was always intended to shake up the region and it certainly is doing that. The challenge is to transform change into net gain for peace and democracy. This will require much more than military power. We won't see blue skies for a while.

http://www.clark04.com/articles/006/

From "Gen. Wesley Clark, unplugged:
by Jake Tapper
Salon.com

(snip)

Q: Of the people who are running this war, from Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and Powell on down, in terms of the political appointees, are there are any who you particularly like who you would work with again, hypothetically, in some ...

Clark: I like all the people who are there. I've worked with them before. I was a White House Fellow in the Ford administration when Secretary Rumsfeld was White House chief of staff and later Secretary of Defense, and Dick Cheney was the deputy chief of staff at the White House and later the chief.

Paul Wolfowitz I've known for many, many years. Steve Hadley at the White House is an old friend. Doug Feith I worked with very intensively during the time we negotiated the Dayton Peace Agreement; he was representing the Bosnian Muslims then, along with Richard Perle. So I like these people a lot. They're not strangers. They're old colleagues.

Q: Do you disagree with them on their worldview?

Clark: I disagreed with them on some specific aspects. I would not have gone after the war on terror exactly as did and I laid that out in the (new foreword to the paperback edition of "Waging Modern War"). But I also know there's no single best plan. You have to pick a plan that might work and make it work. That means you've got to avoid the plans with the fatal flaws. This administration came into office predisposed to use American troops for war fighting and to realign American foreign policy so it focused on a more robust, more realistic view of the world than the supposedly idealistic view of the previous administration.

But the views that President Bush espoused recently at the American Enterprise Institute, if his predecessor had espoused that view he'd have been hooted off the stage, laughed at, accused of being incredibly idealistic about the hard-nosed practical politics of the Middle East. So this is an administration that's moving in a certain direction, and now that that's the direction they've picked they've got to make it work. Like everybody else, I hope they'll be successful. It's too important; we can't afford to fail.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/03/24/clark/index2.html