Gen. Clark to President Bush: Ten-hut!
Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general and former presidential candidate, campaigned for Democratic congressional candidate Victoria Wulsin in Pleasant Ridge Saturday morning, with a message for the commander-in-chief.
"President Bush has been out there saying Democrats don't have a plan in Iraq,'' Clark told about 60 Wulsin supporters squeezed into a small meeting room at the VFW on Montomgery road.
"Hey, Mr. President,'' Clark said. "Right here. I'll tell you what the plan is."
The U.S. policy in Iraq is "failing," the former NATO commander said, but there is a course of action that would work:
"Sesnd a team in and talk to every country in the region, even those who don't agree with us and listen to what they have to say. Really listen.
"Do the same thing in Iraq. Give them some carrots and give them sticks. Make it clear to them that they must run their own country. And make it clear to them that there will be no permanent American bases in Iraq.''
When a member of the crowd, wearing a "Clark for President '04" button, asked if the retired general planned to run for the Democratic presidential nomination two years from now, Clark was noncommittal.
"I haven't said I won,'t,'' Clark said. "But this is not about '08. We have win back this Congress right now. This is the most important election."
5 Comments:
at 12:09 PM, November 04, 2006 
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at 12:26 PM, November 04, 2006 
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at 12:38 PM, November 04, 2006 
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at 1:04 PM, November 04, 2006 
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at 2:39 PM, November 04, 2006 
Brah Coon said...
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Post a Comment*who is victoria wulsin?
Maybe Wulsin will discuss this investigation:
This morning, Dr. Robert Baratz, on behalf of the National Council Against Health Fraud, requested that the State Medical Board of Ohio conduct an investigation into the activities of Dr. Victoria Wells (Wulsin)—who is also in the final week of a campaign against Republican incumbent Jean Schmidt in the race for second congressional district seat.
….. Baratz’s letter to the medical board included the following:
Activities which we feel merit discipline include, but are not limited to:
Participation in unsupervised, unapproved, and dangerous experiments involving human beings where serious diseases were left untreated akin to the notorious Tuskegee experiments. Wells participated with the Heimlich Institute, Henry Heimlich, The Deaconess Associations of Cincinnati, and other parties in these experiments. Further, when Wells became aware of the nature of these deviant and immoral acts she failed to reveal them to proper authorities, and thus became complicit in them. Numerous journalistic reports and release of a report on this work by Wells herself document her involvement and the experiments themselves. The experiments violate 21 CFR 50 and 56 and 45 CFR 46 and appear to involve lack of informed consent, use of unapproved biological agents, and other unprofessional conduct.
After Wells’ activities became known, she altered the records of her report in an attempt to mislead the public as to her true role.
Recently television advertising depicts Wells in a laboratory coat with a stethoscope in a medical facility suggesting to the public she is a practicing physician. In response to interviews and questions conducted by the Cincinnati Enquirer on October 20, 2006 Wells admitted she has not seen a patient in approximately five years “My most recent clinical work was at the Health Resource Center in Over-the-Rhine from 1998 to 2001.”
The so-called Heimlich Malariotherapy experiments involve the injection of malarial parasites into humans for the alleged treatment of cancer, Lyme disease, and HIV infection. They have been disclaimed by numerous medical authorities, including the Centers for Disease Control, and exposed by the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and numerous other media.
Baratz has asked for this investigation under Section 4731.22 of the Ohio Revised Code.
It's the incompetence stupid.
And the absolute lack of oversight by the GOP congress.
Vanity Fair nails it.
Neo Culpa
As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself.
by David Rose
I remember sitting with Richard Perle in his suite at London's Grosvenor House hotel and receiving a private lecture on the importance of securing victory in Iraq. "Iraq is a very good candidate for democratic reform," he said. "It won't be Westminster overnight, but the great democracies of the world didn't achieve the full, rich structure of democratic governance overnight. The Iraqis have a decent chance of succeeding." Perle seemed to exude the scent of liberation, as well as a whiff of gunpowder. It was February 2003, and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the culmination of his long campaign on behalf of regime change in Iraq, was less than a month away.
Three years later, Perle and I meet again at his home outside Washington, D.C. It is October, the worst month for U.S. casualties in Iraq in almost two years, and Republicans are bracing for losses in the upcoming midterm elections. As he looks into my eyes, speaking slowly and with obvious deliberation, Perle is unrecognizable as the confident hawk who, as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, had invited the exiled Iraqi dissident Ahmad Chalabi to its first meeting after 9/11. "The levels of brutality that we've seen are truly horrifying, and I have to say, I underestimated the depravity," Perle says now, adding that total defeat—an American withdrawal that leaves Iraq as an anarchic "failed state"—is not yet inevitable but is becoming more likely. "And then," says Perle, "you'll get all the mayhem that the world is capable of creating."
According to Perle, who left the Defense Policy Board in 2004, this unfolding catastrophe has a central cause: devastating dysfunction within the administration of President George W. Bush. Perle says, "The decisions did not get made that should have been. They didn't get made in a timely fashion, and the differences were argued out endlessly.… At the end of the day, you have to hold the president responsible.… I don't think he realized the extent of the opposition within his own administration, and the disloyalty."
Perle goes so far as to say that, if he had his time over, he would not have advocated an invasion of Iraq: "I think if I had been delphic, and had seen where we are today, and people had said, 'Should we go into Iraq?,' I think now I probably would have said, 'No, let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which is Saddam supplying weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.' … I don't say that because I no longer believe that Saddam had the capability to produce weapons of mass destruction, or that he was not in contact with terrorists. I believe those two premises were both correct. Could we have managed that threat by means other than a direct military intervention? Well, maybe we could have."
Having spoken with Perle, I wonder: What do the rest of the pro-war neoconservatives think? If the much caricatured "Prince of Darkness" is now plagued with doubt, how do his comrades-in-arms feel? I am particularly interested in finding out because I interviewed many neocons before the invasion and, like many people, found much to admire in their vision of spreading democracy in the Middle East.
I expect to encounter disappointment. What I find instead is despair, and fury at the incompetence of the Bush administration the neoconservatives once saw as their brightest hope.
To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush's 2002 State of the Union address that accused Iraq of being part of an "axis of evil," it now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because "the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them." This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on "failure at the center"—starting with President Bush.
Kenneth Adelman, a lifelong neocon activist and Pentagon insider who served on the Defense Policy Board until 2005, wrote a famous op-ed article in The Washington Post in February 2002, arguing: "I believe demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Now he says, "I just presumed that what I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most incompetent teams in the post-war era. Not only did each of them, individually, have enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."
Fearing that worse is still to come, Adelman believes that neoconservatism itself—what he defines as "the idea of a tough foreign policy on behalf of morality, the idea of using our power for moral good in the world"—is dead, at least for a generation. After Iraq, he says, "it's not going to sell." And if he, too, had his time over, Adelman says, "I would write an article that would be skeptical over whether there would be a performance that would be good enough to implement our policy. The policy can be absolutely right, and noble, beneficial, but if you can't execute it, it's useless, just useless. I guess that's what I would have said: that Bush's arguments are absolutely right, but you know what, you just have to put them in the drawer marked can't do. And that's very different from let's go."
I spend the better part of two weeks in conversations with some of the most respected voices among the neoconservative elite. What I discover is that none of them is optimistic. All of them have regrets, not only about what has happened but also, in many cases, about the roles they played. Their dismay extends beyond the tactical issues of whether America did right or wrong, to the underlying question of whether exporting democracy is something America knows how to do.
I will present my findings in full in the January issue of Vanity Fair, which will reach newsstands in New York and L.A. on December 6 and nationally by December 12. In the meantime, here is a brief survey of some of what I heard from the war's remorseful proponents.
Richard Perle: "In the administration that I served [Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan], there was a one-sentence description of the decision-making process when consensus could not be reached among disputatious departments: 'The president makes the decision.' [Bush] did not make decisions, in part because the machinery of government that he nominally ran was actually running him. The National Security Council was not serving [Bush] properly. He regarded [then National-Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice] as part of the family."
Michael Ledeen, American Enterprise Institute freedom scholar: "Ask yourself who the most powerful people in the White House are. They are women who are in love with the president: Laura [Bush], Condi, Harriet Miers, and Karen Hughes."
Frank Gaffney, an assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan and founder of the Center for Security Policy: "[Bush] doesn't in fact seem to be a man of principle who's steadfastly pursuing what he thinks is the right course. He talks about it, but the policy doesn't track with the rhetoric, and that's what creates the incoherence that causes us problems around the world and at home. It also creates the sense that you can take him on with impunity."
Kenneth Adelman: "The most dispiriting and awful moment of the whole administration was the day that Bush gave the Presidential Medal of Freedom to [former C.I.A. director] George Tenet, General Tommy Franks, and [Coalition Provisional Authority chief] Jerry [Paul] Bremer—three of the most incompetent people who've ever served in such key spots. And they get the highest civilian honor a president can bestow on anyone! That was the day I checked out of this administration. It was then I thought, There's no seriousness here, these are not serious people. If he had been serious, the president would have realized that those three are each directly responsible for the disaster of Iraq."
David Frum: "I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything."
Michael Rubin, former Pentagon Office of Special Plans and Coalition Provisional Authority staffer: "Where I most blame George Bush is that through his rhetoric people trusted him, people believed him. Reformists came out of the woodwork and exposed themselves." By failing to match his rhetoric with action, Rubin adds, Bush has betrayed Iraqi reformers in a way that is "not much different from what his father did on February 15, 1991, when he called the Iraqi people to rise up, and then had second thoughts and didn't do anything once they did."
Richard Perle: "Huge mistakes were made, and I want to be very clear on this: They were not made by neoconservatives, who had almost no voice in what happened, and certainly almost no voice in what happened after the downfall of the regime in Baghdad. I'm getting damn tired of being described as an architect of the war. I was in favor of bringing down Saddam. Nobody said, 'Go design the campaign to do that.' I had no responsibility for that."
Kenneth Adelman: "The problem here is not a selling job. The problem is a performance job.… Rumsfeld has said that the war could never be lost in Iraq, it could only be lost in Washington. I don't think that's true at all. We're losing in Iraq.… I've worked with [Rumsfeld] three times in my life. I've been to each of his houses, in Chicago, Taos, Santa Fe, Santo Domingo, and Las Vegas. I'm very, very fond of him, but I'm crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don't know. He certainly fooled me."
Eliot Cohen, director of the strategic-studies program at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and member of the Defense Policy Board: "I wouldn't be surprised if what we end up drifting toward is some sort of withdrawal on some sort of timetable and leaving the place in a pretty ghastly mess.… I do think it's going to end up encouraging various strands of Islamism, both Shia and Sunni, and probably will bring de-stabilization of some regimes of a more traditional kind, which already have their problems.… The best news is that the United States remains a healthy, vibrant, vigorous society. So in a real pinch, we can still pull ourselves together. Unfortunately, it will probably take another big hit. And a very different quality of leadership. Maybe we'll get it."
David Rose is a Vanity Fair contributing editor.
General Wesley Clark is correct. We have a Congress that has absolutely no plan to resolve the conflict in Iraq while the lives of American soldiers are plucked away one by one by insurgents who plant roadside bombs in a country half a world away. What do the politicians in Washington do? They quit on November the 3rd and come back to their districts to try to get re-elected.
I've had enough!
This election is about the future of the American family. This election is about the middle class. This election is about economic policies that make sense for most people, not just the priviliged and the few... This election is about saving Medicare (even though nobody is talking about it because none of the politicians have a clue what to do about it.) This election is an all out fight for the American Dream for millions of American families who deserve a government that represents them; not the special interests who write checks for political campaign funds.
The moderate Democrats, Republicans and Independents will be the people who put this country back on track. Everybody else has already made up their mind.
I wish the absolute best outcome for the people who live all throughout Southern Ohio. You are incredible people and you deserve to be represented in an honorable fashion in Washington DC.
Jim Parker
Former Democratic Candidate for US Congress
Southern Ohio - 2nd District - 2005 & 2006
FLEEING NEO'S LEAVE LACKY BEHIND!
EX HIPPIE BRONSON LEFT TO FEND FOR SELF BEHIND HIS DESK! HEAR HIS PLAINTIVE CRIES OF - " MEDIC" BETWEEN LINES!!
http://news.enquirer.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061102/COL05/611020323/1009/EDIT
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