The following piece is published on OffTheBus as well as Pop and Politics.
Former NATO commander and retired four-star general Wesley Clark appeared at UCLA on Friday ostensibly to plug his latest book, A Time to Lead: For Honor, Duty, and Country, a memoir accompanied by a talking website.
The former 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, often criticized for his late, some say opportunistic, affiliation as a Democrat, stressed the importance of redefining American leadership in the face of the numerous foreign policy failures by the Bush administration.
"We've got some big problems," Clark said to the crowd of about 150 attendees. "After 9/11, there was basically a policy coup in this country," he said, lambasting administration neo-con strategists for embarking on "the most arrogant... the most reckless foreign policy in 100 years of American history."
Not exactly original material but delivered with verve! In fact, as the night progressed, Clark's carefully staged L.A. appearance begged a question. What was he really doing up there? Certainly the point wasn't to regurgitate long-standing leftist lore from the past few years. Was he there to hawk a book or was Gen. Clark (aka The Perfumed Prince, aka The Chameleon Candidate) speaking directly to the gross speculators of the blogosphere and beyond? In the end, it was impossible not to conclude that the whole thing was about finding a space on Hillary's platform for his spit-shined military shoes.
The devil's in the details.
Clark opened with an overly-dramatized reading from his book, recounting the day he was wounded in Vietnam, how he managed to bark orders to his platoon while doubled over, bleeding. He then outlined his suggestions for reestablishing American global stewardship. A foreign policy characterized not by hawkish isolationism but by the diplomatic engagement of those nations presently dubbed our enemies, Clark said, will restore America's role in "shaping the institutions of the rest of the world."
"We're at a dividing point in our strategy. Which way does it go? Toward hard-line isolation or toward engagement, toward opening it up and changing peoples' minds and working to resolve crises instead of provoking them?"
He cited George Kennan's famous Cold War containment policy. The Iron Curtain, he said, collapsed through an intricate web of diplomacy that included the aid of West Germany, the Pope, the AFL-CIO, and Citibank. The Soviet Bloc was engaged on all fronts, military and non-military.
Why turn from that success? he asked. Why interpret a winning strategy so narrowly as to miss the point? Containment was a long slog, a comprehensive program, but if it worked to defeat the Soviet empire, why not the likes of Iran? "If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to be a nail," Clark said.
He followed with a gem of an anecdote from the halls of the Bush-era Pentagon. He said that nine days after 9/11 he ran into "a military official" who began telling him of a classified DoD memo outlining the the invasion of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran over the next five years. Such mad flight of fantasy, Clark said, put us where we are today in the Middle East: bogged down in a blood and treasure sinkhole, our talk of freedom and democracy sounding for all the world like merely words. That's not the general's kind of leadership.
Clark's got the credentials. A decorated military hero, a commander in vietnam, the Balkans, first in his class at West Point, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, honors graduate from the National War College, he doesn't fail to impress. After his talk, he was lobbed softballs from the mesmerized audience-- basic questions on Ahmadinejad and Iran, Iraq as compared to Vietnam, Iraq as compared to Kosovo, and so on. Nothing he hasn't heard before. And damn if his answers weren't polished, swinging whatever came at him back to wonky prepared talking points, wowing the crowd with his ability to call it all up off-the-cuff, to roll out authoritatively on the sectarian conflicts in Iraq, for example.
Put together the subtle grandstanding and the timing of the book tour with Clark's formal endorsement of Hillary two weeks ago and it makes for a campaign politics "comprehensive program" that would make George Kennan proud.
Clark finished by posing a question to the "rational Democrats" in the room, asking them to name one instance where Hillary had shown "bad judgment." In the face of the general, no one dared mention even the striped slacks she favored in the sixties. Amazing.
The above piece is published on OffTheBus as well as Pop and Politics.