"We need to do a lot less threatening and more listening to people in the world," stated General Wesley Clark yesterday as the keynote speaker at our Johns Hopkins University SAIS Center on Politics and Foreign Relations breakfast.
Citing poll after poll indicating how America's standing in the world has sunk further and further because of the Iraq War, the former valedictorian of his graduating class at West Point, remarked, "America has lost legitimacy around the world."
Clark, who was briefly a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president in the 2004 campaign, has not ruled himself out as a candidate again in 2008.
The former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Europe impressed an audience of more than 200 journalists, diplomats and students as he said "I am not standing for office now" but he certainly left the door open for a possible run for the presidency, perhaps in the fall.
Having a former four-star general who is quite outspoken on our current conduct of the war in Iraq run as a Democratic candidate for president in the 2008 campaign appeared to make sense to people I talked with after his speech.
Criticizing what he called "an elective war" in Iraq and saying there was "no legitimacy for the war in Iraq," the former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, also blasted the term "shock and awe" at the start of the war as "a bad phrase." Clark, who feels we have "violated almost every doctrine of Just War Doctrine" in Iraq called for "an inquiry to how we went so wrong."
Saying it is "not premature to call for a complete inquiry into the Iraq War" after "first finishing the Senate investigation about Intelligence," Clark went on to comment that President Bush talks only "about troops and tactics in Iraq and what we need to talk about are our strategies and policies."
Clark feels that "we can't just see Iraq as a strategic blunder. It is a deep and near fatal wound to the United States that has undercut us in the Middle East and has undercut trust in our intelligence system."
The General, who lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, was distressed by our country's use of torture relating that "torture is never acceptable as a matter of policy and it is abhorrent to our idea of human dignity." Criticizing our use of torture Clark goes on to say "the solution is not to act as our enemies do."
Clark, who commanded "Operation Allied Force, NATO's first combat action, which saved 1.5 million Albanians from ethnic cleansing in Kosovo" in the 1990s said we should "ask NATO to take over the detention facilities in Guantanamo".
Clark feels America derives legitimacy from pursuing "benign, noble and just causes" and other countries still admire America "for our institutions" that "we have earned goodwill through."
His prescription for raising our standing in the world is to once again "as Americans live up to our values."
Clark is an articulate speaker who looks like he is right out of central casting for what a president should look like. He appears to know the issues as well as the other announced presidential candidates of both parties we have had talk in our Political Profiles speakers' series.
Someone in the audience proposed the idea of Clark running with General Colin Powell as vice-president on a third party ticket.
Clark indicated that he was not interested in running as a vice-presidential candidate and if he does decide to run for president in 2008 he will run as a Democrat.
Should General Clark enter an already-crowded Democratic field? Why not!