I admire Wesley Clark. I really do. But after
this op-ed in the Washington Post I guess I'll have to reconsider. I'm disappointed that the man could be this clueless. I'm sure Joe Biden likes this "plan", but no one else should.
He proposes a plan that might have had a chance of working if implemented in the summer of 2003, but is such a wildly unrealistic fantasy today that you wonder if Clark has been hiding under a rock for the last year.
Clark divides his plan into a political side, a military side, and a diplomatic side, and manages to mess up all three. More analysis follows.
First, the political side. Clark seems to think that the US, at this late date, can dictate the form of the Iraqi constitution, or have a veto over it.
He writes "And no private militias." Does he think that al-Sadr and SCIRI and the peshmurga will disband on his say-so? And those are the sides (the Kurds and Shiites) that the US has more influence over. He then says that we must get the Iraqi government to give the US a legal mandate to fill the Iraqi government with "additional U.S. civilian personnel, to help strengthen the institutions of government". This will look to the locals like Iraq is to be a colony: Americans in their government.
On the military side, he calls for Canada, France, Germany, and neighboring states to help with training, and then includes this whopper: "Ten thousand Arab Americans with full language proficiency should be recruited to assist as interpreters." Sorry, Wes, you aren't going to get 10,000 Arab Americans to go off and be shot.
Finally, the diplomatic side. Here at least Clark does not come off as completely clueless. He says that the US should "form a standing conference of Iraq's neighbors, complete with committees dealing with all the regional economic and political issues, including trade, travel, cross-border infrastructure projects and, of course, cutting off the infiltration of jihadists". Maybe such a conference would be useful, but the US cannot form it if it is to have any credibility, and at least some of the neighbors (Iran, Syria) don't mind seeing the US bleed (besides the fact that a freed-up US military might come after them). He says the US should forswear permanent bases in Iraq, and that's good but insufficient, while the US continues to build bases that look permanent.
As I said in the intro, had Bush announced something like the Clark plan in May or June 2003, it might have worked. The US had more good will among those who were happy to see Saddam gone, and the neighbors would have been eager to stabilize the situation. As Juan Cole wrote, sometimes you're just screwed. The best and the brightest can't fix this one.