General Clark had a strong interview on NBC’s Meet the Press this morning. Key exchange on Iraq’s reconstruction:
MR. RUSSERT: In terms of Iraq, you said this the other day. “When I am president, I will go over to Iraq and it won’t be to deliver turkeys in the middle of the night.” What does that mean?
GEN. CLARK: When I go over to Iraq, I’m going to talk with the people that are on the ground. I’m going to consult with the military leaders. I’m going to consult with the Iraqi leaders. And we’ll have a political success strategy that turns this problem back to the Iraqi people in a way that brings us out of there with success, with honor and gets our forces back and reconstituted to meet the real national security challenges facing America.
MR. RUSSERT: Isn’t that what the president did, met with military leaders, met with Iraqi leaders?
GEN. CLARK: Well, he was on the ground for about two hours, as I read the report. I don’t think he had any substantive discussions with either military leaders or Iraqi leaders during that period. He only met, as far as I could determine, with some of the very pro-American Iraqi leaders like Chalabi. To my knowledge, he did not meet with Sistani. There’s been no real discussion with the Shia leadership and certainly not by high-level U.S. authorities.
Sistani may very well hold the keys to Iraq’s future. We must engage him.
We should certainly engage Sistani, though I think he intentionally makes it difficult. The problem is that we don’t want to set up a theocracy and he does. A Bush meeting in such a case would almost certainly have been inappropriate.
A Bush meeting in such a case would almost certainly have been inappropriate.
Oh, I certainly agree that a meeting between Sistani and Bush would have been inappropriate if it was the sole meeting of the day. Among other things, such an approach would have placed too much importance on Sistani, which is dangerous for the reasons you cite. But such a meeting could have occurred as part of a round of meetings with other Iraqi notables — and this I believe was General Clark’s point.
The General was on top of his game today. I’m eager to hear his announcement tomorrow about tax reform.
For the record, I corrected a few typos in my response to Sebastian’s comment (above). One of the perogatives, I suppose, of being the blogger.