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by Lara (Lara at forclark dot com) on 04/08/2004 11:21:02 PM EST
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Recap of Gen. Clark on Greta's show for those who missed it. This is paraphrased in parts because I was trying to watch as I was listening. I can't wait for the transcript! :o)
Clark: Right now, we are at one of the decisive moments in this war. We need to gain control of the urban areas. We have crossed an important threshhold and have had to bring our heaviest ground weapons to bear. My fear is that we have discredited the Iraqis who supported us in this effort. They have abandoned the police stations. They are in hiding. Once we finish this, we will be starting all over in a deficit. This has to call into quesiton the 30th of June turnover date. This has to put into quesiton Paul Bremer's insistance that we turn over Iraq into the hands of Chalabi.
Right now we need political and economic assistance.
Greta asks Clark about the troops and the planning and execution of the fighting in Fallujah:
Clark: We've got the best generals in the world over there. They are very competant and able and mature and very capable of dealing with setbacks, but we don't have enough troops on the ground to finish this fight quickly. This has increased the difficulty in working with Iraqis who were moderately friendly to the United States. We should have taken care of Fallujah three days ago, but, from what I see, we don't have enough troops there. This is a city of 300,000. We have some great marines there, but it's not enough. The longer this goes on, the more the fence-sitters are apt to join the insurgents. We may have to go and do an emergency deployment of troops back here. This will look bad, politically, for the Bush Administration, but it would show the American resolve to end this.
She asks about whether we can capture those who murdered the four contracted workers (stupid, idiotic question, in my opinion) and states that this is what the "real problem" is and how all this got started.
Clark: That's impossible without someone turning them in and I don't see that that will happen. but that is NOT the real problem. The real problem is that we went in and nbever had a winning political strategy. The basic principle is that you don't go in and throw grenades and spears at one another, you throw (something - I couldn't hear the word, but it sounded like a classic Gen. Clark vocabulary word - imbeckias, embekias, ambecias... anyone know? I tried to find a similar word on dictionary.com and couldn't. Maybe I've mis-heard or don't have it spelled anywhere near correctly). We should try to make things better through dialogue. It takes an organization to to do it and we didn't put an organization in there. We only put our military in there and told them to sort it out. We cannot go into something with the kind of preconceived notions that we did - like Donald Rumsfeld saying that there can be "no theocracy." It looks maneuvered. It looks maneuvered so that Chalabi could take control and that is so transparent. This transparency builds resistance.
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