Ik ben helemaal gewonnen voor Wesley Clark als president van de VS.

“Republicans are going to try to wrap George Bush in a flag, but I don’t think you can make anybody more patriotic than Wesley Clark.” [Salon]

Inderdaad. En een ex-militair aan het hoofd van een land zou wel eens Afghanistan en Iraq-histories kunnen vermijden: ofwel er niet aan beginnen, ofwel er meteen goed aan beginnen.

A Southerner from Little Rock, Ark., who graduated first in his class at West Point and became a Rhodes scholar, Clark was awarded the Purple Heart in Vietnam. He became a four-star general, later serving as supreme commander of NATO troops, and he defeated Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic and stopped the Serbs’ ethnic cleansing of the Albanians.

Clark was also a fervent critic of the war with Iraq, claiming the Bush White House had misled America and needlessly put American troops in harm’s way. In the days and weeks immediately following Saddam Hussein’s fall from power, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other allies of the Pentagon derided Clark, although not by name, as a “TV general” who’d lost touch with the realities of war. Fast-forward three months to American soldiers being killed on a near-daily basis, Islamic terrorists pouring into an unstable Iraq, and the reconstruction of that country sucking tens of billions of dollars out of the U.S. treasury, and suddenly Clark’s sober warnings appear dead on.