Steve Chapman does an admirable job of deconstructing Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark in today’s column. First he hits Clark on the general’s seeming confusion about his own position on the Iraq war:

For those of us who are generally skeptical about plunging into optional wars, that’s not the only reason to wonder if Clark offers a real alternative to the incumbent.

His pratfall came in an interview with The New York Times, when he was asked how he would have voted on the congressional resolution giving President Bush authority to invade Iraq. Clark hemmed and hawed, but finally ended up saying, twice, “I probably would have voted for it.”

This was not a question out of left field, on the order of asking him to name the president of Uzbekistan. In the months leading up to the war, Clark was a tireless presence on CNN, analyzing and criticizing the administration’s policy. He wrote several articles arguing that the president should use force only as a last resort and warning of the dangers of occupying postwar Iraq.

Given his expertise on the subject, Clark should have handled the question like Barry Bonds turning on a fastball down the middle. Instead, he finally had to call on his press secretary to explain his position. The following day, he announced, “I would never have voted for war.” Well, of course not, general. Who said you would have?

And then he cracks the real nut, which is that Clark holds nothing like a principled stand against unending foreign wars, only to ones he’s not in charge of:

But George W. Bush still fervently believes the United States should use its pre-eminent military power to reshape the world in our image. Wesley Clark shares that faith, and differs only in where and how he would pursue it.

That gives us a choice between conservative imperialism and liberal imperialism. How about a candidate who offers an end to imperialism?

Good luck!

P.S. Perhaps I should rename this The Pro-Cubs, Anti-Clark Blog.

According to the record, the much-ballyhooed “anti-war” Gen. Wesley Clark has done as much bean-jumping on Iraq as the famously plastic John Kerry.

Was Clark against the war? Not really. He just wanted to wait longer and get the U.N. on board. Dean said pretty much the same thing, though in Dean’s case I guess that was said in lieu of the probably more truthful but politically inexpedient position that the war unnecessary and a bad idea altogether, unilateral or no.

At least Dean didn’t jump on the Bush bandwagon the way Clark did when Baghdad fell. “Let’s have those parades on the Mall and down Constitution Avenue,” he wrote.

So the great hope of a national debate about this war next year is fading fast. Oh, sure there’ll be a debate all right: Which man do you trust more to manage a mess?

I have to agree with Gene Healy’s initial reaction to Gen. Wesley Clark’s entering the race for the Democratic presidential nomination.

It’s worse than whether to root for Dean versus Clark, however. The sad fact is that if there’s any debate about Iraq in 2004 it will be about how best to occupy the country, not how best to get the hell out of there ASAP and focus on the real bad guys — you know, the ones who actually had something to do with Sept. 11.

Dubya says Iraq is now “the central front in the war on terror.” Well, it had better be! That’s where all the troops are. It would be a mighty misuse of military resources if it weren’t. You probably won’t hear anything like that argument from Clark or any of the other Democratic dwarfs for president.

Antiwar.com’s Justin Raimondo writes the obituary of Dean as anti-warrior with his usual subtlety. He lambasts “the Dean deception” and calls him a “lying SOB” for his refusal to advocate pulling the troops out of Iraq until “the job is done.”

While I don’t feel betrayed by Dean — his coming out in favor of the Liberia misadventure illustrated his lack of clear non-interventionist principles — I too am saddened by the fact that it’s now clear there will be no anti-Iraq occupation presidential nominee coming out of the Democratic camp. At least there would have been a debate, even if it was one Dean was likely to lose.

(Reposted from Stand Down.)

I picked up this biography of anti-slavery agitator William Lloyd Garrison in a used-book store a few weeks ago and it is truly inspiring. I recommend it to any lover of liberty.

While I’m not the moralist Garrison was (though if there’s any political issue deserving of stern moralism, slavery would certainly be it), his approach to politics has a lot to recommend it. For example, he didn’t vote for a single politician until Lincoln’s bid for reelection, by which time it was clear he was committed to ending slavery.

Garrison saw it as a tacit endorsement of a system perpetrating evil. But he did take pains to commend mainstream politicians when they took positions he favored, even if they may have fallen far short of the immediate abolition he so fervently advocated week after week in “The Liberator.”

In other words, Garrison attempted to nurture anti-slavery feeling until it could enter the realm of mainstream politics. There was no point, in his view, of attempting politics when the game was so far removed from where he thought the issue should be joined.

He also resisted other abolitionists’ attempts at third parties (the Free-Soil and Liberty parties, to jog a few cobwebs from your U.S. history survey class). His view was that abolitionists made for lousy politicians, and couldn’t possibly compete for office without toning down their radicalism, so why bother?

All of this makes a lot of sense to me, and I think applies very well to today’s liberty movement. Why support a lousy third party like the LP, which (1) won’t win in our two-party system and (2) only feeds egoes and distracts from the real work of promoting liberty.

What it takes to make progress is the heavy intellectual lifting the libertarian think tanks and litigation work that groups like Cato, Heartland, Reason and the Institute for Justice do.

And, too, maybe a little more outrage. On a lot of issues, we don’t quite have the black-and-white crystal clarity of an issue like slavery or civil rights, but there’s a lot of hurt and suffering out there done at the pleasure of our government and at the bidding of our politicians. That’s something to be outraged about. And I don’t think there’s any shame in saying so, in a way that can be felt and appreciated by people without doctorates in economics.

(Also posted to Circle Bastiat.)

The perverse results of the president’s decision to invade Iraq should now be obvious to everyone. There was no weapons threat and no Iraq-Al Qaeda connection.

Now, Al Qaeda operatives are streaming into Iraq with the help of Iran and cooperating with remnants of the Hussein regime in a head-on attempt to damage and humiliate the United States. Furthermore, the ranks of viable recruits is as long as the list of newly radicalized Muslims in the whole of Iraq.

We are lucky only that they appear to have — for the time being — chosen Iraq as their prime target rather than “the homeland.” Still, the national-security benefit of the Iraq war is still highly dubious. Instead of attacking Al Qaeda at “the time of our choosing,” they have American soldiers on their heels, nervous that around every corner is another disaster.

The Hussein regime was successfully contained, but the anarchic Iraq of today is a greater threat than ever to U.S. security. The president’s policy of unncecessary, preemptive war created this dilemma. This is the worst of all: Now the battle against Al Qaeda must share time, energy, and increasingly scarce resources with the ungainly attempt to remake an ethnically and religiously fractured country which has known only oppression and a Soviet-style economy into a functioning, democratic, tolerant society devoted to free enterprise and the suppression of terrorism.

To stay means serving as a target and recruiting tool for anti-American terrorists while sucking up the military resources so badly needed to fight the terror war on the homefront and elsewhere around the globe. To leave quickly probably means making Iraq just another client state with a questionable devotion to fighting terrorism and yet another example of the United States’ lackluster devotion to democracy in the Middle East.

There is, as Justin Raimondo writes, “no U-turn on the road to empire.” Other than that, it’s been a splendid little war.

To maneuver ourselves out of this sticky situation would take the intelligence of a rocket scientist and the delicate touch of a brain surgeon. Whatever else might be said about Dubya, he doesn’t possess those qualities. He doesn’t possess even the inclination to reflect that he was wrong to have fought this war.

I don’t know what the best way out of this box is. Frankly, I’m too disgusted to even bother trying to conjure the ideal solution anyway, since it’s so painfully obvious that Dubya & Co. are impervious to the colossal nature of their mistake. Of course it’s good that Hussein is gone. The war can’t be said to have been a total failure because it did achieve the ouster of his regime, but U.S. security should be the first objective of U.S. foreign policy (an exotic idea, I know), and this war has done nothing to further U.S. security and done just about everything to endanger it.

I only hope at this point Iraq doesn’t go as badly as it can, not too many American soldiers come home in bodybags, and that Dubya & Co. don’t get the notion that another little war — this time with Iran — is the way to take their Iraq troubles off the front pages.

(Also posted to Stand Down.)

G-Rod has inked the Mayor Daley Cronies Full Employment Act of 2003, aka the O’Hare expansion deal (not to imply that G-Rod would ever serve up pork, because I don’t mean to imply it but rather state it directly.)

“Thank God this day has arrived,” Da Mare said. Yeah, I think God felt the ledger was a little uneven down here. After all Da Mare has given Chicago, didn’t all of us and our God owe him a little in return?

Still, is the last word on expansion? Not likely. The FAA has already sent back the plan based on its severe flaws.

And then there is the matter of who will fit the bill. As Sen. Fitzgerald points out in the same story linked above, United’s pension is underfunded by $6.4 billion but the bankrupted firm plans to stretch out its payments to the fund in order to make the necessary payments to get O’Hare expansion done.

There’s also the matter of the price tag, which the city says is $6.6 billion. These are the same folks who underestimated the cost of the disastrous Millennium Park project by a factor of three. We may be well into the next millennium before the damn thing’s finished.

Worse yet, the additional taxes the city is forcing airlines serving O’Hare to pay to finance its bonds on the expansion deal will make the airport an even less attractive for upcoming competitors like JetBlue to do business there. Instead, more than 80 percent of O’Hare’s gates will continue to be controlled by the aviation industry’s tweedle dum and tweedle dee, United and American.

Welcome to Chicago, Richard M. Daley, Mayor.

First they shut down an Iraqi newspaper “because of an article that U.S. occupation authorities and Iraqi officials considered an incitement to violence and a threat to human rights in Iraq,” and now 500 Iraqi detainees have been held incommunicado from families and 90 percent of them have not been allowed to consult a lawyer.

Best of all, they are being housed in one of Iraq’s most notorious prisons.

Iraq’s desaparecidos may simply be a cost of maintaining order before the civil justice system is up and running, U.S. authorities say.

Good thing Dubya’s against nation building.

Be prepared for TSA screeners to begin cluelessly examining your cell phone, PDA, digital camera, etc. the way the apes at the beginning of “2001” investigated the mysterious monolith.

Sure, Homeland Annoyance boss Tom Ridge admits, “there’s no indication” Al Qaeda has actually used any electronic devices to smuggle weapons onto airplanes.

Still, he adds helpfully, “if you have these electronic devices in your carry-on baggage, pull them out, because if we find them in the X-ray machines, we’ll pull you aside and take a look.”

Sigh. If airport screening is going to continue to focus on detecting weapons instead of terrorists, on disarming everyone instead of arming pilots, flight attenders and employing air marshals, then it was only inevitable that our electronic necessities would eventually join the parade of passenger possessions to be prodded and poked.

Andy Martin is an excellent journalist. For a long time, he worked for the Chicago Tribune’s investigative team and broke some major stories, including several about corruption at City Hall, before moving on to the paper’s Washington bureau. I learned a lot from him in the investigative reporting class he taught at Columbia. In many ways, he’s the perfect example of a very hardworking, nose-to-the-ground type of journalist.

And he’s also, apparently, wearing ideological blinders. I posted earlier about a story of his on the anti-fast food crusade. In that story, he featured several of the usual anti-choice suspects, and I noted that he didn’t speak with anyone from the Center for Consumer Freedom . Martin’s story more or less left all the contentions made by the anti-choice crowd unchallenged.

But yesterday, he finally got around to it. His quick and dirty profile of the Center for Consumer Freedom’s executive director, Richard Berman, ran under the headline, “Flinging mud in the nation’s food fight.”

Gee, I’m sure this story will be very fair. The story goes on to give Berman’s critics the most space, as they charge that he’s unfair and hits below the belt, that he exaggerates and is just a paid shill of the food and beverage (and formerly, gasp, the tobacco) industries.

I suppose the Center for Science in the Public Interest’s extreme and bizarre agenda is measured and reasonable by comparison, right Andy? Come on.

And so it goes. Any old busybody who puts on his scientist lab coat can tell us how to live our lives, but if a targeted industry tries to defend itself — and, oh yeah, its consumers — then they’re just a bunch of self-interest mudslingers. Talk about your hoary journalistic cliches.

That’s the nut of the problem, though. If a really good journalist like Martin goes slants the stories this way, what’s the barely competent journalist doing? I’d like to think good journalism is good journalism, but many times it’s untrue. Journalists make critical evaluations about how to describe the subjects of their stories, who to quote, etc., and by so doing reveal their biases. Martin has revealed his.

Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made the rounds of the news shows today and said that in the war on terror the United States has no choice but “to act on the basis of murky intelligence.”

On Fox News, he said, “I think the lesson of 9/11 is that if you’re not prepared to act on the basis of murky intelligence, then you’re going to have to act after the fact, and after the fact now means after horrendous things have happened to this country.”

Do you think Wolfowitz was asked about Afghanistan? Or about attempts to track down Al Qaeda cells in Pakistan? Nope, he was talking about Iraq.

You may have been confused because he kept talking about Sept. 11, when no connection between Hussein’s regime and Al Qaeda was ever demonstrated. The intelligence on that subject wasn’t murky — it didn’t exist!

Even a nuclear-armed Iraq wasn’t a plausible threat to the United States unless you believed there was some reason Hussein would cooperate in some kind of handoff of arms to Al Qaeda or another anti-American terrorist organization. That’s why the demonstration of coordination between the two was crucial to the case for war.

Indeed, Wolfowitz and his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, targeted Iraq Sept. 12, 2001, before even any attempts to investigate the (it turns out, nonexistent) relationship between Hussein’s regime and the attacks of the day before.

Not only that. Not only that. They had targeted Iraq years before, urging then-President Clinton to undertake a policy of regime change there in 1997, years before Sept. 11 woke everyone up to the real danger posted by terrorism, back when everyone was harping about “rogue nations” like, oh, Iraq and North Korea.

Meanwhile, the real battle against Al Qaeda is not being fought with the full force it deserves. And we can only hope against hope that the Iraqi reconstruction does not turn into a painful episode with possibly disastrous consequences.

Bullshit, Wolfowitz! I call bullshit on you.

(Also posted to Stand Down.)

A joint congressional inquiry reveals that there is not now, nor has there ever been, an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection.(Update: This story was corrected; apparently the reporter was misfed by a source. Nonetheless, the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection’s still very shaky.)

Why did Dubya keep saying that in all of his speeches? In fact, in Dubya’s March 17 speech giving Hussein and his boys 48 hours to vamoose, he said Iraq “has aided, trained and harbored terrorists, including operatives of Al Qaeda.”

Up to the last minute, Dubya was straining to tie Iraq and Al Qaeda together tighter than a yellow ribbon ’round the old oak tree. Maybe he just forgot that there was no evidence to back up the bogus claim. That seems to be happening a lot with this administration.

Josh Marshall, as usual, has been all over this:

It would be one thing if the administration had pursued this war because of weapons of mass destruction and, in so doing, pumped up the evidence to strengthen the case. Perhaps, one might hypothesize, they knew there was a lot of chemical and biological weapons production underway and the beginnings of a major push for nuclear weapons and, to seal the deal, said the nuclear program was further along than it was.

But this greatly understates the scope of the problem. Not only was the WMD issue (and the allied issue of Iraq’s connection to al Qaida) systematically exaggerated, the entire WMD issue — and the nexus to non-state terrorist groups like al Qaida — wasn’t even the main reason for the war itself. So the case for war amounted to one dishonesty wrapped inside another — not quite Churchill’s “riddle, wrapped in mystery, inside an enigma” but not that far off it either. …

But over time after 9/11 one overriding theory of the war did take shape: it was to get America irrevocably on the ground in the center of the Middle East (thus fundamentally reordering the strategic balance in the region), bring to a head the country’s simmering conflict with its enemies in the region, and kick off a democratic transformation of the region which would over time dissipate the root causes of anti-American terrorism and violence: autocracy, poverty and fanaticism.

That is why we are in Iraq today. That is the theory of this war.

Marshall concludes that this was a much more complex case to make which, frankly, Dubya & Co. didn’t the American public could understand or support. So, when faced with the inescapable difficulty of trying to sell a preemptive war being fought for an uncertain purpose with an unpredictable post-war scenario, the administration [take your pick: hyped / exaggerated / misled / deceived / fabricated / lied] its way into it.

And now, 2,000 more troops are being sent to Liberia to back up the administration’s newfound liberation theology.

It doesn’t matter, now, though. All of this is, as Dubya likes to say, “revisionist history.” The new history being written, day by day, is not about whether the United States government tasks itself with the mission of remaking the entire Middle East, but how well or poorly that mission will be carried out.