Ahhh, Perle’s of wisdom. Or perhaps unintended self-incrimination. But who’s counting.
As you know, I’ve been flogging since yesterday this issue of the ridiculously distorted quotes Drudge used from Wes Clark’s September 26th 2002 congressional testimony. Then this morning the Journal got into the act claiming that the silly clips showed that Clark was endorsing Perle’s views.
Now, I’ve been suggesting that people go and read the actual testimony to get a sense of whether these cherry-picked lines at all represent what Clark said that day. But I know people’s lives are busy. And perhaps you don’t have the time to get through the whole transcript. But maybe that’s not necessary.
Toward the end of the session Perle himself characterized Clark’s position …
(Perle’s run-down is more than a little disingenuous and he apparently felt the need to wait until Clark had left the hearing room for the day. But let’s forgive him this once.)
Schrock: Sure, I would love to know Mr. Perle’s, you know, the general said time is on our side. My guess is you do not believe that.
Perle: No, I don’t believe it and frankly I don’t think [Clark] made a very convincing case in support of that cliche but it was one of many cliches. At the end of the day when you sought to elicit from him a reconciliation of the view that time is on our side with what he acknowledged to be our ignorance of how far along Saddam Hussein is, he had no explanation.
He seems to be preoccupied, and I’m quoting now, with building legitimacy, with exhausting all diplomatic remedies as though we hadn’t been through diplomacy for the last decade, and relegating the use of force to a last resort, to building the broadest possible coalition, in short a variety of very amorphous, ephemeral concerns alongside which there’s a stark reality and that is that every day that goes by, Saddam Hussein is busy perfecting those weapons of mass destruction that he already has, improving their capabilities, improving the means with which to deliver them and readying himself for a future conflict.
So I don’t believe that time is on our side and I don’t believe that this fuzzy notion that the most important thing is building legitimacy, as if we lack legitimacy now, after all the U.N. resolutions that he’s in blatant violation of, I don’t believe that that should be the decisive consideration. So I think General Clark simply doesn’t want to see us use military force and he has thrown out as many reasons as he can develop to that but the bottom line is he just doesn’t want to take action. He wants to wait.
Did the Journal guys run their piece by Richard? Seems he disagrees. And what about those shows on the cable nets that got taken in? (Yeah, I’m talking about you too, CNN) No research departments?
