QandO

January 23, 2004

Wesley’s World: Part I
Posted by McQ

Josh Marshall tells us:

I was sitting in an auditorium at the University of New Hampshire, where Clark was giving a speech on what he would do in Iraq. The bullet points of the speech were: a) the deadline for turnover is a bad idea in that it encourages all the players to game that deadline against us, b) he wants to abolish the CPA and create some sort of new international organization to manage the rebuilding and return to sovereignty in Iraq, and c) under his plan, John Abizaid, the head of Centcom, would report to the NATO Council.

Huh?!

“A” is debatable, “B” is stupid (yeah, let’s change horses in the middle of the stream and force the entire process to start over again) but “C” is just plain loopy.

Clark is saying he’d take the direct chain-of-command which goes from the President of the US to the Secretary of Defense to the Combatant Commands such as CENTCOM and re-route that line, in the case of CENTCOM, away from the President and Sec Def and give it to a “NATO Council?”

I would assume he was serious. If so, that’s all we need ... Germany and France second-guessing everything we want to do through NATO but still not providing anything material in terms of troops or treasure. Command by committee. Great.

Which brings me to my ABC’s for Wesley:

A) What has NATO had to do with Iraq to this point that would somehow benefit their command of CENTCOM? In other words, what does NATO bring to the table which makes giving command of CENTCOM to them something which is desirable?

B)If you are president, why in the world would you want to give away your own command to a NATO Council (something which has never, ever been done before to my knowledge)?

C) Were you really in the Army? Do you actually understand the chain-of-command as presently structured and WHY it is so structured? I mean this seems like something Al Sharpton would conjure up.

Internationalizing a problem simply to say you’ve done so doesn’t mean you’ve made the problem go away or that you’ve made it better. And this bit of nonsense goes a long way toward making the point that people should look long and hard at this man before they consider letting him use the presidency as an entry-level job. He is just not ready for “prime-time”.

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