Wesley Clark and Richard Perle

Howard Dean, who apparently once flirted with Wesley Clark to see if the General wanted to be his Vice President, now says Clark is a Republican. Josh Marshall reports that Ed Gillespie and Matt Drudge are quoting identical congressional testimony from Clark, September 26, 2002, ostensibly highlighting Clark's support for the Iraq war.

However, as Marshall points out, if one actually reads the entire testimony (and not just the blips pulled out by Drudge and the RNC), Clark argued for war only if backed by a broad and legitimate multilateral coalition (preferably with the full support of the UN Security Council) and only after prolonged inspections. Clark also said that war was a bad idea unless the US was fully prepared for the post-war environment, which was likely to be quite chaotic. He warned against sinister forces taking WMD before they could be controlled and against fundamentalist takeover of Iraq.

Neoconservative Richard Perle also testified that day and he accused Clark of being "wildly optimistic" about inspections and "wholly pessimistic" about the post-war situation.

Gee, which one has been proved closer to right?

IAEA inspectors said in 2003 before the war began that there was no nuclear program -- and there was no nuclear program.

As for the post-war situation. Get a load of what Perle said:

I think nearly 30 years of Saddam Hussein's rule will inspire in the Iraqi people a desire for decent, humane government, and with help from us, I see no reason to assume (inaudible) that that can't be done. I think it can be done and I think the chances of success in that regard are infinitely greater than the likelihood that we will find the weapons of mass destruction that even a good inspection regime would be incompetent to unearth.

Hey. Maybe Perle knew there were no WMD to find, so he could make this otherwise incredible comparison.

Clark also points out the lack of connections between Iraq and al Qaeda (other than minor contacts), while Perle says the lack of evidence reflects incompetent intelligence since real (and dangerous) links are surely there.

Bottom line: Clark clearly wasn't shying away from the possibility of war with Iraq, and seemed to support congressional backing to support US policy at the UN, but he clearly thought the US had plenty of time to deal with a threat that was neither imminent, nor more important than the threat from Al Qaeda. Clark advocates the "narrowing" of the congressional resolution so as to reflect a balance of domestic power between Congress and the executive (p. 24): "not giving a blank check but expressing an intent to sign the check when all other alternatives are exhausted."

And this: "I think it's not time yet to use force against Iraq, but it is certainly time to put that card on the table, to turn it face up and to wave it." But he worries openly about an "enfeebled" UN (p. 26) and says the US should "exhaust all of the non force of arms remedies. (p. 27). And later (p. 31): "I personally really mean that you (sic) got to exhaust all the options first" before using force.

Interestingly, Clark also asserts that the intell the administration was using about a nuclear device referred to a dirty bomb, not a nuclear weapon (p. 28).

Here's what Perle said about Clark after the General left the room:

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...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."

In short, General Clark was making exactly the kinds of arguments advanced by France and Germany.

Yet, nobody is going around saying Chirac and Schoeder were really for the war.

Generals Against the War

I've blogged frequently about former General Wesley Clark, but it should be noted that other military leaders are quite dubious about the Iraq war too.

For example, last week the Washington Post had an article titled, "For Vietnam Vet Anthony Zinni, Another War on Shaky Territory." Back in 1998, Zinni was in charge of the Central Command for the Middle East, enforcing "no fly" zones in Iraq. Around Thanksgiving 2001, General Zinni was sent as a special envoy by the Bush adminstration to the Middle East, in hopes of resolving Israeli/Palestinian violence. Now, however, the Bush administration is unlikely to turn to him for foreign policy help:

Over the past year, the retired Marine Corps general has become one of the most prominent opponents of Bush administration policy on Iraq, which he now fears is drifting toward disaster.

It is one of the more unusual political journeys to come out of the American experience with Iraq. Zinni still talks like an old-school Marine -- a big-shouldered, weight-lifting, working-class Philadelphian whose father emigrated from Italy's Abruzzi region...Yet he finds himself in the unaccustomed role of rallying the antiwar camp, attacking the policies of the president and commander in chief whom he had endorsed in the 2000 election.

"Iraq is in serious danger of coming apart because of lack of planning, underestimating the task and buying into a flawed strategy," he says. "The longer we stubbornly resist admitting the mistakes and not altering our approach, the harder it will be to pull this chestnut out of the fire."

His criticism is pretty thorough:

"Since we've failed thus far to capitalize" on opportunities in Iraq, he says, "I don't have confidence we will do it now. I believe the only way it will work now is for the Iraqis themselves to somehow take charge and turn things around. Our policy, strategy, tactics, et cetera, are still screwed up."

Zinni dismisses the notion that Iraq posed a threat:

As chief of the Central Command, Zinni had been immersed in U.S. intelligence about Iraq. He was all too familiar with the intelligence analysts' doubts about Iraq's programs to acquire weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. "In my time at Centcom, I watched the intelligence, and never -- not once -- did it say, 'He has WMD.' "

Though retired for nearly two years, Zinni says, he remained current on the intelligence through his consulting with the CIA and the military. "I did consulting work for the agency, right up to the beginning of the war. I never saw anything. I'd say to analysts, 'Where's the threat?' " Their response, he recalls, was, "Silence."

This retired Marine commander is hardly a late-life convert to pacifism. "I'm not saying there aren't parts of the world that don't need their ass kicked," he says, sitting in a hotel lobby in Pentagon City, wearing an open-necked blue shirt. Even at the age of 60, he remains an avid weight-lifter and is still a solid, square-faced slab of a man. "Afghanistan was the right thing to do," he adds, referring to the U.S. invasion there in 2001 to oust the Taliban regime and its allies in the al Qaeda terrorist organization.

But he didn't see any need to invade Iraq. He didn't think Hussein was much of a worry anymore. "He was contained," he says. "It was a pain in the ass, but he was contained. He had a deteriorated military. He wasn't a threat to the region."

But didn't his old friend Colin Powell also describe Hussein as a threat? Zinni dismisses that. "He's trying to be the good soldier, and I respect him for that." Zinni no longer does any work for the State Department.

Zinni's concern deepened at a Senate hearing in February, just six weeks before the war began. As he awaited his turn to testify, he listened to Pentagon and State Department officials talk vaguely about the "uncertainties" of a postwar Iraq. He began to think they were doing the wrong thing the wrong way. "I was listening to the panel, and I realized, 'These guys don't have a clue.' "

Finally, Zinni believes that the administration is heading toward a Vietnam-like mistake:

The more he listened to Wolfowitz and other administration officials talk about Iraq, the more Zinni became convinced that interventionist "neoconservative" ideologues were plunging the nation into a war in a part of the world they didn't understand. "The more I saw, the more I thought that this was the product of the neocons who didn't understand the region and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had an idea that worked on the ground."

"Obviously there are differences" between Vietnam and Iraq, he says. "Every situation is unique." But in his bones, he feels the same chill. "It feels the same. I hear the same things -- about [administration charges about] not telling the good news, about cooking up a rationale for getting into the war." He sees both conflicts as beginning with deception by the U.S. government, drawing a parallel between how the Johnson administration handled the beginning of the Vietnam War and how the Bush administration touted the threat presented by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "I think the American people were conned into this," he says. Referring to the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which the Johnson administration claimed that U.S. Navy ships had been subjected to an unprovoked attack by North Vietnam, he says, "The Gulf of Tonkin and the case for WMD and terrorism is synonymous in my mind."

Likewise, he says, the goal of transforming the Middle East by imposing democracy by force reminds him of the "domino theory" in the 1960s that the United States had to win in Vietnam to prevent the rest of Southeast Asia from falling into communist hands.

And that brings him back to Wolfowitz and his neoconservative allies as the root of the problem. "I don't know where the neocons came from -- that wasn't the platform they ran on," he says. "Somehow, the neocons captured the president. They captured the vice president."

He is especially irked that, as he sees it, no senior officials have taken responsibility for their incorrect assessment of the threat posed by Iraq. "What I don't understand is that the bill of goods the neocons sold him has been proven false, yet heads haven't rolled," he says. "Where is the accountability? I think some fairly senior people at the Pentagon ought to go." Who? "That's up to the president."

Zinni has picked his shots carefully -- a speech here, a "Nightline" segment or interview there. "My contemporaries, our feelings and sensitivities were forged on the battlefields of Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies, and we saw the sacrifice," he said at a talk to hundreds of Marine and Navy officers and others at a Crystal City hotel ballroom in September. "I ask you, is it happening again?" The speech, part of a forum sponsored by the U.S. Naval Institute and the Marine Corps Association, received prolonged applause, with many officers standing.

Zinni says that he hasn't received a single negative response from military people about the stance he has taken. "I was surprised by the number of uniformed guys, all ranks, who said, 'You're speaking for us. Keep on keeping on.' "

Sorry for quoting a lot, but Post articles disappear quickly from the 'net.

Wesley Clark's America

I've blogged a great deal about Wesley Clark, partly because he's a former general and I study US foreign policy, partly because he has a damn impressive resume and I believe in the merit system, and partly because I think he's the most likely Democrat to emerge after Super Tuesday as the main rival to Howard Dean.

Still, most of what I've written is about Clark's take on foreign policy and the war on terror. What does he think about domestic policy questions?

For some idea, read the guest post by Andrew Sabl on Open Source Politics. Here's a shippet:

If Clark seems to lack opinions on domestic policy, it's because he's spent his life in a place that's seceded from domestic policy. In his recent health care speech, he said he was shocked to find out that ordinary people weren't required to get preventive checkups every year. Riff on this: He also hasn't had to think very much about people who lacked health insurance, couldn't afford college, or struggled to pay rent. The Army has people with low incomes, but ensures basic living standards and adequate opportunities for all. Clark's book convincingly articulates a case for making the rest of the country like that.

Imagine an America with a living wage, universal health care, a race-blind work force, aggressive college aid programs....sounds impressive.

Oh, and as I've written, Sabl emphasizes the stuff to like about Clark's foreign policy. Clark is greatly dismayed at the Bush administration's unilateralism and is quite worried about the lack of attention to genuine Homeland Security issues. How can the US be safer if it keeps shipping its "first responders" (firefighters and policy officers) off to Iraq -- where there are no WMD or credible links to al Qaeda?

Wesley Clark

By chance, I read two Wesley Clark pieces today. The first is a fairly lengthy article authored by the General in The Washington Monthly, "America's Virtual Empire." Essentially, Clark offers an extended critique of US foreign policy under Bush -- especially the neoimperial aspects.

It is particularly interesting that Clark makes many of the criticisms Bush made in 2000. Here's a good snippet on nation-building:

U.S. foreign policy has become dangerously dependent on its military. The armed forces are now practically the only effective play in the U.S. repertoire. Only they have the personnel, funding, and transportation to deliver relief supplies; organize training for armies and police; install communications and power; advise ministries of justice, health, and finance; build bridges; support election efforts; and inoculate and treat host populaces. Yet such problems are not among their primary missions. The troops often resent being asked to tackle these issues, to which they bring, often very understandably, a narrow, almost mechanical approach. For all their versatility, they lack the knowledge, skills, staying power, and scale to manage seriously a large nation on a continuing basis. They are unable to foment deep-rooted political development. They lack the skills and experience to revise constitutions, rework property laws and criminal statutes, and methodically bore into the deepest aspects of the societies. Troops are not police officers; the kind of investigations and anticorruption efforts essential in nation-building are largely beyond them.

There's much more and I encourage people to read it.

The second piece is an interview from the October 16 Rolling Stone. Obviously, I fall behind reading the non-political magazines in my house.

The interview has some strong words. Here's a taste, as Larry Solum would say:

We made a historic strategic blunder. We attacked a state rather than going after a terrorist. Iraq had no connection to the war on terror. Of all the states in the Middle East to give chemical, biological or nuclear weapons to terrorists, least likely was Iraq.

Here's something on one of my favorite topics -- the public sphere:

I don't believe that government is made better by secrecy and restraint. It's made better by transparency, by being open and honest. If you're right, you're right. If not, you take your licks.

There's not a great deal to learn in this interview, but it shows a little of Clark's personality and devotes a lot of attention to foreign policy.

Watch this clip from Fox News

I generally don't post twice in a day, nor do I regularly watch Fox News, but I highly recommend that everyone with a decent internet conection go to the Fox News site and watch the video associated with this link. It is an interview with General Wesley Clark and it runs for several minutes.

The best part comes a couple of minutes into the clip.

My call? Home run for Clark.

Lois and Clark; Beware of Hidden Kryptonite

Josh Marshall has recent links to two interesting stories. I think they are related, though Marshall doesn't tie them together in his blog. I will.

One link is to a story by Lois Romano in the Washington Post about changes in Wesley Clark's campaign. Marshall does a good job of highlighting the key paragraphs and explaining the apparent changes in Clark's New Hampshire strategy and in his advising team.

Since I blogged about Clark's "Meet the Press" interview yesterday, this story caught my eye for a different reason. Obviously, Clark is running a quite different campaign from Howard Dean. While Dean built his following (and cash reserves) by opposing the war on Iraq, Clark has been making nuanced security arguments -- recognizing the apparent need to take on WMD proliferation, al Qaeda and other security threats.

His New Hampshire strategy is going to emphasize his ideas and military background -- in an apparent attempt to highlight his contrast with Dean and perhaps to clear the field of other anti-Dean candidates (who do not have his foreign policy credentials). Romano notes that Clark hopes to make the primary contest a two-man race shortly after New Hampshire:

The Clark campaign's goal in the next few weeks is to demonstrate that it has both the resources to take on the former Vermont governor and a candidate whose military résumé makes him far more electable. "Our strategy is that Wesley Clark is the candidate to beat George Bush, and we have to make that clear to people," said Lara Bergthold, the political director.

"The Democratic Party is going to have to take a hard look at itself in the mirror and decide whether it can gamble on Dean when the stakes are so high," said Matt Bennett, Clark's director of communications.

Given what Clark said on MTP Sunday, I think this is a viable approach. Dean isn't really threatened by the other anti-war candidates, and Clark is trying to be both anti-war and focused on terror. He splits the difference, isolating Kerry, Lieberman, Gephardt and Edwards (who voted for the Iraq war resolution).

One potential problem for Clark's strategy? What if the Bush administration actually starts listening to Clark by internationalizing the Iraq occupation and calling in NATO? After all, the administation already announced its intent to hand over political control by June -- essentially caving to French/German demands.

Would such a shift completely undercut Clark's campaign strategy? I'm not suggesting this would be the administration's motive -- but if it were to occur, I think the General would have a difficult time highlighting his credentials. More cynical observers might conclude that Karl Rove could do this to assure a Bush-Dean race, which they might feel better about than Bush-Clark.

So back to Josh Marshall, who also linked to this story in the Independent today by Leonard Doyle and Stephen Castle. The paper is reporting that the US is not merely planning a political handoff to Iraq. It says the US is about to convert the troop command into an international force!

The United States accepts that to avoid humiliating failure in Iraq it needs to bring its forces quickly under international control and speed the handover of power, Javier Solana, the European Union foreign policy chief, has said. Decisions along these lines will be made in the "coming days", Mr Solana told The Independent.

The comments, signalling a major policy shift by the US, precede President George Bush's state visit this week to London, during which he and Tony Blair will discuss an exit strategy for forces in Iraq.

Mr Solana underlined the change of mood in Washington, saying: "Everybody has moved, including the United States, because the United States has a real problem and when you have a real problem you need help." There is a "growing consensus" that the transfer of power has to be accelerated, he said. "How fast can it be done? I would say the faster the better."

He added: "The forces will have to be there under aa different chapeau. The more the international community is incorporated under the international organisations [the better]. That is the lesson I think everyone is learning. Our American friends are learning that. We will see in the coming days decisions along these lines."

And the change might well mean a more active role for NATO.

Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, arrives in Brussels tonight for talks with EU ministers, which he will combine with a meeting with the retiring Nato secretary general, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. Diplomats say that Mr Powell is expected to "test the water" about the involvement of the transatlantic alliance in Iraq.

Obviously, this is all political whispering, but I cannot believe Solana (recall, Spain is part of the "coalition of the willing") would say these things unless he had some pretty strong indications of impending change.

Bush critics have been saying for a long time that the US would have little to lose by truly internationalizing the force structure. Maybe they are actually listening?

If this internationalization occurs, the "anti-Dean" candidate (whoever that turns out to be in the primaries) will be the one emphasizing the dangers of Bush's crony capitalism in Iraq.

Is Wesley Clark the Candidate?

This morning, I watched most of the Wesley Clark interview on "Meet the Press." Tim Russert confronted Clark with a lot of the "gotcha" stuff that has been noted in some media over the past weeks. However, Clark did a fairly good job of heading it off.

Sometimes he pointed out that the remarks were taken out of context or that his speeches, op-ed columns, and TV appearances had included a lot of nuance that would serve to condition his apparent past support of Bush policy and/or personnel.

He wasn't as good as Clinton in the famous 60 minutes interview (was that during the Super Bowl?), but it was direct and seemed sincere.

Quite early on in the interview, Russert asked Clark what he would say to President Bush if the latter asked for advice. This is his excellent reply:

"Mr. President, the first thing you've got to do is you've got to surrender exclusive U.S. control over this mission. You cannot build the kind of international support you need if we retain exclusive custody of the mission, and there's no point in it. Build an international organization like we did in the Balkans. We call it the Peace Implementation Committee there. Call this one the Iraqi reconstruction Development Authority. Bring in every nation that wants to contribute, give them a seat at the table, put a non-American in charge and the responsibilities are to assist the political and economic reconstruction of Iraq, and then go to the Iraqis and there's no reason to wait until June to give the Iraqis back their country. We should be transferring that authority tomorrow. They've already elected local councils. Let each local council send two people to a central location. Let that be a transitional central government. Give them staff and let them start forming up the kinds of committees they need to have visibility over and make decisions on what's being done in Iraq. Give the country back to the Iraqis. We're not there to occupy it; we're only there to help. So let's give them their country back."

Of course, as I noted yesterday, the Bush administration is already moving in this direction.

It was odd that Clark said the Iraq war was technically legal, but Kosova was technically illegal (though legitimate). I buy the latter, but this war was widely viewed as illegal by international lawyers -- and other states.

Since the American people probably don't want to think about their country acting against international law, this probably wasn't a bad answer. In any case, Clark was much stronger on operational questions. This was another good moment for the General:

I think we need to change the force mix in Iraq as rapidly as we can. I think we need a lighter, more mobile force, more agile, more intelligence-driven. We need to take those 1,400 people who are searching for weapons of mass destruction, pull them off the search, give that to the United Nations people, use them to help us track down Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and to help us find the people in Iraq who are attacking our soldiers. And then we need to start reducing the size of the U.S. force there. We may have to temporarily increase it, but we need to transform what it does. All these heavy forces have big logistics footprints. I mean, you have lots of logistics. You have lots of unarmored Humvees, you have lots of opportunities for ambush. We need to reduce those opportunities.

Let me post two more long answers. Here's how Clark defended his decision to oppose the $87 billion request:

I do support money for the men and women on the ground. I came out against this because to vote for this resolution, at that time, was to give the president of the United States a blank check, a blank check because he didn't have a strategy. And I think what the troops in Iraq need more than anything else is a strategy for success. Each day that they go forward without a strategy, the danger increases, and that's the responsibility of the president of the United States, to provide that strategy. He hadn't done so. And it was the duty of the Congress to press the administration to do it. They didn't. They gave him a blank check. Now, if they had pressed and said, "Mr. President, we're not going to give you this until your spokesmen come up here and you lay out a strategy. What are you trying to do there? What's going to happen in the region. Give us the vision, tell us your time lines. Give us your estimates." If he'd done that, then of course we would have supported -- I would have supported taking care of the troops. That wasn't done. And that was the duty of the United States Congress, to have the--”hold the executive branch accountable.

That's great stuff. Here's what he said to explain how Bush has weakened the fight versus al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan:

I was one of those, along with Senator Bob Graham, who believed at the outset that this was a distraction. This was a distraction from the more important war against al-Qaeda. And, in fact, it was a distraction, Tim.

When we went into Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, CENTCOM was already planning the operation in Iraq. Instead of planning how to get Osama bin Laden, instead of putting the U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan to finish the fight against al-Qaeda and bring back Osama bin Laden, dead or alive, we had our top leadership distracted in preparing what to do about Saddam Hussein. And then, when we could have put the U.S. troops in, we withheld them, because there was uncertainty as to how long we would be in Afghanistan and how soon we might need those troops to go into Iraq.

So we've stretched and we've accommodated the Afghanistan mission, we've done as little as possible. In military terms, it's been "economy of force." And the result is today that al-Qaeda and the Taliban are coming back in Afghanistan.

I was going to stop, but as I read the transcript, I do think Clark was great. Here's a direct challenge to the so-called "Bush Doctrine":

This administration made a fundamental choice early in the war on terror to go after states rather than to go after terrorists. They wanted to use the conventional power of the United States armed forces to take down states. And Don Rumsfeld's still talking about it, as though these old states are central to the problem of terrorism. The problem with that is they aren't, and when you take them down, you're left trying to pick up the pieces, as has happened in Iraq. Attacking Iraq has done almost nothing to help us deal with the problem of al-Qaeda.

I'd like to see Russert question Bush one-on-one for the better part of an hour, asking similar questions and playing old film footage. Later in the interview, Clark said the administration had framed one-sided intelligence about WMD to mislead the public. It was strong stuff and I'd like to see Bush answer it directly.

Clark even brought up one of my persistent beefs -- the failure to do anything about Rwanda. Unlike Bush, Clark regrets the US inaction.

Mid-December, by the way, Clark is going to Europe to testify against Milosevic. That will make for an interesting campaign moment. It would give him yet another way to frame the argument against Saddam Hussein. Done differently, the war in Iraq might have led to a trial of the Iraqi dictator.

Political updates

OK, let me update two threads I've been discussing for the past few weeks.

1. The Presidential Race: It's all over the news, but the data is usually delivered without much analysis. The media cover only the horse race part of the election. According to a new poll from CNN-Gallup-USA Today, Wesley Clark has jumped to the top of the list of Democratic presidential candidates. Here's the list:

Clark 22%
Dean 13
Kerry 11
Gephardt 11
Lieberman 10

Most importantly, the poll said Clark beats Bush 49-46%. Kerry also wins 48-47. All the other top Democrats lose by only a couple of percentage points. Since the sample error is 3.5%, none of these results mean anything really -- and all the candidates behind Clark are essentially equal.

So, in the first week, Clark is sailing along on his first rate biography. There has already been a flap about whether Clark genuinely opposed the war or not, so it will be interesting to see if he can sustain a lead.

Some of the criticisms, by the way, are unfair. Clark has frequently and clearly expressed a desire for a much more multilateral US foreign policy. Actually, he wrote a nice article in The Washington Monthly last September that more fully explains his views. He would have prosecuted Afghanistan with NATO, for example. In a January interview with a columnist for the Washington Post, Clark also criticized Bush administration priorities:

"They picked war over law. They picked a unilateralist approach over a multilateral approach. They picked conventional forces over special-operations forces. And they picked Saddam Hussein as a target over Osama bin Laden."

Graham has been saying these same sorts of things for quite awhile, but the criticisms will likely get more attention coming from Clark's mouth.

2. Iraq and Bush: Tuesday morning, President Bush is speaking at the UN and various media are reporting (often based on Bush's interview with Fox) that the President has no intention of expressing any regrets to the UN over the events earlier this year.

Given that most states in the UN opposed the US war, and that the UN was again the target of a terrorist car bomb attack in Iraq Monday, I doubt Bush is going to find a particularly sympathetic audience.

Since the address is going to be widely televised within the US, I also doubt if the primary target of this Bush speech is the UN. Rather, the Bush administration is working hard to make this war look good in retrospect.

Keen observers probably noticed that the Republicans are all over the media claiming that the war is going well. For example, they often point out that the northern area of Iraq is quite stable.

NEWS FLASH: the northern area of Iraq was Kurdish controlled before the war. In fact, it was protected by the "no fly zone" established by US/UK aircraft (and not, as a matter of fact, by the UN).

Then again, when the Bush people were arguing before the war that al Qaeda was in Iraq, many critics pointed out that the evidence pointed to terrorist links in Kurdish areas, which were not under Saddam Hussein's control.There was a good story about this in the BBC last July (2002).

Anyway, to wrap this up, I look for Bush to again "challenge" the UN to live up to its responsibilities...as if the US alone has the right idea regarding world politics.

Will audience members (whether at the UN or on TV in the US) remember the Wake Forest debate answer from Bush, when asked "Should the people of the world fear us, or see us as a friend?"

Bush said: "It really depends upon how [our] nation conducts itself in foreign policy. If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us. If we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us. Our nation stands alone right now in the world in terms of power. And that’s why we’ve got to be humble and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom. We’re a freedom-loving nation. If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll view us that way, but if we’re humble nation, they’ll respect us."