Wesley in 2004

The other night, I heard General Wesley Clark being interviewed by Tavis Smiley on WHYY on my way back from welding school. He was great. I mean, he was speaking candidate-speak, but I liked everything he had to say. Imagine: the commander of NATO forces in Bosnia, and an economist. We could sorta use a guy like that, huh?

I especially liked what he had to say about the war in Iraq.

Y'see, I've been thinking about the war in Iraq. When the social services agency I ran was located on Avenue C, we were right around the corner from a fire house on East Third Street. We got to know the guys at the fire house. When we would have a holiday party or whatever, we would invite them. They were pretty much down with the fact that we were running a needle exchange.

Every guy in that fire house who was working on September 11th was among the 343 firefighters that went down in the Towers. Because they were in lower Manhattan, they were among the first on the scene, and up they went, climbing the stairs.

All gone.

So, that being the case, it increasingly pisses me off that Osama Bin Ladden is sitting down to dinner tonight along the Afgani-Pakistani border, while we're committing $87.5 Billion so that our unelected President can attend to his father's unfinished business in Iraq.

At the outset, I believed in the merits of the war. I was lead to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam was closely allied to Al Quaeda, that he was a repressive despot whose removal would be welcomed by the people of Iraq, and that the removal of this militarily aggressive kook would be stabilizing to the region.

Well, there are no weapons of mass destruction. There are no ties to Al Queda. The situation with the people of Iraq is far more complicated than can be solved by regime change. And I don't read much about stability in that part of the world.

And Osama Bin Laden is breaking his Ramadan fast with a hearty meal.

Go Wes Clark!

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