Two of the prominent Democratic party hopefuls who failed to make the nomination for the presidency, Wesley Clark and Howard Dean, have widely different takes on the Iraq war.
Former NATO commander Wesley Clark, somewhat surprising to me, is strongly advocating staying the course, but adjusting the tactics. He fears, with some justification I think, that the real winners of the Iraq war will be the Mullahs of Iran.
The American approach shows little sense of Middle Eastern history and politics. As one prominent Kuwaiti academic explained to me, in the Muslim world the best way to deal with your enemies has always been to assimilate them - you never succeed in killing them all, and by trying to do so you just make more enemies. Instead, you must woo them to rejoin society and the government. Military pressure should be used in a calibrated way, to help in the wooing.
If this critique is correct - and it is difficult to argue against it - then we must face its implications. "Staying the course" risks a slow and costly departure of American forces with Iraq increasingly factionalized and aligned with Iran. Yet a more rapid departure of American troops along a timeline, as some Democrats are calling for, simply reduces our ability to affect the outcome and risks broader regional conflict.
We need to keep our troops in Iraq, but we need to modify the strategy far more drastically than anything President Bush called for last week.
He advocates more of what is really going on, with increased emphasis on "winning over" the less extreme parts of the insurgency (which is already being attempted), and also to keep the US forces ready to secure that the sectarian militias (he only mentions the Shia) are disarmed or transferred to the control of the central government, he thinks it is a big mistake to allow regional control of new oil revenue, which the new constitution allows, and he emphasises that the primary objective of the US forces should be to secure Iraq's borders, both against Syria and Iran, as good as possible.
From what I know, this is not very different from what the coalition is already doing, and I think his suggestions have some merit.
Democratic National Chairman Dr. Howard Dean, in contrast, comes across as a total defeatist in recent statements.
Saying the "idea that we're going to win the war in Iraq is an idea which is just plain wrong," Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean predicted today that the Democratic Party will come together on a proposal to withdraw National Guard and Reserve troops immediately, and all US forces within two years. [...]
"I think we need a strategic redeployment over a period of two years," Dean said. "Bring the 80,000 National Guard and Reserve troops home immediately. They don't belong in a conflict like this anyway. We ought to have a redeployment to Afghanistan of 20,000 troops, we don't have enough troops to do the job there and its a place where we are welcome. And we need a force in the Middle East, not in Iraq but in a friendly neighboring country to fight (terrorist leader Musab) Zarqawi, who came to Iraq after this invasion. We've got to get the target off the backs of American troops.
Dean didn't specify which country the US forces would deploy to, but he said he would like to see the entire process completed within two years. He said the Democrat proposal is not a 'withdrawal,' but rather a 'strategic redeployment' of U.S. forces.
Dr Dean, I know what 'strategic redeployment' is in military terms. This isn't it. This is a retreat. If US forces withdraw from Iraq, where the enemy actually is, how could the soldiers at all be able to fight the terrorists? They would be able to do that only to the degree the 'redeployment' inspired terrorists to come after them into the mysterious third-country allegedly willing to host a large US base.
Wesley Clark, for all his faults, gets it. Howard Dean doesn't.
3:25:52 PM 
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