Another New Republic Columnist for Clark

Clark appears to be emerging as TNR's popular vote choice for the nomination. Considering Lieberman's chances in the primary season, it's certainly one of the more realistic choice (as is being discussed in an internal debate over the endorsement). In any case, here's another take on Clark for President that again addresses some of my commentors unfair and uninformed charges that Clark would put multilateralism before real threats to national security.

That leaves one candidate who has made restoring America's position in the world a major theme of his campaign. It's unsurprising that it's also the man who led an awkward, 19-nation NATO coalition against Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo. Clark is alone among the Democratic candidates in having had to negotiate with foreign leaders, both friends and enemies. He has spent much of his life abroad as a soldier (and Rhodes scholar), as compared with Bush, who had barely left the country before taking office. Clark understands that it matters what the world thinks of America, and has promised to act accordingly.

An easy, and patently false, charge against Clark is that he is a reflexive multilateralist and NATO fetishist who would not protect America without asking permission first. But nothing in his record suggests he'd feel the need to consult Luxembourg before dealing with an imminent threat. If anything, the opposite criticism of him, also widely made, is probably truer--that he is intensely hard to dissuade once he has made up his mind. (Witness his doggedness in urging NATO to go into Bosnia earlier, and to intervene in Kosovo.)

Clark's opposition to the Iraq war is easily caricatured as putting him in the "antiwar" camp. But, unlike Howard Dean, Clark openly expressed jubilation at the liberation of Iraq. And, as J. Peter Scoblic's endorsement of Clark shows, his positions on the war are both far more consistent and more sophisticated than he has been given credit for: Simply put, Clark's instinct is that some elective wars--which few can now doubt Iraq was--should be fought, but only with as much forethought, and as much international support, as possible. Going into Iraq may have been justifiable, but the Iraq war that George Bush fought did not meet those tests, particularly not at a time when the war on terror loomed as a higher priority.