The American Spectator

p> KNOWING BETTER br> Re: John Corry’s Two Cheers for Wesley Clark : /p>

While I have no argument with John Corry’s conclusion that the good General Wesley Kanne Clark “is not a girly-boy,” I find his egregious shot at the “neocons” unworthy of someone who probably knows better. That judgment is not only tiresome, but also smacks of the Bush is a dolt but clever enough to con large numbers of people (including “peace loving” Democrats) into waging war; Bush, the dolt, was too slow to act on intelligence about the threat of a 9/11, but too fast to lance the boil of terrorism in one of its bases of support (Saudi Arabia, Syria et al to come, despite State Dept nonsense); and, Bush, the dolt, revealed, for all to see, the nefarious, double-dealing, no-account UN (that exists by the grace of the American taxpayer) crowd. Of course, Dubya is just a “tool” of the neocons. By the way, there was no UN resolution for the war in Kosovo, the extent of “ethnic cleansing” there pales by comparison with the mass graves being uncovered in Iraq, and Milosevic (like Saddam?) posed no imminent threat to the U.S. And so, I guess that the previous POTUS was a “tool” of who?…our continental European “friends”?

p>Come on, John, had Billy Boy not been “occupied elsewhere” during his tenure, 9/11 most likely would not have happened. The neocons, indeed! br> — P.A. Melita br> Charlottesville, VA /p>

I am baffled by John Corry’s claim that the neocons were “wrong” about Iraq. Virtually everything they said has come true, and continues to come true.

1) The Iraqis, on the whole, did indeed welcome us as liberators. The fact that you could get as many soldiers killed policing Watts as you could in Tikrit doesn’t seem to me to equate “failure” of the slightest kind. It means that in any occupation, there are dangers.

2) We just passed a week in which there was not a single American death. That was followed by a couple, then by more days without any. The ratio of deaths-per-day has now grown to deaths-per-every-four or five days. And it will continue to move in this direction until Iraq looks like the DMZ in Korea just after the armistice. By the way, a little research would show that the airborne units policing Austria in 1945 lost 30 men in 31 days, or, about the same numbers was we lost in the first month of the Iraq police action.