Amy Goodman interviewed Wesley Clark, and among much else that was interesting, he said this:
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to get your response to Seymour Hersh's piece in The New Yorker to two key points this week, reporting the Pentagon's established a special planning group within the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to plan a bombing attack on Iran, that this is coming as the Bush administration and Saudi Arabia are pumping money for covert operations into many areas of the Middle East, including Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, in an effort to strengthen Saudi-supported Sunni Islam groups and weaken Iranian-backed Shias -- some of the covert money has been given to jihadist groups in Lebanon with ties to al-Qaeda -- fighting the Shias by funding with Prince Bandar and then with US money not approved by Congress, funding the Sunnis connected to al-Qaeda.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well, I don't have any direct information to confirm it or deny it. It's certainly plausible. The Saudis have taken a more active role. ...
[T]he Saudis have basically recognized that they have an enormous stake in the outcome in Iraq, and they don't particularly trust the judgment of the United States in this area. We haven't exactly proved our competence in Iraq. So they're trying to take matters into their own hands. The real danger is, and one of the reasons this is so complicated is because -- let's say we did follow the desires of some people who say, “Just pull out, and pull out now.” Well, yeah. We could mechanically do that. It would be ugly, and it might take three or four months, but you could [withdraw U.S. forces.] ...
But when you leave, the Saudis have got to find someone to fight the Shias. Who are they going to find? Al-Qaeda, because the groups of Sunnis who would be extremists and willing to fight would probably be the groups connected to al-Qaeda. So one of the weird inconsistencies in this is that were we to get out early, we’d be intensifying the threat against us of a super powerful Sunni extremist group, which was now legitimated by overt Saudi funding in an effort to hang onto a toehold inside Iraq and block Iranian expansionism.
"When you leave, the Saudis have got to find someone to fight the Shias."
As I've said, I am not a foreign policy expert at all; I am just a citizen of the most powerful country on Earth trying to do the responsible thing by trying to figure this subject out. I arrived at the theory that the U.S. was presiding over the effective partition of Iraq, but I never asked myself two questions: Since we know the parties will be tempted to cheat, who will enforce the partition once it's in place? And if the partition is not successful, what is the fallback strategy of countries like Saudi Arabia? Clearly, the answer to the first question is the United States. And Clark provides the answer to the second question: Saudi Arabia, which has already been funding Sunni militant groups associated with al Qaeda in Syria, Iraq and Iran, will fund those groups more heavily so they can take on the Shiites directly.
What I conclude from this, with the utmost reluctance, is that Hillary Clinton is right:
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton foresees a “remaining military as well as political mission” in Iraq, and says that if elected president, she would keep a reduced military force there to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military.
We'll pull back to protected bases and provide air cover and launch occasional airmobile attacks. Bush has driven us into a ditch, and truly, there is no way out.
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