Soros Placing Chips on Clark
By amba | Related entries in Elections, Foreign Policy, Money, The War On TerrorismNot all his chips, of course. But it’s the biggest bet he’s placed yet. From The New York Sun:
George Soros is giving a financial boost to the political fortunes of a former four-star general, Wesley Clark, who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and is poised to mount another bid in 2008.
Mr. Soros gave $75,000 in July to a political group led by General Clark, Wes-Pac, according to a report filed yesterday with the Internal Revenue Service.
It is the largest known gift from Mr. Soros this year to a political organization affiliated with a contender for the presidency in 2008. [ ... ]
In April, Mr. Soros hosted a fund-raiser for WesPac at his home in Manhattan. General Clark also serves on the board of a nongovernmental organization supported by Mr. Soros, the International Crisis Group.
I received this via my brother from an Israel watchdog group that spotted some not-so-supportive-of-Israel remarks General Clark apparently made in a speech he gave at the University of Alabama last Friday (the 13th). Here’s the video, and here’s an article on the speech from the Tuscaloosa News (on Clark’s website, Securing America) which reports that Clark “took the Bush administration to task on practically all its foreign policy initiatives” — not talking directly to North Korea and Iran, not putting enough soldiers into Afghanistan to get Osama at the beginning, rushing into an Iraq war that has served al Qaeda’s interests and contemplating actions in Iran and Syria that would do the same. The article doesn’t mention Israel, and as yet no transcript of the speech is posted on Clark’s website. (The video link is there, and a transcript is promised.) I don’t have time to watch the whole video, so the following quote on Israel, from the Israel watchdog group’s e-mail, is unconfirmed by me:
We’ve made some serious, serious mistakes, the latest being - it’s hard to pick the latest - but one of them, recently, was the one where we sided with the Israelis in that air campaign in Lebanon. And instead of stopping the bombing, we were cheerleading it. It hurt Israel, it hurt Lebanon, and it hurt us. It helped Iran.
Clark, unfortunately from my point of view, is swinging left, stumping for Lamont and garnering praise from Daily Kos. It’s obviously proving a shrewd move short-term, since it scored the KA-CHING! from Soros. What it has to do with “Securing America” is a matter of debate.
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October 17th, 2006 at 12:35 pm
How about Clark is expressing views he believes in–rather than swinging left as a shrewd, short-term move.? There are plenty of Jews–and I count myself among them–who agree with Clark that the Lebanon overreaction “hurt Israel, it hurt Lebanon, and it hurt us.” This does not make me or Clark anti Israel or anti Semetic. I predict that a couple of years from now what Clark is saying about Israel will be commonly accepted wisdom.
October 17th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
I thought it was already commonly accepted wisdom in Israel itself. Michael Totten has had several interviews with people from both the “peace” movement and the militaristic right and they said more or less the exact same things — destroying Hezbollah in a noble goal but it was carried out completely incompetently and looking back on it the grand mission was idiotic. All they disagree about is whether they should try again with more force.
October 17th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
LMAO @ “Clark, unfortunately from my point of view, is swinging left” …
Your perspective must be the same as Rush Limbaugh’s. Any ’swing’ away from the neo-cons’ mafioso alliance with Israel is a swing to the left.
Wesley Clark is the only potential candidate who won’t have blood and oil money supporting his campaign; but of course that means AIPAC will be sure to black ball his name (to no avail).
If Wesley Clark runs, he will be elected: with or without Zionazi approval.
October 17th, 2006 at 3:41 pm
It doesn’t move you very far left to disagree with substantially all of the current administration’s foreign policy. Is it that anything Kos supports must automatically be rejected by the “center?” Wesley Clark as raving leftie is a pretty tough image to sell.
October 17th, 2006 at 3:52 pm
I’m sorry, but if Clark said that, Clark was right, and that is most certainly not a statement to be criticizing him for. Not only was it not a conflict that was in our interest, it wasn’t a conflict that was in Israel’s interest either. It’s irrelevant who won or lost that conflict, because regardless of who won, the price was significant. Hezbollah lost a significant fraction of their manpower. Israel lost additional political capital on the international stage (although one wonders if they really have much more of it to lose at this point), they managed to get more blood on their hands in the form of collateral damage, and they stirred up significant dissent within their own country. And the United States further jeopardized their role in the Middle East by supporting Israel in a conflict against other muslims — never a popular move.
Iran is the only player that you could intellegently argue came out ahead: They didn’t lose any of their own manpower, they funded Hezbollah on the cheap, they got the Shiites in Iraq cheering for the bad guys, and they successfully split Israel’s attention between the threat to the north and Iran’s own nuclear ambitions, to say nothing of the fact that anything that hurts Israel even the tiniest bit seems to make them ecstatic.
Clark is one of the few Democrats I’d vote for in a heartbeat. It was a shame he didn’t beat out Kerry the last time round, and it’d be a shame if he doesn’t get a chance this time round either. He’s certainly far more competant and electable than Clinton ever will be, and he’s one of the few Democrats I’d be inclined to vote for over a Republican or Libertarian alternative.
October 17th, 2006 at 3:58 pm
Sylny/Daniel, you two are right on target.
Groups such as the ADL and AIPAC exist only to ATTACK/ruin the reputation of U.S. citizens and politicians who 1) do not speak particularly highly of Zionism/Jews and 2) do not endorse pro-Israeli policies. Oh yeah. They exist also to bring billions in U.S. Taxpayer dollars back to Israel…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqya1eiSv98
As a U.S. Jew, I believe we should defend our great country against the criminal Israeli element within our borders. Let’s keep U.S. interests on the front burner. No more wars for Israel!
Shalom…
October 17th, 2006 at 4:00 pm
Way too many people have bought into the incessantly repeated brainwashing mantra of “conservative = good, liberal = bad”.
Please, people, start actually listening to the positions being espoused and judge based on those and what their effects would be for the country rather than some preconceived notion of all ideas associated with the liberals being automatically bad.
October 17th, 2006 at 5:29 pm
I wonder if it is coincidence that “Zani” is an anagram of “Nazi.”
And I wonder if it’s a coincidence that two obvious anti-semites, both with Jewsish-sounding names, showed up here within 17 minutes of each other.
Yep. I wonder.
October 17th, 2006 at 5:55 pm
Clark sucks at campaigning. Soros is chucking his money away.
October 18th, 2006 at 9:10 am
I respect Gen. Clark’s service to the country. However, as he has never held elective office, I am disinclined to seriously consider him as a Presidential candidate.
Assuming that his words have been accurately reported, I would wonder exactly what he thinks the US should have done vis-a-vis the Israeli war in/with Lebanon? The Bush policy could be summed up as “let them fight for a bit, then try to stop the fighting”
Does Gen. Clark think that a country is entitled to make a military response if its civilians are kidnapped and rockets are launched across its borders? The answer to that, in light of the other statements, could be very instructive about the type of foreign policy he would embrace.
October 18th, 2006 at 1:51 pm
Clark’s military record in Kosovo leaves him little room to criticize the military strategy or tactics of others. He has a point about Israel’s aerial bombardment of Hizballah, but it’s ironic considering his own even less effective aerial bombardment of the Serbs. It would be different if he had ever acknowledged that his running of the Kosovo campaign was stupid. As it is, he comes across as a hypocrite.
October 19th, 2006 at 11:43 pm
Fuck the Israeli watchdog bastards.
This is the United States of America, not the United States of Israel.
We should be cutting all ties with Israel. They are an APARTHEID REGIME which exacts ethnic cleansing and other forms of violent, racist oppression upon the indigenous population of Palestine.
Our taxpayer money goes towards those cockbags?
Wesley Clark is the man. Fuck these other Zionist bootlickers.
Keep the foreign lobbies out of our affairs.
Save the USA.
October 24th, 2006 at 12:50 pm
The attitude exhibited by the comment above serves absolutely no purpose, other than to warn the rest of us away from reactionary rebound Fascism: the kind that becomes so principled against violence that it becomes violently unprincipled.
It’s indicative of our crumbling national moral and ethical stature: little by little, we’re sounding more and more like the people from whom our ancestors fled, and selfishly defending our own interests like the jumble of autonomous oblasts we’re likely to become.