DKos diary, 1/8/06 - Wesley Clark is Aragorn

The administration needs a new strategy for the region, before Iran gains nuclear capabilities. While the military option must remain on the table, America should take the lead with direct diplomacy to resolve the interrelated problems of Iran's push for regional hegemony and nuclear power, the struggle for control of Lebanon, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Isolating our adversaries hasn't worked.

Absent such fundamental change in Washington's approach, there is little hope that a troop surge and accompanying rhetoric will be anything other than "staying the course" more. – General Wesley Clark in today’s Washington Post.

General Clark lucidly addresses the situation in the Middle East in relationship to the troop surge. His has been the one and only steady hand in this from the first. The timing couldn’t be more perfect. Yesterday’s NYTs had a cheeky article about the new “Alpha Male Democrats” with Jim Webb in the center of the picture. It was a reluctant first recognition by the mainstream press that something new is taking place within the Democratic Party. It will rise with the new Congress. There has been a tendency ‘till now to look for the “new” Roosevelt, or the “new” Kennedy, or whatever. It is a natural healthy yearning for the “return of the king.” It is spiritually debilitating. But when Aragorn arrives, the yearning subsides.

The new Congress is the matrix for this new change. They will need new leaders. Wesley Clark is Aragorn, awakening in this new matrix the new paradigm; it will be the building block and consensus vortex for a new generation in Congress and in the country. As historians William Strauss and Neil Howe point out, new periods always start with one individual, and the character of that individual becomes the new character of the new group, then the character of the country. General Clark is that individual. There have been many opportunities for Democratic leadership to step forth in this process in the last six years. Again and again and again and again at each critical turning, only General Clark has taken the initiative. The truth is that a new Congress and a new political generation cannot turn on old leadership.