Wes Clark's StopIranWar.org
BY Nancy Scola | Friday, February 23 2007
I know I'm stretching the boundaries of TechPresident because Clark hasn't declared that he's running for anything, but I'm trying to make some sense of his recently-launched Stop Iran War site. The policy gist is fairly clear -- Clark thinks that the U.S. should use "every diplomatic, political, and economic option at our disposal" to deal with Iran, and from the homepage:
Cannot the world’s most powerful nation deign speak to the resentful and scheming regional power that is Iran? Can we not speak of the interests of others, work to establish a sustained dialogue, and seek to benefit the people of Iran and the region? Could not such a dialogue, properly conducted, begin a process that could, over time, help realign hardened attitudes and polarizing views within the region? And isn’t it easier to undertake such a dialogue now, before more die, and more martyrs are created to feed extremist passions?Beyond that, the site has a few tools and feeds -- a petition, a handful of blog posts, two radio clips, some media contacts, three news stories on Iran and something named Flikzor by which folks can upload videos to send to Wes. I wish I had more clever to say than this: I'm not sure what the point of this project is yet, other than he's real worked about Iran and this is some sort of outlet for those energies. Though it does seem to be example number two in a new trend of politicians building well-branded web-based mini-campaigns, example one being John Kerry's Set a Deadline.