Posted on 09/22/2003 7:00:14 PM PDT by PJ-Comix
Dear Debra,
One anecdote in this overlong book sums up its tone and content. New to the Balkan crisis, U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark telephones Joe Ralston, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and describes the call this way: "'Sir, I'm sorry to wake you. What's up?' I almost always called him 'Sir.' He was a year senior by date of rank to four stars, a year older, and was above me in the U.S. chain of command." Waging Modern War must have more Sirs in it than any book since Boswell's Life of Johnson--and there's a reason for that.
It's dressed up as the autobiography of a war hero. It has:
But at the book's core is an agenda of score-settling and ass-covering--and there's plenty of both to do. I don't really see the difference between "modern war," as Clark describes it, and a cynical kind of media savvy. ("For large democracies, the home front is the critical theater of war, and words and images are the key weapons.") Like his fellow airwave-hog Richard Holbrooke, the State Department's special negotiator in the run-up to the Kosovo bombing, Clark sought to wage the war by chatting up Tom Brokaw and Christiane Amanpour. He made end-runs around the U.S. Army chain of command and leaked information to other branches of government (State, in particular) and other governments (Britain's, in particular). This won Clark a reputation for flexibility with Holbrooke and Albright and the esteem of both NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana and British Prime Minister Tony Blair--so much esteem, in the latter case, that Clark was recently knighted.
But at the same time, his methods led him into a propagandistic press strategy that was transparent to anyone paying the slightest bit of attention to the war. And they hurt him in U.S. military circles, where he was considered a showboating egotist and a devious political operator. Defense Secretary William Cohen told Clark, through Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton, "Get your fucking face off the TV." Shelton didn't trust him. Nor did Gen. Eric Shinseki, subsequently Army chief. And once the Kosovo operation was finished, Cohen--with no objection from President Clinton--ended Clark's tour of duty early. In essence, sacked him. Last month, the European edition of the U.S. military magazine Stars and Stripes carried an article asking how Clark came to receive a Kosovo Campaign Medal since you had to have either 30 consecutive or 60 nonconsecutive days in the Balkans to get one--and Clark had spent the war at NATO headquarters in Belgium. The implication was that he'd connived for it. And you'll notice the coolness with which this book has been received in top U.S. military circles.
Clark is trying to re-spin his own role at almost every turn in the crisis. "State and Pentagon battled out the issues," he writes. "I was occasionally asked my opinion, but this was a Washington fight. I kept my head down." And later: "Holbrooke didn't call routinely, and I always listened to what he said. But of course, I didn't take orders from him." Clark's Army colleagues will howl at such sentences.
What a brag fest this memoir is. One of the things Clark harps on--and he's a hectoring, preachy, anecdote-averse writer--is the importance of personality in war. He thinks his is just terrific, and on the off-chance that we don't, he's assiduously catalogued every compliment he's ever received from anyone: "One soldier sent a nice letter saying I was like Clint Eastwood." ... "A few weeks later, General Shalikashvili told me, 'Wes, you are the most well-known general in Europe.' " ... "I looked over to the British representative, Pauline Neville-Jones, for support. She had won high honors at Oxford as an undergraduate, and I felt she might be sympathetic to my approach." Oh--and pretty much everyone calls him "Sir."
Waging Modern War, in fact, frequently reminds me of Jeffrey Frank's hilarious recent novel, The Columnist, in which a Washington climber tries to take credit for pretty much every social advance of the last half-century. There's a stunning passage in which Clark describes a 1983 meeting with Colin Powell, in which the two of them were drafting a transition memo to the new Army chief of staff:
Emboldened, I suggested a line of argument: "Isn't the most important thing never to commit U.S. troops again unless we're going in to win? No more gradualism and holding back like in Vietnam, but go in with overwhelming force?" Again, Powell agreed, and we put it in the introduction.
In other words, Clark is claiming to be the real inventor of the Powell doctrine.
As you may perhaps glean, I was not (to put it mildly) a big fan of the Kosovo operation in the first place, and I think Clark was one of its least honorable and most self-serving participants. I'd be curious to know whether you think his record of the conflict is straight or slanted.
Dear Chris,
"Quivering with terror at the thought of physical violence and harsh words, Colin Powell begged me to reconsider. 'No!' he wailed, 'We can't say that. We mustn't! We must always ensure that U.S. troops are used as sitting ducks destined to give their lives in twos and threes while we take pointless meetings with important foreigners. We must always, always, commit our forces as gradually as possible so that America's sons and daughters give their lives most futilely and ingloriously. Viet Nam wasn't so bad, Wes.'"
That's what I would have liked for Colin Powell to have responded to Gen. Clark's duh-inducing pronouncement on military strategy--overwhelming force, fight to win--that you mentioned in your posting. Correctly or not, few post-Viet Nam GIs believe anything else. When I read that, I thought, deja bloody vu. This--the feigned artlessness, the self-congratulation, the stolen credit, the wild contortions of ass-covering, "doing" trumped by the flashy paper chase (briefings, talking papers, memos), Amen-corner banalities tossed off like gems of Talmudic brilliance--I don't miss. Â
I didn't follow the Kosovo crisis that closely, so I enter this discussion without an attitude problem toward Gen. Clark. Having spent 12 years on active duty in U.S. Air Force intelligence as well, I like the military. A lot. In fact, I dedicate my memoir to my parents and the USAF. I will encourage my 10-week-old son to do a hitch. All of that to say this: It was people like Gen. Clark who made me realize that I had no real future in the military if only because I didn't have the stomach for its particular brand of competition. Probably not the talent either, but definitely not the stomach.
To ascend to even medium levels, let alone the highest, you have to be political, crafty, opportunistic, and shameless, among many other things (excellent duty performance not always being one of them). Clark is clearly all those things, not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that. It takes certain kinds of folks to prosecute wars and run complicated organizations like the military of the planet's most powerful nation, so please, let's cut the organization men some slack. If sweet, befuddled Kurt Vonnegut were chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the USSR would reform, and we'd all have to learn Russian and dialectical materialism. Still, I began Waging Modern War expecting a vicarious trip down memory lane and was immediately annoyed. What got my hackles up (and I hate when that happens) was the "gee golly, ain't I just a country boy, how on earth did l'il ole me end up with all these purty stars?" tone of the book. Slick as a fox, he belittles that still prevalent GI fakery explicitly in discussing his early rise through the ranks, then engages in it in the very same paragraph.
It was a time of the "country-boy" and "jes' plain solderin'." Lots of people with fancy master's degrees and Ph.Ds kept it quiet if they could. It was the Vietnam backlash, though it took a long time to develop. I couldn't help what I had already done or how I had worked my way up. After the Rhodes scholarship and finishing at the top of the class in the Command and General Staff College, I had gotten an Army-wide reputation, and I was stuck with it, for better or worse.
Queasy yet? So, Chris, do I think his record of the conflict is straight or slanted? Guess. No one slings BS, shifts blame, and steals glory like a GI because the culture harshly punishes failure and mistakes even when no one is really to blame. Or when everyone is. Simultaneously, it so richly rewards whomever wins that the nature of the competition, I found, often seemed dishonorable. So what I must be saying is that I was too ambitious to stay when it was clear that I couldn't "win," so maybe I had the stomach after all. Just not the talent. Golly gee whiz.
Yours,
Debra
And they hurt him in U.S. military circles, where he was considered a showboating egotist and a devious political operator. Defense Secretary William Cohen told Clark, through Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton, "Get your fucking face off the TV." Shelton didn't trust him. Nor did Gen. Eric Shinseki, subsequently Army chief. And once the Kosovo operation was finished, Cohen--with no objection from President Clinton--ended Clark's tour of duty early. In essence, sacked him. Last month, the European edition of the U.S. military magazine Stars and Stripes carried an article asking how Clark came to receive a Kosovo Campaign Medal since you had to have either 30 consecutive or 60 nonconsecutive days in the Balkans to get one--and Clark had spent the war at NATO headquarters in Belgium. The implication was that he'd connived for it. And you'll notice the coolness with which this book has been received in top U.S. military circles.
OUCH!
What a brag fest this memoir is. One of the things Clark harps on--and he's a hectoring, preachy, anecdote-averse writer--is the importance of personality in war. He thinks his is just terrific, and on the off-chance that we don't, he's assiduously catalogued every compliment he's ever received from anyone:
OUCH!
Waging Modern War, in fact, frequently reminds me of Jeffrey Frank's hilarious recent novel, The Columnist, in which a Washington climber tries to take credit for pretty much every social advance of the last half-century.
OUCH!
In other words, Clark is claiming to be the real inventor of the Powell doctrine.
OUCH!
...I think Clark was one of its least honorable and most self-serving participants.
When I read that, I thought, deja bloody vu. This--the feigned artlessness, the self-congratulation, the stolen credit, the wild contortions of ass-covering, "doing" trumped by the flashy paper chase (briefings, talking papers, memos), Amen-corner banalities tossed off like gems of Talmudic brilliance...
OUCH!
What got my hackles up (and I hate when that happens) was the "gee golly, ain't I just a country boy, how on earth did l'il ole me end up with all these purty stars?" tone of the book.
OUCH! Both book reviews show what a phony and fraud Weasely Clark is.
And it's not like he has put these methods behind him. No wonder the Clintons like him.
Great find, PJ.
LOL!
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