GENERAL CLARK’S BATTLES-The candidate’s celebrated—and controversial

The first important decision of retired Army General Wesley Clark’s new political career was the long deferral of its launch. As Clark lodged safely in the rear echelon, the other Democratic Presidential aspirants spent most of the year hustling money at fund-raisers, finessing the Iraq question, and trying to befriend every citizen of Iowa and New Hampshire. By September, a bleak common wisdom had taken hold among Democratic Party pros: the established candidates were struggling, and an outsider, Howard Dean, seemed destined to win the nomination but would be a weak opponent for George W. Bush.

By mid-September, many Democrats were eager to be convinced that Wesley Clark was what Bill Clinton had reportedly declared him to be—the only Democrat besides Hillary Clinton who qualified as a true political “star.” He was the anointed choice of many in the Clinton wing of the Party, the stop-Dean candidate charged with keeping Democrats tethered to the center. When Clark finally announced his candidacy, in Little Rock on September 17th, he was surrounded by old Clinton hands and the national press; a loudspeaker played the theme music from the movie “The Natural.”

It quickly became apparent, however, that Clark, in terms of his oratorical prowess or personal magnetism, was not a natural at all. He required heavy handling on the campaign trail, where, as a political novice, he was prone to gaffes, such as his opening-week assertion that he “probably” would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing the war in Iraq. One of his press representatives described the misstep as “devastating, a huge mistake”; the mood among Democratic activists is unambiguously antiwar, and Clark’s subsequent attempts to amend his position have made him seem confused on the subject. (He eventually declared that he didn’t know the full content of the resolution.)

Still, Clark ascended immediately to the top in national polls, and he remains in the upper tier of candidates. On a late-night flight from Iowa City to Little Rock shortly after his announcement, I asked him how he explained his appeal. “Democrats are desperate for someone who’s got a coherent message and the courage to deliver it,” he said. “It just seems to me that much of the Democratic dialogue, preëlection, in recent years has been stressed in terms of policies. It’s ‘He believes in universal health care.’ Or ‘He believes in something else.’ Or it’s been expressed in terms of labelling. Like ‘He’s a moderate,’‘He’s a liberal.’ I think that my candidacy is not as easily tagged.”

Clark seemed to recognize that the central message of his candidacy is Wesley Clark, and the uniform he wore for thirty-four years as an officer in the United States Army. For many Democrats today, the uniform is a kind of talisman, a tool for neutralizing George Bush’s perceived strength on national defense. When Clark entered the race, the cartoonist Garry Trudeau devoted a full week of “Doonesbury” to a Clark homage. In one installment, the character Jeff Redfern reads an article about Clark: “‘A brilliant, telegenic, Southern Rhodes Scholar, decorated Vietnam hero and ex-Supreme Commander of nato.’ Whew! I wonder if Bush has the slightest clue what he may be up against.”

Soon after Clark entered the race, though, another Clinton-era general, Tommy Franks, who retired this summer after directing the capture of Baghdad, was asked in a private setting whether he believed that Clark would make a good President. “Absolutely not,” Franks replied. Retired General Hugh Shelton was asked the same question after giving a talk at a college in California. Shelton, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was Clark’s boss in 1999 when Clark was unceremoniously told that he was being removed from his position as Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. “I’ve known Wes for a long time,” Shelton said. “I will tell you the reason he came out of Europe early had to do with integrity and character issues, things that are very near and dear to my heart. . . . Wes won’t get my vote.” Shelton has refused to explain how he came to his conclusion.

Clark indicated that he was puzzled by such comments. “I’ve known Hugh Shelton for years,” he said, with a tight smile. “I always liked him.” The comments of Franks, Shelton, and others in the Clinton-era military and defense establishment suggest a paradox in Wesley Clark’s candidacy for President: his military career, the justification for his candidacy, may also be a liability.

Our conversations began on that flight to Little Rock, as we were squeezed into the rear of a borrowed Beechcraft King Air turboprop. Clark has often been described as tightly wound. He seems almost physically to exude an inner tension. He rarely blinks his eyes. When he does close them, he is able to impose on himself what he calls “sleep discipline,” nodding off instantly in the back of a plane, his arms clinched across his chest, tightly wound even in slumber. Our talk resumed a week later in New York, and concluded a week after that in Los Angeles. The subject was how the war in Iraq, which Clark calls a “historic blunder,” differed from the 1999 war over Kosovo, which Clark commanded. Clark was welcomed into the campaign by many Democrats as the triumphant commander of Kosovo, and he uses the lessons of Kosovo to explain his criticism of the Iraq war. In a speech at the University of Iowa College of Law, on September 19th, Clark had declared that chief among America’s mistakes was that it had gone to war in Iraq without “the mantle of authority” bestowed by United Nations approval. But hadn’t the Kosovo war also been conducted without the endorsement of the U.N. Security Council? Yes, Clark allowed, and in that regard the Kosovo war was “technically illegal.” He went on, “The Russians and the Chinese said they would both veto it. There was never a chance that it would be authorized.” That situation did not seem entirely dissimilar from the prewar maneuverings regarding Iraq, when France and Germany said that they would oppose any Security Council resolution authorizing an immediate war; Bush bypassed the U.N. and resorted to an alliance with Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Britain and sundry lesser members of the “coalition of the willing.” But there was one more important difference, Clark said: the war against Serbia was waged to stop the imminent threat of ethnic cleansing in the disputed province of Kosovo; the war in Iraq, he said, was waged under false pretenses. He then told me—as he has told others—how he came to learn of a secret war scheme within the Bush Administration, of which Iraq was just one piece.

I've collected the best excerpts from the piece.

On using ground troops:

Clark advocated an invasion of Kosovo with a force of two hundred thousand troops, mostly American. The force would move into Kosovo through Albania, because Macedonia had declared that it would not allow its territory to be used for launching an attack. Aside from the most obvious difficulty with Clark’s plan—that a major American-led ground invasion in the Balkans could not win the support of Congress, the Pentagon, the White House, or nato—there was a real problem regarding Albania. The country was already in chaos, and had almost no infrastructure. There was only one major road, and it was only partly paved, and there were few bridges that could support the mammoth tanks and fighting vehicles of the American Army. If an invasion were to occur on Clark’s time line, which was early autumn, the infrastructure would have to be put in place during the summer.

Clark outlined the plan to the Joint Chiefs in a video-teleconference, and they were starkly unsupportive. Dennis Reimer, the Army Chief of Staff, made it clear that he considered Clark’s plan ludicrous. General Shelton refused to go forward with any real planning for the invasion. A Clinton Defense official recalls, “Any of those elements of his most expansive plan would have, in our view and in the view of a number of thinking people, derailed what was a fairly fragile situation. And, in the judgment of many, many military professionals, it wouldn’t have worked anyway. It called into question the real military judgment being put behind it.”

On military action in Kosovo:

[Clark] seemed to o be promising a relatively painless way to break Milosevic: threaten him with the use of force, tell him that nato will bomb him if he doesn’t coöperate, and he will come to the negotiating table and agree to a Kosovo peace. Because of Dayton, Clark was confident that he could read Milosevic. “I knew Milosevic,” Clark told me. “I’m the only commander in the twentieth century, I think, that really knew his adversary.” Berger asked Clark what would happen if the threats didn’t work, and, later, General Joe Ralston, the vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs, pressed him on the same question.

“I know Milosevic,” Clark said, over and over. “It will work."

On Defense Secretary Bill Cohen's opinion of Clark:

Cohen, according to someone who worked closely with him, had come to regard Clark’s hiring as one of the worst mistakes of his tenure at Defense, and the relationship between the two men became so strained that one of the Joint Chiefs still groans at the memory of Cohen’s tortured body language when Clark would enter the room. What so vexed Cohen and the Chiefs was not just the fact that Clark had routinely gone behind their backs, or that Clark was so unyieldingly certain of his judgment. They believed that, too often, Clark’s judgment was wrong.

After Clark gave a briefing:

“Wes, at the White House meeting today there was a lot of discussion about your press conference,” [Clark's boss Hugh] Shelton said. “The Secretary of Defense asked me to give you some verbatim guidance, so here it is: ‘Get your f****ing face off the TV. No more briefings, period. That’s it.’ I just wanted to give it to you like he said it. Do you have any questions?”

On Clark's struggle to avoid getting fired:

One official who was involved in Clark’s hiring acknowledges that disagreements over policy matters and plans are inevitable during war: “But with Wes this became, as with everything else, the drama of ‘Will Wes’s moral rightness and brilliance be upheld and observed, or will it be thwarted?’ That became the nature of the drama, and if you were one of the people—notwithstanding having been dumb enough to give him the job—who were going to thwart his native brilliance, then you were going to get worked around and have five million other phone calls made, and it just got tiresome after a while.”

On Clark's firing:

Clark received a call from a Washington Post reporter, Bradley Graham, who’d been told about Clark’s removal. The leak was a cold-blooded, but effective, method of cutting off Clark’s escape routes. “He was probably not extended the traditional courtesies of receiving the news in an orderly and private manner,” the Defense official said. “Quite simply, we felt he could not be trusted to accept the decision.” Clark made a furious round of telephone calls, to no avail.

From Of Paradise and Power, by Robert Kagan, pp. 48, 49.

General Clark and his colleages complained that the laborious effort to preserve consensus within the alliance hampered the fighting of the war and delayed its conclusion. Before the war, Clark later insisted, "we could not present a clear and unambiguous warning to Milosevic," partly because many European countries would not threaten action without a mandate from the UN Security Council - what Clark in typically American fashion, called Europe's "legal issues." For the Americans, these "legal issues" were "obstacles to properly preparing and planning" for the war.*
During the fighting, Clark and his American colleagues were exasperated by the need constantly to find compromise between American military doctrine and what Clark called the "European approach."**
"It was always the American who pushed for escalation to new, more sensitive targets...and always some of the Allies who expressed doubts and reservations." In Clarks view, "We paid a price in operational effectiveness by having to constrain the nature of the operation to fit within the political and legal concerns of the NATO member nations"***

* Clark, Waging Modern War, pp. 420, 421.
** Ibid., p. 449.
*** Ibid., p. 426.

-----------------------------------------------------------

Our Illegal War - April 26, 1999 - "It is a remarkable spectacle to see the Clinton Administration and NATO taking over from the Soviet Union the role of sponsoring "wars of national liberation." More remarkable still, and even more unsettling, is the fact that the beneficiary in the case of Kosovo — the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) — is a collection of Maoist drug-peddlers and terrorists who have been armed by Iran and provided with training and support by Saudi terrorist financier Osama bin Ladin, who is the world’s most notorious sponsor of international terrorism. When Bill Clinton, in an earlier crime against the Constitution, unilaterally launched missile strikes on Afghanistan and Sudan, he claimed that his target was the terrorist network operated by bin Ladin. However, in Kosovo, Bill Clinton has committed America’s military might to the support of bin Ladin’s Balkan allies, and the policy of the Clinton Administration seeks the creation of a Balkan outpost for bin Ladin’s terrorist network."

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.