Posted on 11/16/2003 9:42:45 PM PST by HAL9000
WASHINGTON — Retired general Wesley Clark warned Sunday that the failure to capture Saddam Hussein was likely to undermine any new Iraqi government. And he said it was important to capture Saddam alive so he could be tried for war crimes.Clark's comments, at a session with USA TODAY and Gannett News Service reporters and editors, came as the Bush administration was accelerating the turnover of civilian authority to Iraqis. Clark praised the decision as a move "in the right direction" but said no regime was likely to succeed if Saddam stayed on the lam.
"It's going to be very hard for the United States to turn the problem over to the Iraqis if Saddam is still there as the, we might say, illegitimate ruler," said Clark, a Democratic presidential contender. "It's going to make it very hard for an Iraqi government to survive." The Bush administration, under fire for a growing toll of U.S. casualties, agreed this weekend to turn over political control by July 1, regardless of Saddam's whereabouts.
Clark also announced that he would go to the Netherlands next month to testify at the United Nations war-crimes trial of Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav president. As supreme allied commander of NATO, Clark led a 78-day bombing campaign in 1999 to expel Yugoslav forces that were brutalizing ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, a province of Serbia.
Clark said capturing Saddam should be "a high priority," though administration officials now downplay the search for him. An audiotape purportedly by the ousted Iraqi leader was aired on Arab TV on Sunday. It exhorted Iraqis to wage war against U.S. forces.
Saddam's ability to elude the United States has been an embarrassment for the Bush administration. In the war's early days, President Bush vowed that Saddam would be caught "dead or alive."
Paul Bremer, U.S. administrator of Iraq, said on Fox News Sunday that Saddam should be killed. "The fact that he's still alive and on the loose gives the ability of people around him to hold open the idea that the Baathists will come back," He said, referring to Saddam's party. "So it is important to kill him."
Clark said it was important to catch him alive: "I would hate to see us bust into a bunker and not be able to bring him out alive to stand trial. One of the things you really want to establish is rule of law. It's the essence of peacekeeping and stability operations."
For the same reason, he said, the United States should have participated in the International Criminal Court. The Bush administration has refused for fear that U.S. forces would be subject to politically motivated prosecution.
Clark said he hadn't seen the evidence of Saddam's war crimes, a comment that prompted adviser Chris Lehane to slip him a folded note. "You should make clear that Saddam is a bad guy," the note read. Clark glanced at the note but didn't return to the topic.
Clark has been at or near the top of national polls since he entered the race in September. However, he trails in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the first contests will be held, and his missteps have raised questions about his campaign. He is trying to regain momentum with a $1.1 million, two-month TV ad campaign in New Hampshire. The ads highlight his military career.
Clark, 58, fielded questions for more than an hour. He was most passionate in defending his decision to push for U.S. military action against ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. He says debate over that action accounts for criticism leveled at him by William Cohen, who was Defense secretary at the time, and Hugh Shelton, who was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"I don't think Secretary Cohen or the Pentagon fully appreciated what was going on," he said. Cohen moved to cut short Clark's tenure at NATO. Shelton has said Clark's early departure "had to do with integrity and character issues."
"There was never any integrity or character issue there," Clark said. "This was just a policy dispute that people let get personal."
At one point, tears welled in his eyes as he leafed through a book of photographs he had brought of the conflict in Kosovo. He displayed pictures of a Serb soldier kicking a woman lying on the street and of a 5-day-old baby who had died of exposure in the mountains, where her family had fled.
"This is the pornography of violence," he said. He noted that the United States didn't act to stop a bloody civil war in Rwanda. "We dillied and we dallied," he said. "I said I never would let something like that happen again."
Freerepublic calls for Wesley Clark to STFU and go away.
Poor Clark, he lost an issue to complain about. Do Democrats ever do anything but sit in the back seat and repeat "Are we there yet?"? :^)
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