Clark's credibility gap -

Wesley Clark, the four-star general who commanded US forces in Europe during the Kosovo war, is running for president as an opponent of the war in Iraq. So what will he say, a questioner asks, when the Bush camp levels the obvious criticism: If General Clark had his way, Saddam Hussein would still be in power.

"If General Clark had his way," the candidate instantly replies, "we'd have had Osama bin Laden dead or alive two years ago, and the world would have been a lot safer. And then we'd have used the United Nations to go after Saddam Hussein the right way."

Coming from one of the other Democratic candidates, that might be dismissed as empty rhetoric. But Clark has had extensive experience in the Balkans and ought to know something about capturing international war criminals. After all, the two most-wanted men in the world before Sept. 11, 2001, were Radovan Karadzic, the former president of the Bosnian Serbs, and Ratko Mladic, the head of the Bosnian Serb army. They are widely considered responsible for the worst atrocities in Europe since World War II, including the bloody "ethnic cleansing" of Bosnia and Croatia, the murderous siege of Sarajevo, the slaughter of 7,000 unarmed boys and men in what was supposed to be the safe haven of Srebrenica, and the systematic rape of thousands of Bosnian women and girls.

Karadzic and Mladic were indicted in 1995 by the UN war-crimes tribunal, but their barbarity was common knowledge well before that. As far back as 1992 they were publicly identified by then-Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger as key war-crimes suspects. So how did Clark, who claims he would have "had Osama bin Laden dead or alive two years ago," collar the two Serb butchers?

And yet it probably is fair to say that Clark knows more about dealing with war criminals than the rest of the Democratic field. After all, none of the other candidates has ever horsed around with a mass murderer. Clark has.

On Aug. 27, 1994, when he was a three-star general working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Clark paid a visit to Mladic in Bosnia. In so doing, the Washington Post reported, he "ignored State Department warnings not to meet with Serb officials suspected of ordering deaths of civilians." Clark says he wanted to get Mladic's views for a policy paper he was writing and thought he had permission to do so.

Either way, Clark did more than take notes. The two men drank wine and posed for jovial pictures that showed them merrily wearing each other's caps. Mladic plied Clark with other gifts, too -- a bottle of brandy and a pistol inscribed, in Cyrillic lettering, "From General Mladic." It was, one disgusted commentator wrote at the time, like "Ike going to Berlin while the Germans were besieging Leningrad, and having schnapps with Hermann Goering."

Today Clark acknowledges that cavorting with the infamous killer "wasn't the right thing to have done." He says that after Mladic and Karadzic were indicted, "I did try" to apprehend them. But having to work with allies -- the stabilization of Bosnia was a NATO operation -- made it impossibly difficult. "Karadzic was in the French sector," Clark explains, and seizing him would have "required a degree of cooperation with other powers that proved difficult for some in the US government to accept. There remained rumors of some kind of French connection," he adds darkly, "rumors that have been denied vigorously by Paris."

Whatever the French may or may not have done, the failure to catch Mladic and Karadzic underscores some of the drawbacks to internationalizing US foreign policy. Clark experienced similar frustration during the Kosovo war, when bombing targets had to be approved in advance by the 19 NATO governments. Yet today, bowing to the Democratic fetish for multilateralism, he mechanically insists that the conduct of the war in Iraq be taken out of US hands and turned over to an international organization.

"I would go to NATO," Clark says, "and I would tell John Abizaid, the [US] commander, 'You're now working for NATO.' " And what would that change, exactly? Not much, Clark admits. "When you do NATO, it's the United States, anyway, that's doing it. I mean, NATO doesn't have an intelligence system. It relies almost exclusively on the United States." It is an incoherent position, and the more he tries to clarify it, the more he retreats into windy platitudes. "I think if the United States works in efficient multilateralism through NATO, we can move the world."

Before he became a presidential candidate, Clark plainly supported the Iraq war resolution; since entering the race, he has tied himself into knots insisting that he actually opposed it. Before becoming a candidate, he described Saddam as a menace requiring urgent action -- "the clock is ticking," he said last year. Now Clark labors to explain why Saddam wasn't a burning issue -- "there was no ticking clock," he said last week.

With each passing day, Candidate Clark sounds less and less like General Clark -- which is to say, less and less like the man so many Democrats were eager to support for president. Even for a commander who was first in his class at West Point, that doesn't seem like a strategy for victory.

"Karadzic was in the French sector," Clark explains, and seizing him would have "required a degree of cooperation with other powers that proved difficult for some in the US government to accept. There remained rumors of some kind of French connection," he adds darkly, "rumors that have been denied vigorously by Paris."

France's ambassador to Nato has strongly rejected reports that a French military officer tipped off the Bosnian Serbs about last week's failed operation to arrest Radovan Karadzic.

When there is a failed operation it is always tempting to find an excuse

Benoit D'Aboville
French ambassador to Nato
Benoit D'Aboville told the BBC that an alleged telephone conversation between the French captain and a Bosnian Serb police officer, apparently warning the Bosnian Serbs about the imminent operation, "never took place".

He said that the story was made up as an excuse for Nato's public failure to capture the Bosnian Serb wartime leader and the international war crimes tribunal's most wanted suspect.

But a German journalist who broke the story about the alleged leak told BBC News Online that he was standing by his story, which he said had been confirmed by intelligence sources.

Franz-Josef Hutsch, of the German newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt, said Nato's rejection of the reports was "not credible".

Last minute escape

Nato launched its largest-scale operations yet to capture Mr Karadzic on Thursday and Friday last week.

Hundreds of Nato troops as well as helicopters and armoured vehicles were deployed to seal off the village of Celibici, near Foca. But Mr Karadzic is reported to have fled the area in the nick of time.

The Abendblatt and the UK's Times newspaper reported separately on Monday that the French officer had given the Bosnian Serb the tip-off about the plan.

That the conversation took place is not debatable

Franz-Josef Hutsch
Hamburger Abendblatt
The Times carried details of a transcript of the conversation which it said had been monitored by British intelligence.

Franz-Josef Hutsch said his transcript, which was less detailed, had come from another western European member of Nato's Stabilisation Force (S-For), but was not from the British source quoted by the Times.

Both transcripts quoted the French officer as telling the Bosnian Serb policeman: "Foca and its neighbourhood are always interesting for us".

"That the conversation took place is not debatable," Mr Hutsch told BBC News Online.

"The Times came on the scene with exactly the same quotation, word for word," he said, adding that he had not spoken to the Times until after the story had broken.

Mr Hutsch says he has received separate confirmation from one of Mr Karadzic's bodyguards that a warning had been given.

The bodyguard, known as Beli Vuk (White Wolf) said that Mr Karadzic had fled the village of Celibici in a black Cherokee jeep 45 minutes before the Nato forces arrived.

The bodyguard did not say whether the warning had come from the French captain.

Nato inquiry

On Monday, S-For said the allegations of a French tip-off were being thoroughly investigated.

Nato Secretary-General Lord Robertson said later in the day that there was no evidence to support the claims, which he described as "pure speculation".

This is not the first time French officers have been accused of helping out the Serbs, who are traditionally their allies.

Last December a French army major was jailed for spying for Belgrade ahead of Nato's Kosovo campaign.

On 28 February, 2002 US special forces landed four helicopters in the mountain village of Celebici in Eastern Bosnia without bothering to inform Nato Headquarters in Brussels of the operation.

The US commander General Sylvester using information supplied by Bosnian intelligence authorised the biggest operation ever to lift Karadzic. They missed him.

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