Posted on 01/15/2004 11:06:06 PM PST by Destro
JAN 16, 2004 FRI
Wesley Clark - the real Democratic dud
BY DOUG BANDOW
FOR THE STRAITS TIMES
FORMER General Wesley Clark has become the great hope for establishment Democrats seeking to stop front-runner Howard Dean in his quest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Yet Gen Clark, who has based his campaign on his foreign policy credentials, actually has the strangest foreign policy views of anyone in America's presidential race.
While Democrats were firing away at each other in the aftermath of the capture of Saddam Hussein, Gen Clark was at The Hague, seeking to hype his candidacy by testifying at the United Nations trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. Gen Clark, who prosecuted the 1999 war against Yugoslavia, suggested the tribunal be considered as 'one of the venues' for trying Saddam. That's actually a foolish idea. Saddam's crimes were first and foremost against the Iraqi people. Iraqis should hold him accountable. Moreover, however satisfying it is to see Milosevic in the dock, the idea that the UN has a right to create artificial ex post facto law should discomfit anyone who believes in the rule of law. Milosevic deserved to be tried, but in Yugoslavia.
The ultimate absurdity of concocting special international panels with limitless criminal authority was demonstrated when Belgium claimed global jurisdiction over all human rights abuses. Activists filed charges against political figures as varied as Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Belgium finally repealed the law after critics of the Iraq war threatened to target United States Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
But Gen Clark's greatest foolishness is his bizarre contention that Kosovo warranted military action while Iraq did not.
He is presenting himself as the anti-Bush with military experience. Alas, he is no Dwight D. Eisenhower, the World War II commander turned president.
Whatever Gen Clark's virtues as a military leader, his experience in Kosovo did not exhibit them. In that conflict, he led the world's most powerful military alliance against a small, impoverished country beset by a messy guerilla war. It didn't take the least bit of talent to win. In fact, only a genius could have found a way to lose. As he almost did.
First, he, like others in the Clinton administration, thought that a few bombs - indeed, the threat of a few bombs - would solve the problem. When they didn't, the alliance lacked a strategy.
Second, after the fighting had ended, he ordered British General Mike Jackson to block Russian troops from occupying the airport in Pristina, Kosovo.
'I'm not going to start World War III for you,' Gen Jackson replied. At least, most Americans would have known Gen Clark's name had he managed to get Nato into a shooting war with Russia after the West had peacefully won the Cold War.
Even worse, however, is Gen Clark's contention that his war was good while President George W. Bush's war was bad. I happen to think that neither was necessary, but set that aside. No serious person can claim that Yugoslavia posed a greater threat than Iraq did.
WHAT THREAT?
IN EARLY 1999, Yugoslavia was suffering through a nasty fight between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo. It was a tragic conflict, but far smaller and less deadly than a score of ethnic and religious wars around the globe. Genocide it was not.
Indeed, the mass expulsion of ethnic Albanians that dominated TV screens occurred only after Nato went to war: It was a result, not cause, of the conflict. And Gen Clark's victory has led to ethnic cleansing of Serbs, Jews, gypsies and non-Albanian Muslims.
Milosevic was a nasty character, but Gen Clark's claim that there was 'an imminent threat' of war is just plain silly. Milosevic's regime was bankrupt and isolated. It made no pretence of developing weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It wasn't capable of conquering its neighbours. It had no means to hurt the US.
Nor was war a last resort after diplomacy had failed, as Gen Clark said. The US tried to impose its own settlement, which neither the Albanians nor the Serbs supported. Washington offered an ultimatum, not diplomacy.
Iraq was completely different. Saddam had engaged in a policy of domestic brutality on a massive scale, killing tens, and probably hundreds, of thousands of people.
He ran a police state, attacked two of his neighbours, killing hundreds of thousands more, and, it seemed, was developing WMD. He was capable of cooperating with terrorists, though those connections remain unproved.
Of the two, Gen Clark thinks Yugoslavia posed the greatest danger? And warranted war without international sanction?
Such passes for foreign policy analysis from a leading presidential candidate.
Winning the American presidency will require that the Democratic nominee be taken seriously on foreign policy. Gen Wesley Clark is not that candidate.
The writer is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and a former special assistant to then US president Ronald Reagan.
But Gen Clark's greatest foolishness is his bizarre contention that Kosovo warranted military action while Iraq did not....the word vainglorious seems to fit the little 'bantie-rooster' very nicely.
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