In the posts below, the NY Times takes shots at General Clark. Now, the New Yorker eviscerates both his current campaign and his conduct of the Kosovo campaign.
Soundbite: Clark, in campaign mode, has taken a variety of positions on Iraq.
Meanwhile, back in Kosovo, he misjudged Milosevic, believing that the threat of bombing would be sufficient; he misjudged Milosevic's resilience and resolve, believing that a short (three days?!?) air campaign would suffice; and he correctly anticipated difficulties getting 19 nations to agree on targets, but misjudged the humanitarian consequences.
Although excerpts can not do this justice, here we go:
But first, an update - from the New Yorker to the New Republic - Andrew Sullivan joins in.
As do the Brothers Judd, with thoughts from pollster and savant Dick Morris.
Now, Jane Galt doesn't even like Clark for Vice President. Where's the bottom?
UPDATE: The Clark rally begins with Fred Kaplan at Slate rebutting the New Yorker.
...[Gen. Clark] 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.)
...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.
...In his 2001 book “War in a Time of Peace,” David Halberstam describes the view of an officer who became Clark’s most powerful supporter in the military, General John Shalikashvili:
"What the Army disliked about Wes Clark, Shalikashvili believed, was an unusual amalgam of the personal and the professional. For all his obvious talents, he was too brash and cocky, too sure that his way was the right way, and therefore not a good listener and difficult to deal with. In addition, people felt that he was so driven and so absorbed in his mission—far too self-absorbed, it seemed to many of his critics. . . . He lacked the warmth and humanity that truly great commanders need. . . .There was more than an element of truth in that belief, Shalikashvili thought."
That is just prelude... on to Kosovo!
...As SACEUR (Supreme Allied Commander, Europe), Clark defined for himself a role with unprecedented latitude. In policy areas, an American military commander’s principal purpose is to advise the civilian authority (the Defense Secretary being his first channel) about the military costs and consequences of a particular policy. Clark pushed his advisory role to the point of policy advocacy, and it began to seem to some in Washington that American policy was being partly crafted from Château Gendebien. The Clinton White House was distracted by domestic political concerns (among them, a Republican Congress, Monica Lewinsky, and impeachment), which amplified Clark’s influence. Clark became involved in the political side of the turbulent events in the Balkans, which now centered on the disputed province of Kosovo. His superiors at the Pentagon felt there was no reason to believe that America would play a role there; it wasn’t America’s fight. He felt differently. “Kosovo was simply an extension of Bosnia in the mind of Wesley Clark,” Holbrooke said. “For Clark, Kosovo was the logical next step in his liberal interventionist attitude toward the use of force.”
...Clark decided that Milosevic, his old antagonist from Dayton, had to be stopped, and that it was time for a true democracy in Belgrade. He appealed to Washington. “I was told, ‘Forget it, we’re not interested in what you’re saying, we’ve got too much on our plates back here, you make us nervous,’” he said.
...Clark soon began to push his case directly to Clinton’s national-security adviser, Sandy Berger. Clark knew that the White House had been advised by Defense Secretary Cohen and the Joint Chiefs to stay out of the Kosovo fight, and Clinton’s people, remembering the 1993 debacle in Somalia, were reluctant to use American force in the Balkans. With regard to the Kosovo conflict, even the merits of intervening were open to question. Milosevic was a tyrant, and his retaliations were brutal, but did the United States really want nato to ally itself with the Kosovo Liberation Army?
Clark, however, seemed to 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.”
...An all-out diplomatic effort got under way in February, 1999, at a palace in Rambouillet, outside Paris. Clark, however, was barred from the palace. 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...
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.
The negotiations went badly. The Albanian Kosovars refused for a time to budge from their position of absolute autonomy, and eschewed the diplomatic niceties. (When Albright flew to Rambouillet in the hope that her presence might help to move things along, the Albanian delegation, working late at night, mistook her for a cleaning woman and told her to go away.) Clark had assured the White House that Milosevic would acquiesce, but the Serbian leader did not, and the talks ended in March.
“If you look back at the basics of it,” one Clinton Defense Department official recalls, “Wes’s strongly held view was ‘If we just threaten to bomb, he’ll fold, I know this guy. This won’t last forty-eight hours.’” Months earlier, when General Ralston had asked Clark what would happen if he was wrong about Milosevic, Clark had responded, “Well, then we’ll bomb.”
...Air Force General Michael Short, had been planning for just such an eventuality. Months earlier, Short had presented to Clark his team’s plan for a classic air campaign, one that would hit Milosevic hard and fast. The first strikes would take down the Serb air-defense system, followed quickly by bombing attacks against what Short called the “strategic target set”—the country’s power grid, communications systems, key bridges, routes in and out of Belgrade, and a half-dozen military command centers. To Short’s dismay, Clark did not approve the plan. Clark had his own reasons. He knew that direct hits against Belgrade would never be approved by nato’s member nations. His hope was that, once the ineffectiveness of a more limited campaign became apparent, NATO would agree to a bombing escalation.
...This meant that much of the early air war was conducted in Kosovo itself, a scenario that had nato bombers trying to hit Serb tanks from fifteen thousand feet, to little effect. It didn’t help that a French major at nato headquarters leaked a potential nato target list to the Serbs. Short hated this kind of war—“tank plinking,” he called it—and refused even to refer to it as an “air campaign.” More than once, he came close to quitting his command in frustration. Short had complained to Clark about the lack of targets, but Clark assured him, “This will be over in three nights.”
...When Milosevic refused to fold after just a few days of bombing, the nato bombers quickly ran out of approved targets, and were failing to destroy, or even to seriously erode, the Serb force inside Kosovo. The bombing seemed to have accelerated the very ethnic cleansing that it was supposed to have prevented; after a month of bombing, nearly a million Kosovars had been displaced.
...Clark decided that nato had to intensify the bombing and to prepare for a ground invasion of Kosovo. Actual ground war, as against preparing for it, was an unlikely prospect at best, opposed by almost all of the allies and expressly precluded by President Clinton, but it consumed Clark’s thinking for the rest of the war, and was the cause of his final, irreversible estrangement from Washington.
As Secretary Cohen and the Joint Chiefs saw it, Clark, in lobbying for negotiations and then for going to war in Kosovo, had misread Milosevic twice. Now Clark was advocating the war’s escalation, and there was an impression that he would be no more constrained in his advocacy than he had been before. The Pentagon dared not jeopardize a delicate alliance by firing Clark in the midst of a war, but its lack of confidence was clearly conveyed to him.
...What Cohen hoped for was an intensified air campaign, and a diplomatic solution, which he believed was within reach. Nevertheless, Clark continued to focus on preparations for a ground war, and the plan he ultimately proposed was greeted in Washington with astonishment. “Gallipoli springs to mind,” one defense expert, who made a study of Clark’s plan, says. 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.”
Clark’s friend Dan Christman acknowledges that the ground plan may have seemed impractical. “But the question of its feasibility was totally beside the point,” he said. “It was as much psychological as it was military. He wanted to convince Milosevic that we were prepared to go in.”
...Clark learned of the end of his two-year appointment as European commander in July, 1999. He had counted on getting the customary extension of another year, perhaps two, but the ceaseless battles with the Pentagon had precluded it. In Cohen’s office, the animosity against him was irreparable. 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.”
OK, that is more than enough to catch the spirit.
When considering the merits of Clark, I think it well to take with a grain of salt any recommendtion made by an Army peer. Army Generals tend to be clany and smoozy, and then there is always professional jealousy. Besides these peer are probably thoroughly Republican!
Posted by: Sydell Stokes | December 07, 2003 at 02:13 AM
When considering the merits of Clark, I think it well to take with a grain of salt any recommendtion made by an Army peer. Army Generals tend to be clany and smoozy, and then there is always professional jealousy. Besides these peer are probably thoroughly Republican!
Posted by: Sydell Stokes | December 07, 2003 at 02:13 AM