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He eventually declared that he didnt 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 whos got a coherent message and the courage to deliver it, he said. It just seems to me that much of the Democratic dialogue, prelection, in recent years has been stressed in terms of policies. 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 Bushs 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 . 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. 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 Clarks boss in 1999 when Clark was unceremoniously told that he was being removed from his position as Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. 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.
The comments of Franks, Shelton, and others in the Clinton-era military and defense establishment suggest a paradox in Wesley Clarks 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. 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 Americas mistakes was that it had gone to war in Iraq without the mantle of authority bestowed by United Nations approval. But hadnt the Kosovo war also been conducted without the endorsement of the United States 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. 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 United States and resorted to an alliance with Prime Minister Tony Blairs 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;
He then told meas he has told othershow he came to learn of a secret war scheme within the Bush Administration, of which Iraq was just one piece. They made the decision to attack Iraq sometime soon after 9/11, Clark said. So, rather than searching for a solution to a problem, they had the solution, and their difficulty was to make it appear as though it were in response to a problem. Clark visited the Pentagon a couple of months later, and the same general told him that the Bush team, unable or unwilling to fight the actual terrorists responsible for the attacks, had devised a five-year plan to topple the regimes in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Iran, and Sudan. If the basic elements of the story have a familiar ring, it is because Clarks central contentionthat the Bush Administration used September 11th as a pretext to attack Saddamhas been part of the public debate, much discussed in many publications and broadcasts, since well before the Iraq war. That Rumsfeld turned his attention to Iraq almost immediately after the September 11th attacks was reported by Bob Woodward in his book Bush at War, published in November, 2002. Clark, in repeatedly telling his account, seems to suggest that he had special knowledge of a furtive Pentagon plan that would have the Administration hopscotching around the Middle East and knocking off states, as he put it. When the Administration began the buildup to war, Clark did not go public with those doubts. He spent much of the war as an expert military commentator on CNN, and writing editorial opinion pieces for various publications. Clark said that Saddam absolutely had weapons of mass destruction, and added, I think they will be found. In an opinion column in the London Times on April 10th, Clark predicted that the American victory would alter the dynamics of the region. Many Gulf states will hustle to praise their liberation from a sense of insecurity they were previously loath even to express. Egypt and Saudi Arabia will move slightly but perceptibly towards Western standards of human rights. Clark praised the Anglo-American alliance, saying that Bush and Blair should be proud of their resolve in the face of so much doubt. He called for victory parades down the Mall and Constitution Avenue, and, in another column, cheered the spectacular display of coalition force. American military power, especially when buttressed by Britains, is virtually unchallengeable today. Such public statements, of course, have made Clark vulnerable to charges by his Democratic opponents of irresoluteness on the war. He took six different positions on whether going to war was the right idea, Joseph Lieberman complained in the October 26th Democratic debate. In the Army, he was known as a brilliant officer and a rare analytical thinker who frequently was able to read a situation that others couldnt or wouldnt see. Yet he also had a certainty about the rightness of his views which led to conflicts with his colleagues and, sometimes, his superiors. Over the years, Clarks defenders have tended to accuse his critics of being hidebound or intellectually less sophisticated. When I asked Richard Holbrooke, who was Clintons special envoy to Bosnia, about Clark, he said, Let me start with the central issue, which is why so many military people dislike him.
Wes Clark is a water-walker, Rhodes Scholar, top-of-his-class guy, a classic brown-noser in the eyes of the tougher, more manly men in uniform. Retired General Dan Christman, perhaps Clarks closest friend in the military, also attributes the hostility toward Clark to the Armys divided culture. Youve got to be able to spit and chew and dip, and wear your cowboy boots, and clip your ings, Christman said. And, if you didnt do that, somehow you werent part of the crowd, and certainly you couldnt be a warrior. Clarks last three Army jobs, including two at the highest rank, were awarded to him without the Armys recommendation. Clark traces his problems with the Army culture to his days at West Point, and the resentment that he believed his achievement inspired. In the United States Army, from the time I was a West Point captain, really, I was sort of a marked man, he said, as we talked one day in New York. There are three terrible thin...
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