by Andy Jackson
NOTE: I hope this will be the first of a series of opposition research/issue pieces that Republicans can use to win the happy hour/coffee shop debates that help influence public opinion, especially in populations as small as the American ex-pat community in Korea. Submissions are welcome.
Before he even announced, there were groups of supporters creating "Draft Clark" groups. Within a week of declaring his candidacy, he rose to the top tier in most polls. His early fund raising has been so prolific that his campaign is already talking about forgoing federal matching funds.
Wesley Clark is considered by some Democrats to be their perfect candidate; socially liberal, fiscally conservative and a dove who has a chest full of medals. The military campaign he commanded in Kosovo was the most Politically Correct of wars; the targets were white Christians.
With the economy in full recovery and creating more jobs, the election will increasingly turn on events in Iraq.
Much of Clark's campaigning of late has been to attempt to Draw differences between the war in Kosovo and the war in Iraq. His first criticism of the Iraq war was that it was illegal, whereas the Kosovo campaign was legal. Differences of opinion about what is "legal" or "illegal" in international relations aside, his assertion is not factual. As pointed out in this article in the New Yorker, by Clark's own criteria the war in Kosovo was illegal:
The subject [of a conversation between Clark and the New Yorker reporter Peter Boyer] 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 America's mistakes was that it had gone to war in Iraq without "the mantle of authority" bestowed by United Nations approval. But hadn't the Kosovo war also been conducted without the endorsement of the U.N. 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. There was never a chance that it would be authorized." 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 U.N. and resorted to an alliance with Prime Minister Tony Blair's Britain and sundry lesser members of the "coalition of the willing."
Having been called out on his assertion that the war in Kosovo had legal backing while the war in Iraq did not, Clark retreated to an assertion that the war in Kosovo was more justified than the war in Iraq because of the threat of Serbian ethnic cleansing. However, Clark is also mistaken on that part, as noted by Andrew Sullivan of the New Republic:
Moreover, the "imminent threat" of ethnic cleansing is an odd casus belli. By the time of the Kosovo operation, the world had already stood by and watched the slaughter of a quarter of a million Bosnians by the Serbian fascist machine. That had triggered no war from the West. The same could be said for the holocaust in Rwanda, which the Clinton administration (and the United Nations) observed from afar. For Clark to argue that Kosovo was worse than either of those events is bizarre.
The threat of genocide in the Balkans was also, of course, another way in which the two wars were identical in legitimacy. There are an estimated 300,000 mass graves in Iraq today. Saddam's genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the Shia and the Marsh Arabs are and were no different than the monstrosities of Milosevic--except in scale and viciousness. Does Clark believe that leaving Saddam in power would have removed the "imminent threat" of further genocide and mass murder against the peoples of Iraq? Who is he kidding? Does he think that Uday and Qusay Hussein represented the hope of a more humane future? Of course not. If your criterion for intervention is the "imminent threat" of genocide, then Clark's defense of the Kosovo war necessitates an identical defense of the Iraq war. One more obvious distinction: Milosevic hadn't actually used gas or chemical weapons to kill civilians. Saddam did. Moreover, Milosevic had restricted his murderous military campaigns to the territories of the former Yugoslavia. Saddam had already launched wars against two neighboring states, Iran and Kuwait. A final point: Milosevic hadn't threatened the United States and hadn't attempted to assassinate the president of the United States. Saddam had. On humanitarian and realist grounds, toppling Saddam was far more legitimate than toppling Milosevic.
Clark's final complaint against that the war against Saddam was based on a false premise is also faulty:
Now let's take Clark's final point: that the war against Saddam was conducted "under false pretenses." Does he mean that Saddam had publicly and openly disarmed as he promised to do in 1991? Not even Jacques Chirac believed that; and the Kay report has already documented a vast apparatus of concealment and subterfuge to keep the WMD programs alive. Does Clark mean that he knew that no such WMDs existed? Nope. He already opined on CNN that Saddam "absolutely" had WMDs, adding, "I think they will be found. There's so much intelligence on this." Was it because the war turned out to be more destructive than had been planned for and promised? Again, it was a miraculously speedy, humane and successful war, as Clark also conceded on CNN. In the Times of London, as Boyer points out, Clark even went into hubristic mode: "American military power, especially when buttressed by Britain's, is virtually unchallengeable today. Take us on? Don't try!" If the Bush administration's intelligence was faulty, Clark signed onto it at the time. If the administration's strategy was wrong, Clark praised it at the time. He has absolutely no credibility in arguing that the war was conducted "under false pretenses."
He goes on to say that some of Clark's reasoning on the war against terror is "Ross Perot Crazy." I strongly urge you to read the rest of the New Republic article. In fact, I will link it again here.
BTW, if Clark gets far in the Democrat Primaries, here are a couple of pictures that you can expect to see. They are Clark playing around with Bosnian Serb commander and indicted war criminal Gen. Ratko Mladic in 1994. In all fairness to Clark, those pictures were taken 10 months before the the Srebrenica massacre that Mladic directed. But who said that Democrats were fair?
Here is an article about the meeting from World Net Daily.
You will also hear this phrase:
"I'm not going to start the third world war for you."
Here is a small part of an article from Antiwar.com:
"I'm not going to start the third world war for you," General Sir Mike Jackson, commander of the international KFOR peacekeeping force, is reported to have told Gen. Clark when he refused to accept an order to send assault troops to prevent Russian troops from taking over the airfield of Kosovo's provincial capital. The Times of London reported on 23 May 2001 in an article titled, "Kosovo clash of allied generals," that "General Sir Michael Jackson [was] told that he would have to resign if he refused to obey an order by the American commander of Nato's forces during the Kosovo war to stop the Russians from seizing control of Pristina airport in June 1999."
The BBC also reported on the incident.
I personally believe that the Clark campaign will eventually collapse under its own contradictions.
Prediction: Clark wins 3 or 4 states and drops out in April.
The Washington, DC chapter of the leftist Independent Media Center has published a partial list of delegates to the Republican National Convention on its web site. The list includes names, home addresses, and telephone numbers as well as the hotel of each delegate for the New York convention. The IMC says that its objective is to "supply anti-RNC groups with data on the delegates to use in whatever way they see fit."
