Many public affairs commentators are guilty of concealing their ideological
and personal preferences from their audiences and grinding their axes
under the guise of value-neutral analysis. Neoconservative ultra-Zionists
parading as American patriots, apologists for jihad pretending to be
serious scholars of Islam, and promoters of racial discrimination dressed
up as civil rights activists, are among the first to come to my mind;
but the list is endless, and the culprits are to be found at all ends
of the political spectrum.
"Objectivity" is bunk, of course, but coolness, detachment, and seriousness
are admirable conservative traits that can be upheld even as we retain
the awareness of what we cherish and the clarity of what we abhor. For
that reason I have decided not to write a comprehensive expose of General
Wesley Clark, following the announcement of his presidential bid last
week. I loath that man so deeply that coolness and detachment would
be feigned, and scathing sarcasm-however concealed-would be real. Our
readers deserve better. Like a conscientious juror I declare myself
unfit to pass the judgment on this one, and hereby let others speak
for me. The selection is neither random nor "balanced," it belongs to
the News Unfit to Pint. You've been warned.
Instead of keeping the juiciest plum for the finale let us have it
for starters. A well documented episode from the Kosovo war-for which
we provide just one of many credible sources-indicates that Clark is
singularly ill-equipped to be the commander-in-chief of the most powerful
armed force the world has ever known:
If Nato's supreme commander, the American General Wesley Clark, had
had his way, British paratroopers would have stormed Pristina airport
threatening to unleash the most frightening crisis with Moscow since
the end of the cold war. ‘I'm not going to start the third world war
for you,' General Sir Mike Jackson, commander of the international K-For
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. Jackson
was deadly serious… The Russians had made a political point, not a military
one. It was apparently too much for Clark [who] ordered an airborne
assault on the airfield by British and French paratroopers. General
Jackson refused… Jackson got full support from the British government
for his refusal to carry out the American general's orders. When Clark
appealed to Washington, he was allegedly given the brush-off.
-the Guardian, London, August 3, 1999.
Unlike Wellington and Schwarzkopf, Clark's not a muddy boots soldier.
He's a military politician… Known by those who've served with him as
the ‘Ultimate Perfumed Prince,' he's far more comfortable in a drawing
room discussing political theories than hunkering down in the trenches
where bullets fly and soldiers die."
-Col. David Hackworth-the most decorated American soldier alive-in his
1999 commentary "Defending America (http://www.hackworth.com/20Apr99.html)
As for his ability as a military leader, Gen. Clark failed on two counts-the
air campaign and his plan for a ground campaign… Gen. Clark is the kind
of general we saw too often during the Vietnam War and hoped never to
see again in a position of responsibility for the lives of our GIs and
the security of our nation. That it happened once again we can thank
that other Rhodes scholar from Arkansas.
-Col. George Jatras, Starts & Stripes (European edition), October
13-19, 2002
The air campaign against the Serb military in Kosovo was largely ineffective.
NATO bombs plowed up some fields, blew up hundreds of cars, trucks and
decoys, and barely dented Serb artillery and armor. According to a suppressed
Air Force report obtained by NEWSWEEK, the number of targets verifiably
destroyed was a tiny fraction of those claimed: 14 tanks, not 120; 18
armored personnel carriers, not 220; 20 artillery pieces, not 450. Out
of the 744 ‘confirmed' strikes by NATO pilots during the war, the Air
Force investigators, who spent weeks combing Kosovo by helicopter and
by foot, found evidence of just 58… The Air Force protested that tanks
are hard to hit from 15,000 feet, but Clark insisted. Now that the war
is long over, neither the generals nor their civilian masters are eager
to delve into what really happened. Asked how many Serb tanks and other
vehicles were destroyed in Kosovo, General Clark will only answer, ‘Enough.'
… At the end of the war the Serbs' ground commander, Gen. Nobojsa Pavkovic,
claimed to have lost only 13 tanks. ‘Serb disinformation,' scoffed Clark.
But quietly, Clark's own staff told him the Serb general might be right…
His team found dozens of burnt-out cars, buses and trucks-but very few
tanks. When General Clark heard this unwelcome news, he ordered the
team out of their helicopters: ‘Goddammit, drive to each one of those
places. Walk the terrain.' The team grubbed about in bomb craters, where
more than once they were showered with garbage the local villagers were
throwing into these impromptu rubbish pits… They briefed Gen. Walter
Begert, the Air Force deputy commander in Europe. ‘What do you mean
we didn't hit tanks?' Begert demanded. Clark had the same reaction.
‘This can't be,' he said. ‘I don't believe it.' Clark insisted that
the Serbs had hidden their damaged equipment and that the team hadn't
looked hard enough. Not so, he was told. A 50-ton tank can't be dragged
away without leaving raw gouges in the earth, which the team had not
seen… Interviewed by NEWSWEEK, General Clark refused to get into an
on-the-record discussion of the numbers.
-"The Kosovo Cover-Up," Newsweek, May 15, 2000, by John Barry And Evan
Thomas
We are going to systematically and progressively attack, disrupt, degrade,
devastate and ultimately destroy these forces and their facilities and
support unless President Milosevic complies with the demands of the
international community.
-Gen. Clark in Los Angeles Times, 26 March 1999.
He presided over the massive use of depeleted uranium weapons, which
poisoned Yugoslavia's water supply and agriculture, leading to an extremely
high rate of miscarriages and childhood cancers… Clark called the destruction
of a Yugoslav train filled with civilians by a NATO missile ‘an uncanny
accident.' He said the same each time that NATO bombed civilian targets.
-Mitchel Cohen in http://www.counterpunch.org/cohen09172003.html
[Clark] would rise out of his seat and slap the table. ‘I've got to
get the maximum violence out of this campaign-now!'
-Washington Post, 21 September 1999, p. 1.
A man of gargantuan vanity, arrogant to subordinates and subservient
to superiors, obsessed with micro-management, and politically savvy
at the expense of military expertise… One officer who served with Clark
termed him "The poster child for everything that is wrong with
the [general officer] corps," and said that under Clark's command,
the 1st [Armored] Cavalry Division at Fort Hood was "easily the
worst division I have ever seen in 25 years of doing this stuff."
-CounterPunch; November 12, 1999
Certainly the Waco onslaught bears characteristics typical of Gen. Wesley
Clark: the eagerness to take out the leader (viz., the Clark-ordered
bombing of Milosevich's private residence); the utter disregard for
the lives of innocent men, women and children; the arrogant miscalculations
about the effects of force; disregard for law, whether of the Posse
Comitatus Act governing military actions within the United States or,
abroad, the purview of the Nuremberg laws on war crimes and attacks
on civilians.
-Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn09182003.html
This was the war, remember, where the first attack was made on a radio
station, the Serb Radio and Television building. Since then we've had
attacks twice on the Al Jazeera television station. First of all in
Afghanistan in 2001, then killing their chief correspondent, and again
in Baghdad, this year. This was a general who I remember bombed series
of bridges, in one of which an aircraft bombed the train and after,
he'd seen the train and had come to a stop, the pilot bombed the bridge
again. I saw one occasion when a plane came in, bombed a bridge over
a river in Serbia proper, as we like to call it, and after about 12
minutes when rescuers arrived, a bridge too narrow even for tanks, bombed
the rescuers. I remember General Clark telling us that more than 100
Yugoslav tanks had been destroyed in the weeks of that war. And when
the war came to an end, we discovered number of Yugoslav tanks destroyed
were 11. 100 indeed. So this was not a man, frankly whom, if I were
an American, would vote for, but not being an American, I don't have
to.
-Robert Fisk, interviewed by Amy Goodman, http://www.indybay.org/news/2003/09/1647153.php
