WESLEY CLARK: THE SCORE by Srdja Trifkovic September 27, 2003 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>
Copyright 2003, www.ChroniclesMagazine.org
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