Reply #57: Wes Clark is "The General Who Did Too Good a Job"

[ClarkUSA]

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The Washington Post
The Unappreciated General
International Herald Tribune The General Who Did Too Good a Job

By Patrick B. Pexton
Tuesday, May 2, 2000; Page A23

Nine years ago, Washington put on a lavish victory parade for the conquering troops of Desert Storm. The nation cheered the men and women who, in a
six-week air campaign and 100-hour ground war, with only 148 combat deaths, defeated a ruthless dictator who had seized and pillaged a neighboring land. The generals who led an unwieldy multinational coalition to triumph were feted, toasted and mentioned as presidential material.

Not so for the general who won Kosovo, although he too ousted a
murderous tyrant who burned and occupied a neighboring land. This general also led a cumbersome multinational coalition to victory in a short war--this time with zero combat deaths. But Gen. Wesley Clark, supreme allied commander Europe, will come home to no special welcome, no TV or book deals and no talk of the presidency. Clark's reward for victory is early retirement. Tomorrow, several months before his tour of duty would normally end, Clark will turn over the European command to an officer more to the liking of the ever-cautious White House and defense secretary.


Clark's problem was that he was a great general but not always a perfect
soldier--at least when it came to saluting and saying, "Yes, sir." In fact, when he got orders he didn't like, he said so and pushed to change them.

Clark disapproved the gradualism of the initial bombing campaign against
Belgrade. He wanted to hit hard and massively. But NATO governments and
diplomats in Washington felt Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic would
yield after only a few bombs and cruise missiles, as he had in Bosnia. They were wrong. Clark, who was part of the delegation that negotiated the Dayton accords with Milosevic, knew Kosovo was integral to Serb identity and to Milosevic's rise to power. He would not give it up easily.

When it became clear the initial NATO bombing wasn't working, Clark
pushed for every airplane he could get, much to the dismay of the U.S. Air Force. Indeed, one of the unsung accomplishments of Kosovo is how quickly Clark built up air power--far faster than was done in Desert Storm. Clark prodded and cajoled the Europeans and the White House into accepting expanded, and riskier, target lists. He ordered 50 Apache attack helicopters to take the battle to the Serb ground troops, only to see the force reduced in size and then left to sit in Albania while the White House and Pentagon fretted about casualties. Clark also was right about readying troops for an invasion. The preparations for a ground war helped persuade Milosevic to surrender.

More presciently, Clark was right about the Russians. When fewer than
200 lightly armed Russian peacekeepers barnstormed from Bosnia to the
Pristina airport in Kosovo to upstage the arrival of NATO peacekeepers,
Clark was rightly outraged. Russians did not win the war, and he did not
want them to win the peace.

Clark asked NATO helicopters and ground troops to seize the airport before the Russians could arrive. But a British general, absurdly saying he feared World War III (in truth the Russians had no cards to play), appealed to London and Washington to delay the order.

The result was a humiliation for NATO, a tonic for the Russian military and an important lesson for the then-obscure head of the Russian national security council, Vladimir Putin. As later Russian press reports showed, Putin knew far more about the Pristina operation than did the Russian defense or foreign ministers. It was no coincidence that a few weeks afterward, Russian bombers buzzed NATO member Iceland for the first time in a decade. A few weeks after that, with Putin as prime minister, Russian troops invaded Chechnya. Putin learned the value of boldness in the face of Western hesitation. Clark learned that he had no backup in Washington.

Recent events in Kosovo show that Clark's bosses in the Pentagon and
White House still don't get it. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Henry Shelton, rebuked Clark in February for using 350 American soldiers to reinforce French troops who were unable to quell violence between Albanians and Serbs. After the American reinforcements were pelted with
rocks and bottles, Shelton and the White House, panicky about potential
casualties, told Clark not to volunteer U.S. troops again.

But Clark was right to act. He understood the value of using force quickly and early to show who was in control, and to demonstrate to the European allies that the United States is willing to put lives at risk too.

Both Desert Storm and Kosovo were imperfect victories because the despots who caused them were left in power. But the military fought them well. The thousands of Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps pilots and support troops who quietly rejoined their squadrons when the Kosovo war ended deserve more than a historical footnote. And Clark deserves more than a pink slip.

The writer is a managing editor at National Journal.