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The Real Story:
Why General Clark
Research and writing by Mike Pridmore Unofficial, private volunteer research
Although this is an incomplete discussion done hurriedly to respond to a specific questioner, the key facts are nevertheless addressed.
First, it is well-documented that after seeing what happened in Rwanda, General Clark willingly took a risk to see that something was done to stop Milosevic and prevent ethnic slaughter in Kosovo.
[i]
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright agreed with General Clark and was really also a driving force behind pushing for action in Kosovo.
[ii]
So this wasn't just General Clark out on his own but there was a conflict of interest between the State Department and the Department of Defense and the Pentagon, perhaps not unlike the rumored clashes of Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld. There were others also pushing for action who were not at the State or Defense departments.
[iii]
Despite the fact that Clark had worked with the State Department at the Dayton Peace Accords and although General Clark also represented European interests as head of NATO and was not necessarily under Cohen's chain of command there, Cohen and Shelton blocked his access to the White House in an effort to unfairly control him.
[iv]
Others felt differently about Clark's right to talk to the White House. James Steinberg, then the deputy national security adviser, said the White House would not have allowed Clark to conduct an end-run around the Pentagon. "I did not think he was being insubordinate," Steinberg said. But "people who knew him understood that when he felt strongly, he wanted to let people know ... My perspective was that there was value in his giving his ground-truth."
[v]
It was not unusual for CinCs to have to try and work around the Defense Department and the Pentagon to get things done.
[vi]
Dana Priest discussed this in an interview about her book The Mission, saying that they risked having their hands slapped if caught .
[vii]
But the difference seems to be in the fact that General Clark was less willing to play the Pentagon/Defense Department games. General Shalikashvili, who appointed General Clark to NATO, has hinted at this without saying it outright.
[viii]
Said Shalikashvili, "The chiefs "might have felt that Wes pushed them too far."
That Shalikashvili hint, although cryptic, no doubt comes from someone who really knows what was going on. There are other possible specific mentions of actions by General Clark that showed his refusal to play the game the way the Pentagon and Defense Department wanted, but this hint tells the real story.
It is interesting that one of Clark's harshest critics during the conflict, soldier activist David Hackworth, has since retracted his criticisms of General Clark and confirmed General Clark's thesis in Waging Modern War that depicted Shelton and Cohen as timid and overly concerned with domestic politics in the face of a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing.
[ix]
Publishing a book that was in part critical of Cohen and Shelton was General Clark's effort at self-vindication after they retired him early even though he won the war, but it no doubt did little to ease the ruffled feathers that had led to the early retirement.
Since his initial comments General Shelton has refused to give specifics of why General Clark's integrity was questioned. This has led some to question Shelton's integrity rather than General Clark's. Dana Priest, who interviewed General Clark for her book The Mission, questioned the actions of Cohen and Shelton after General Clark was retired early, pointing out that they admitted they released the news to the press within an hour of telling General Clark to prevent him from being able to undo what they had done.
[x]
Sidney Blumenthal confirms that the way they went about it meant that their work could not be undone. Blumenthal also plainly states that President Clinton realized he had been deceived by them and was furious when he realized their early retirement of General Clark could not be undone.
[xi]
Part of the deception involved the lie that General Clark had to be retired early to make a place for General Ralston.
[xii]
After seeing the lies they told and the sneaky way they went about assuring the early retirement, it seems reasonable to assume that they wanted rid of General Clark but that the reasons for getting rid of him were ones that were not defensible to President Clinton. Incidentally, President Clinton has recently made clear his feelings about General Clark's integrity and Hugh Shelton's smear tactics by sending a fax to the Hague to rebut the Shelton smears when Milosevic tried to use them to impeach General Clark's testimony.
Lying to indefensibly get rid someone and releasing the news quickly so that the act could not be undone does not sound like the actions of someone who would have the unmitigated gall to question the integrity of the mistreated person. But evidently Shelton has no shame. I frequently disagree with William Saletan, but I think he called this one correctly:
A wise friend once told me you can learn more about somebody from what he says about others than from what others say about him. Given what I've heard so far from Clark and Shelton, if I had to vote for one of them based on integrity and character, I'd go with Clark.
[xiii]
[i]
Samantha Power, A problem from Hell:"
He frantically telephoned around the Pentagon for insight into the ethnic dimension of events in Rwanda. Unfortunately, Rwanda had never been of more than marginal concern to Washington's most influential planners" (p. 330) .He advocated multinational action of some kind to stop the genocide. "Lieutenant General Wesley Clark looked to the White House for leadership. 'The Pentagon is always going to be the last to want to intervene,' he says. 'It is up to the civilians to tell us they want to do something and we'll figure out how to do it.' But with no powerful personalities or high-ranking officials arguing forcefully for meaningful action, midlevel Pentagon officials held sway, vetoing or stalling on hesitant proposals put forward by midlevel State Department and NSC officials" (p. 373).
[ii]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6340-2003Dec16_2.html
Albright, in an interview, said "it was very clear to me that the Pentagon did not want to move on this issue. . . . Wes and I thought it was worth doing." A former Albright aide said Clark's credentials lent critical ballast to Albright's advocacy, providing cover for Clinton and White House officials who were loath to stand up to unified military opposition on any issue.
http://slate.msn.com/id/2091194/#ContinueArticle
In fact, however, Clinton may have been distracted somewhat, but Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was not. Albright was a fiery supporter of military intervention in the Balkans (many have written of the famous meeting where she appalled the reticent chiefs by saying, "What good are all these fine troops you keep telling us about if we can't use them?"). Albright was the prime mover; many observers at the time--supporters and critics alike--called it "Madeleine's war." And her prime collaborator, Richard Holbrooke, Clinton's envoy to Bosnia, also enjoyed direct access to the president.
[iii]
http://slate.msn.com/id/2091194/#ContinueArticle
Thousands of Bosnians were dying in a war that U.S. military power could have ended. Hundreds of thousands of Rwandans had recently been massacred in a civil war to which neither the United States nor the United Nations raised a finger, much less a fighter plane, in protest. Many of those pushing for intervention--and they included not just Clark but some of the most liberal, customarily antiwar politicians and columnists--wanted above all to avert another massacre.
[iv]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6340-2003Dec16_2.html
Cohen did not speak to him until the seventh day of the war, when several U.S. soldiers at Yugoslavia's border were taken hostage. "The relationship had already soured by then," Clark said. He said that his antagonists in Washington blocked him from speaking with President Bill Clinton once during 11 weeks of combat.
[vi]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6340-2003Dec16_2.html
Retired Marine Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, the top U.S. commander for the Middle East while Clark commanded NATO, said, "There is always a tension between the CINCs [regional commanders in chief] and the service chiefs. The CINCs see the need for intervention, engagement, while the services control the resources and see this as a distraction."
[vii]
http://www.state.gov/s/p/of/proc/tr/3719.htm
They each told me stories [about] having to creep around the Pentagon to meet with State Department [officials] and getting their hands slapped when they were discovered. They all felt like they were at the end of a tether line, out on the edges of an empire, and that too often no one at the Pentagon cared about what they were discovering. They each felt disappointed with their chain of command, especially Secretary Cohen, who seemed to them to want to talk only to coordinate the next upcoming news conference. They believed that the Pentagon had become far too reactive to the day's news reports.
[viii]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6340-2003Dec16_2.html
But Clark's personal style evidently caused the policy dispute to boil over into a personal clash, according to former Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman John M. Shalikashvili, who appointed Clark to the NATO job over the objections of the Army leadership. Clark "is a guy who by temperament is more likely to operate on the edge of the system," Shalikashvili said. The chiefs "might have felt that Wes pushed them too far."
[ix]
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34738
Hey, I am one of those: I took a swing at Clark during the Kosovo campaign when I thought he screwed up the operation, and I called him a "Perfumed Prince." Only years later did I discover from his book and other research that I was wrong - the blame should have been worn by British timidity and William Cohen, U.S. SecDef at the time.
[x]
Wednesday, August 4, 1999 Clark's Exit Was Leaked Deliberately, Official Says The Washington Post WASHINGTON
One mystery solved. Why was Gen. Wesley Clark's early removal from his post as NATO's top commander leaked within an hour after Clark himself was informed of Defense Secretary William Cohen's decision last week? Answer: Because Cohen's staff wanted to prevent Clark, who had led the NATO military campaign against Yugoslavia and was known to like his job, from working behind the scenes to undo the decision, according to a senior Pentagon official.
[xi]
From The Clinton Wars by Sidney Blumenthal, senior adviser to President Clinton:
[xii]
Why Wesley Clark Got the Ax at NATO The general exposed the gap between pretended "combat readiness" and refusal to accept war's risks By: EDWARD N. LUTTWAK So why was Clark fired? The official answer is that he wasn't fired at all, but merely asked to accommodate his successor at NATO, Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, by stepping aside a bit early. That is all very plausible except that any four-star general can be parked in a special assignment while awaiting a new command. Because Ralston is especially well-liked, nobody would have objected to the exception.
Formatted and placed online as a public service by Michael North HTML document at: http://www.mediasense.com/wesleyclark/Why-Clark-Retired-Early.htm Other Useful Sources Reading List
Albright Madeleine, Madam Secretary: A Memoir. Blumenthal, Sidney. The Clinton Wars. Clark, Wesley K. Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat. Halberstam, David. War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals. Holbrooke, Richard. To End a War Power, Samantha. "A Problem from Hell" : America and the Age of Genocide Priest, Dana. The Mission: Waging War and Keeping Peace with America's Military
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