Clark's Role in Kosovo Exemplifies his Traits

WASHINGTON - In the spring of 1998, the Monica Lewinsky scandal was in full flower, and Washington was stuck in a showdown with Iraq over U.N. inspections. Then violence erupted off-screen: On March 5 and 6, Yugoslav government forces in Kosovo, a small province in a distant corner of Europe, assaulted some rebels and killed more than 50 people, including women and children. Shortly afterward, an unwelcome fax arrived at the Pentagon from Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, a man whose activism vexed his American superiors for much of his 34-month tenure as supreme allied commander in Europe. Writing from NATO military headquarters at Mons, Belgium, Clark urged that the West renew a six-year-old threat of military intervention to protect Kosovo's majority populace, which supported the rebels. But Clark, as usual, was ahead of others in the administration in his enthusiasm for applying military force. The administration already had too much on its plate, especially on Capitol Hill, Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman Gen. Joseph W. Ralston told him in a late-night phone call, according to the accounts of both men. Washington had not decided whether — much less how — to intervene in Kosovo. A year later, Clark got the exercise in "coercive diplomacy" he had sought, in the form of a bombing campaign that lasted 78 days, then the longest U.S. combat operation since Vietnam. His management of that campaign, which forced the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo, is at the center of his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination — and of criticism of his generalship by some former Pentagon bosses. A detailed examination of Clark's role in the war and his tenure as NATO's senior military officer from 1997 to 2000 shows that three of Clark's most prominent traits — his willingness to defy convention, his persistence and his occasionally grating self-confidence in matters small and large — not only influenced his advocacy of the war, but also helped alienate some of his superiors. Since Clark began his presidential bid in September, his campaign has described the war as a moment when "he led a multinational force that stopped a campaign of terror, liberated a people and brought peace without the loss of a single American soldier," as a recent advertisement says. Lately, Clark has taken to pulling out a book of photographs of atrocity victims in Kosovo when he speaks with reporters about his experience. On Monday and yesterday, he confronted deposed Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for the first time since the war, testifying behind closed doors at the U.N. war crimes trial of Milosevic in the Hague. But the campaign's description of the war skips over a persistent debate not only over how Clark managed it and fought with his superiors over tactics, but also whether the war was avoidable or well planned. The debate has intruded on Clark's campaign, as he is frequently asked about recent criticism by former bosses who had argued that the war was an unworthy gamble. Clark has not wavered about it, then or now. "No" was not a word he liked to hear, or heed, his friends and colleagues say. In April 1998, a month after Clark sent his memo, for example, national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger felt so pressured that he asked Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, a Clark ally: What is it with you people, always wanting to threaten force and bombing, according to two officials present. At that moment, Berger and much of the military's leadership thought the advocates were rushing ahead of the administration's deliberations. Also in 1998, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen warned Clark, through Ralston, that he should heed the chain of command by limiting contact with Albright, according to Clark. Cohen separately warned him not to work too closely with U.S. Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke. But Clark wound up collaborating with both to convince others that Western military force should be brought to bear in Kosovo. "It was Clark's liberal interventionism, very unusual for a general, which played a critically important role in the successful outcome," Holbrooke said. Clark's alienation from his superiors is hardly unprecedented, Holbrooke added, noting that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had furious disagreements with superiors over the North African campaign in World War II. Clark supported bombing Yugoslavia in an effort to force Milosevic to relinquish control over the province of Kosovo; the predominant Army, Marine Corps and Air Force views were that such a war would be unwise without clearly articulated U.S. interests, and political backing for overwhelming force. At the same time, Clark's zealousness — his autobiography admiringly quotes Gen. Douglas MacArthur's remark that "there is no substitute for victory" — often stoked resentment among those who clashed with him. The frictions, stemming largely from a conviction that Clark had failed to respect his superiors' orders, culminated in 2000 with his dismissal by Cohen at a moment when he expected to be reappointed for another year. A second role Clark explains that he wore a second hat, little understood in Washington, as the top NATO officer as well as the top U.S. officer in Europe. In that role, he says, he had a responsibility to meet with members of Congress and senior officials outside the Pentagon to inform them about "dangers looming in the Balkans," including the risk of genocide such as that seen in Bosnia. "Maybe the flaws of excess, intensity and single-mindedness left him tone-deaf about how he might be received" by superiors, said a NATO colleague and friend during this period. The friend added that nonetheless, Clark had commendably forced the Pentagon to "face up" to the Kosovo crisis at a point when its doctrine and traditions favored avoidance. The continuing discussion of Clark's role is relevant to the debate over the merits of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an issue that Clark admits he "bobbled" at the outset of his campaign by expressing weak support. Lately, Clark has been unremittingly critical of the timing of the war and the planning that preceded it. Those are the same issues on which Clark's Kosovo efforts drew criticism from the Pentagon. Clark's independent streak at NATO was foreshadowed during his first tour of duty at its headquarters, in 1978. "Not a yes man," Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr., then the supreme allied commander, said in Clark's performance rating that year, praising him as a "soldier-scholar" with qualities that set "him apart from his contemporaries." Clark first involved himself in Balkan policymaking as a military envoy to Holbrooke during negotiations to end the Bosnian war in 1995. But Clark says his passion for intervening militarily in Kosovo grew out of watching the Clinton administration fumble during the slaughter of half a million people in Rwanda during 1994, when Clark was the director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "I was not going to stand by after Rwanda and let [expulsions occur in Kosovo] ... without raising the alarm in Washington," Clark recalled recently. "That was my duty." An official who worked closely with him at the time of the Kosovo crisis said, however, that he did not recall Clark mentioning Rwanda. Clark also said he had a "professional gap" on the issue with Army Gen. Henry H. "Hugh" Shelton, then the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, because Shelton — a special forces veteran — was a "conventional military officer" and planner. Shelton and his Pentagon colleagues worried acutely about the absence of widespread public and congressional support for a Kosovo war, and told Clark that Washington had no vital interests at stake there. ‘Do you want to fight?’ Not shying from confrontation, Clark said he pressed Army Chief of Staff Dennis J. Reimer, asking, "Do you want to fight a war anywhere?" There was a problem in Europe, he said later, "and it did not fit their model," which envisioned major U.S. wars only in North Korea and the Persian Gulf area. 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. 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." 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." A former senior military official confirmed the account. "If Wes did not agree, then he thought it was okay to call ... anyone else who would help," the official said. "We don't do that in the military." Shelton was provoked, largely by Clark, to demand in a classified 1999 memo that all the regional CINCs inform him in advance of all their meetings in Washington. 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." By the spring of 1999, the administration reached a consensus that a NATO bombing campaign was inevitable, partly because of the indiscriminate use of force by Yugoslav troops against suspected rebels in Kosovo. But tensions persisted between Clark and Washington, even after the war began on March 24. On the second day, Clark announced that NATO bombers would "ultimately destroy" Yugoslav military forces if Milosevic did not concede. His use of the word "destroy" had not been cleared with Washington or London, and some officials in both capitals complained that Clark had overreached. Clark said his goal was to convince Belgrade from the outset that resistance would bring dire consequences. "No one said I had to get everybody's approval," he said in an interview. It was not the only time that Clark's news conferences produced red faces at the Pentagon, said a former military official in Washington: "He would always be out front of where policy was." 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. Clark's management of the war was complicated by the absence of a strong NATO consensus about how to wage it — Italy and other allies favored light strikes and bombing pauses, while the United States and Britain generally sought an aggressive escalation once it got under way. Clark also had competing goals to juggle, having been told by Washington to minimize casualties — a task he met mostly through high-altitude bombing of fixed targets outside Kosovo proper — while also protecting Kosovo's ethnic Albanian population against artillery fire, house-burnings and expulsions by Yugoslav forces. Sandwiched between European pressure for air raids against Yugoslav forces inside Kosovo and the Air Force's unyielding conviction that such raids would have no impact on Milosevic, Clark chucked a strategic bombing plan given to him by subordinates and chose to "cut and paste different elements of different plans that he thought were most appropriate," according to a subsequent study for the Air Force by the Rand Corp. The result, the report said, was "a continuously evolving coercive operation featuring piecemeal attacks against unsystematically approved targets." Clark and others at NATO headquarters had to scramble because they assumed, in error, that Milosevic would capitulate after a few days of bombing. Rand called this a "misjudgment of near-blunder proportions that came close to saddling the United States and NATO with a costly and embarrassing failure." "We called this one absolutely wrong," Navy Adm. James O. Ellis Jr., then NATO's commander in southern Europe, said in a postwar briefing to military officials. That "affected much of what followed: ... lack of coherent campaign planning ... [and] the race to find suitable targets." The number of aircraft assigned to the bombing started at 366 and rose to nearly 1,000 by late May. NATO personnel at the air operations control center in Italy swelled from 400 to 1,300. The process by which targets were cleared was not streamlined until more than six weeks into the war. Even so, about 500 civilians were killed by accident, according to a study by Human Rights Watch. In the interview, Clark blamed much of the disarray on the U.S. target planning staff, which he said was too distracted by the threat of conflict in Iraq and did not follow his orders. He also said "it was the best that could reasonably have been anticipated," given that his superiors in Washington blocked "realistic military planning." But Clark also acknowledged some responsibility, explaining that "I tried too hard to prevent . . . [the war], as opposed to just preparing it, by working the diplomatic piece" in concert with Holbrooke and other Western envoys. Clark waged unsuccessful battles with Washington in March and April for permission to deploy missile batteries in nearby Croatia and to begin planning for a possible ground war — an option that Clinton had ruled out in a speech delivered the night the bombing began, with Shelton's advance knowledge. Clark had to fight with the Navy to have an aircraft carrier placed under his command. He also had to fight for repairs to roads in northern Albania that might eventually be needed for a ground invasion. And he had to fight to attend NATO's 50th anniversary summit in Washington, on the 30th day of the war, after Cohen initially insisted he stay in Europe. But Clark's biggest wartime dispute concerned a request — made only four days before the war began — for the deployment of Apache helicopters. Apaches were created to support Army ground assaults against massed troop formations, which did not exist in Kosovo. But Clark was willing to bend doctrine — he proposed that they thread their way through mountain passes to conduct nighttime assaults on Serb tanks in Kosovo or fire their long-range missiles from Albania. "When you are in a conflict, you use what you've got the best way you can," one of Clark's advisers said in an interview. Ralston, who is now a business partner with Cohen, said that "we never got a concept [from Clark about the Apaches] that would pass any kind of common-sense test." Clark recalled being told by Reimer, the Army chief of staff, that the Apaches would add nothing, a viewpoint Clark said was based on the Army's anxiety about being drawn into a ground war it did not wish to fight. "I said, 'What about me?,' " Clark recalls telling Reimer. " 'I think they're important, and you're not going to support me.' " Reimer declined comment, but colleagues say Clark's personalization of the squabble was not unusual. A friend who visited him during the war said Clark "was exclusively talking about the infighting in which he was a key actor. ... It's the way he sees the world." The Apache deployment to Albania was eventually approved, but proved to be a fiasco. Clark was never authorized to use the Apaches in the war, and two of the $14 million helicopters crashed in training accidents. In the end, 23,000 bombs and missiles were dropped on Kosovo and the rest of Yugoslavia over the 78 days that ended on June 10. By NATO's measures, the war, which cost an estimated $3 billion, was a success. Milosevic withdrew Serbian military forces from Kosovo and accepted U.N. control of the province. The majority ethnic Albanian population no longer fears Serbian repression. But thousands of ethnic Albanians were killed by Yugoslav ground forces that NATO did not directly challenge. The province's institutions and housing were battered, and many Serbs who hated Milosevic say the outpouring of nationalism NATO provoked may have extended his tenure in office by several years. Few Serbs who fled the province in fear of reprisals after the war have been able to return. The Pentagon's official "lessons learned" study of the Kosovo conflict attributed Milosevic's capitulation to NATO's cohesion, the escalating damage inflicted by the bombers, Yugoslavia's growing diplomatic isolation and NATO's eventual preparations — begun mostly at Clark's urging in late May — for possible ground combat. But Rand's Air Force report, written by analyst Benjamin Lambeth, said "NATO's leaders ... had little to congratulate themselves about, when it came to the way in which the air war was planned and carried out." A second Rand report, prepared by a team of Army analysts, concurred that "problems abounded during the NATO military operation," citing in particular the absence of "any significant military planning" for a sustained conflict. Clark's relations with his former colleagues only worsened when he published a book about their frictions in 2001. It generally depicted Shelton and Cohen as timid and overly concerned with domestic politics in the face of a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing. One military official involved in Clark's disputes called it "a very bitter piece of work" that he thought Clark would regret. But roughly 80,000 copies have been printed so far. In September, Shelton told an audience in California that Clark had been fired because of "integrity and character issues, things that are very near and dear to my heart." He has declined to elaborate. In his campaign, Clark has denounced the remark as a smear and compared himself to those attacked by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. In October, Reimer told the Associated Press that he felt "uncomfortable about the way he [Clark] does business," because he lacked the "right balance between ambition and selfless service." Clark's reply is that he and Reimer "had a different view about military leadership. ... If I was ambitious, I was ambitious for my units, and my units were successful." Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this article.

aragraphs are our friends.

But Clark, as usual, was ahead of others in the administration in his enthusiasm for applying military force. The administration already had too much on its plate, especially on Capitol Hill, Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman Gen. Joseph W. Ralston told him in a late-night phone call, according to the accounts of both men. Washington had not decided whether — much less how — to intervene in Kosovo.

A year later, Clark got the exercise in "coercive diplomacy" he had sought, in the form of a bombing campaign that lasted 78 days, then the longest U.S. combat operation since Vietnam. His management of that campaign, which forced the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo, is at the center of his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination — and of criticism of his generalship by some former Pentagon bosses.

A detailed examination of Clark's role in the war and his tenure as NATO's senior military officer from 1997 to 2000 shows that three of Clark's most prominent traits — his willingness to defy convention, his persistence and his occasionally grating self-confidence in matters small and large — not only influenced his advocacy of the war, but also helped alienate some of his superiors.

Since Clark began his presidential bid in September, his campaign has described the war as a moment when "he led a multinational force that stopped a campaign of terror, liberated a people and brought peace without the loss of a single American soldier," as a recent advertisement says.

Lately, Clark has taken to pulling out a book of photographs of atrocity victims in Kosovo when he speaks with reporters about his experience. On Monday and yesterday, he confronted deposed Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for the first time since the war, testifying behind closed doors at the U.N. war crimes trial of Milosevic in the Hague.

But the campaign's description of the war skips over a persistent debate not only over how Clark managed it and fought with his superiors over tactics, but also whether the war was avoidable or well planned. The debate has intruded on Clark's campaign, as he is frequently asked about recent criticism by former bosses who had argued that the war was an unworthy gamble.

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Clark has not wavered about it, then or now. "No" was not a word he liked to hear, or heed, his friends and colleagues say. In April 1998, a month after Clark sent his memo, for example, national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger felt so pressured that he asked Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, a Clark ally: What is it with you people, always wanting to threaten force and bombing, according to two officials present. At that moment, Berger and much of the military's leadership thought the advocates were rushing ahead of the administration's deliberations.

Also in 1998, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen warned Clark, through Ralston, that he should heed the chain of command by limiting contact with Albright, according to Clark. Cohen separately warned him not to work too closely with U.S. Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke. But Clark wound up collaborating with both to convince others that Western military force should be brought to bear in Kosovo.

"It was Clark's liberal interventionism, very unusual for a general, which played a critically important role in the successful outcome," Holbrooke said. Clark's alienation from his superiors is hardly unprecedented, Holbrooke added, noting that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had furious disagreements with superiors over the North African campaign in World War II.

Clark supported bombing Yugoslavia in an effort to force Milosevic to relinquish control over the province of Kosovo; the predominant Army, Marine Corps and Air Force views were that such a war would be unwise without clearly articulated U.S. interests, and political backing for overwhelming force.

At the same time, Clark's zealousness — his autobiography admiringly quotes Gen. Douglas MacArthur's remark that "there is no substitute for victory" — often stoked resentment among those who clashed with him. The frictions, stemming largely from a conviction that Clark had failed to respect his superiors' orders, culminated in 2000 with his dismissal by Cohen at a moment when he expected to be reappointed for another year.

A second role
Clark explains that he wore a second hat, little understood in Washington, as the top NATO officer as well as the top U.S. officer in Europe. In that role, he says, he had a responsibility to meet with members of Congress and senior officials outside the Pentagon to inform them about "dangers looming in the Balkans," including the risk of genocide such as that seen in Bosnia.

‘Maybe the flaws of excess, intensity and single-mindedness left him tone-deaf about how he might be received’ by superiors.

— NATO colleague and friend of Clark’s

"Maybe the flaws of excess, intensity and single-mindedness left him tone-deaf about how he might be received" by superiors, said a NATO colleague and friend during this period. The friend added that nonetheless, Clark had commendably forced the Pentagon to "face up" to the Kosovo crisis at a point when its doctrine and traditions favored avoidance.

The continuing discussion of Clark's role is relevant to the debate over the merits of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an issue that Clark admits he "bobbled" at the outset of his campaign by expressing weak support. Lately, Clark has been unremittingly critical of the timing of the war and the planning that preceded it. Those are the same issues on which Clark's Kosovo efforts drew criticism from the Pentagon.

Clark's independent streak at NATO was foreshadowed during his first tour of duty at its headquarters, in 1978. "Not a yes man," Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr., then the supreme allied commander, said in Clark's performance rating that year, praising him as a "soldier-scholar" with qualities that set "him apart from his contemporaries."

Clark first involved himself in Balkan policymaking as a military envoy to Holbrooke during negotiations to end the Bosnian war in 1995. But Clark says his passion for intervening militarily in Kosovo grew out of watching the Clinton administration fumble during the slaughter of half a million people in Rwanda during 1994, when Clark was the director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"I was not going to stand by after Rwanda and let [expulsions occur in Kosovo] ... without raising the alarm in Washington," Clark recalled recently. "That was my duty." An official who worked closely with him at the time of the Kosovo crisis said, however, that he did not recall Clark mentioning Rwanda.

Clark also said he had a "professional gap" on the issue with Army Gen. Henry H. "Hugh" Shelton, then the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, because Shelton — a special forces veteran — was a "conventional military officer" and planner. Shelton and his Pentagon colleagues worried acutely about the absence of widespread public and congressional support for a Kosovo war, and told Clark that Washington had no vital interests at stake there.

‘Do you want to fight?’
Not shying from confrontation, Clark said he pressed Army Chief of Staff Dennis J. Reimer, asking, "Do you want to fight a war anywhere?" There was a problem in Europe, he said later, "and it did not fit their model," which envisioned major U.S. wars only in North Korea and the Persian Gulf area.

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.

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."

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."

A former senior military official confirmed the account. "If Wes did not agree, then he thought it was okay to call ... anyone else who would help," the official said. "We don't do that in the military." Shelton was provoked, largely by Clark, to demand in a classified 1999 memo that all the regional CINCs inform him in advance of all their meetings in Washington.

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."

By the spring of 1999, the administration reached a consensus that a NATO bombing campaign was inevitable, partly because of the indiscriminate use of force by Yugoslav troops against suspected rebels in Kosovo. But tensions persisted between Clark and Washington, even after the war began on March 24. On the second day, Clark announced that NATO bombers would "ultimately destroy" Yugoslav military forces if Milosevic did not concede.

‘He would always be out front of where policy was.’

— Former military official in Washington

His use of the word "destroy" had not been cleared with Washington or London, and some officials in both capitals complained that Clark had overreached. Clark said his goal was to convince Belgrade from the outset that resistance would bring dire consequences. "No one said I had to get everybody's approval," he said in an interview.

It was not the only time that Clark's news conferences produced red faces at the Pentagon, said a former military official in Washington: "He would always be out front of where policy was."

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.

Clark's management of the war was complicated by the absence of a strong NATO consensus about how to wage it — Italy and other allies favored light strikes and bombing pauses, while the United States and Britain generally sought an aggressive escalation once it got under way. Clark also had competing goals to juggle, having been told by Washington to minimize casualties — a task he met mostly through high-altitude bombing of fixed targets outside Kosovo proper — while also protecting Kosovo's ethnic Albanian population against artillery fire, house-burnings and expulsions by Yugoslav forces.

Sandwiched between European pressure for air raids against Yugoslav forces inside Kosovo and the Air Force's unyielding conviction that such raids would have no impact on Milosevic, Clark chucked a strategic bombing plan given to him by subordinates and chose to "cut and paste different elements of different plans that he thought were most appropriate," according to a subsequent study for the Air Force by the Rand Corp.

The result, the report said, was "a continuously evolving coercive operation featuring piecemeal attacks against unsystematically approved targets."

Clark and others at NATO headquarters had to scramble because they assumed, in error, that Milosevic would capitulate after a few days of bombing. Rand called this a "misjudgment of near-blunder proportions that came close to saddling the United States and NATO with a costly and embarrassing failure."

"We called this one absolutely wrong," Navy Adm. James O. Ellis Jr., then NATO's commander in southern Europe, said in a postwar briefing to military officials. That "affected much of what followed: ... lack of coherent campaign planning ... [and] the race to find suitable targets."

The number of aircraft assigned to the bombing started at 366 and rose to nearly 1,000 by late May. NATO personnel at the air operations control center in Italy swelled from 400 to 1,300. The process by which targets were cleared was not streamlined until more than six weeks into the war.

Even so, about 500 civilians were killed by accident, according to a study by Human Rights Watch. In the interview, Clark blamed much of the disarray on the U.S. target planning staff, which he said was too distracted by the threat of conflict in Iraq and did not follow his orders. He also said "it was the best that could reasonably have been anticipated," given that his superiors in Washington blocked "realistic military planning."

But Clark also acknowledged some responsibility, explaining that "I tried too hard to prevent . . . [the war], as opposed to just preparing it, by working the diplomatic piece" in concert with Holbrooke and other Western envoys.

Clark waged unsuccessful battles with Washington in March and April for permission to deploy missile batteries in nearby Croatia and to begin planning for a possible ground war — an option that Clinton had ruled out in a speech delivered the night the bombing began, with Shelton's advance knowledge.

Clark had to fight with the Navy to have an aircraft carrier placed under his command. He also had to fight for repairs to roads in northern Albania that might eventually be needed for a ground invasion. And he had to fight to attend NATO's 50th anniversary summit in Washington, on the 30th day of the war, after Cohen initially insisted he stay in Europe.

But Clark's biggest wartime dispute concerned a request — made only four days before the war began — for the deployment of Apache helicopters.

Apaches were created to support Army ground assaults against massed troop formations, which did not exist in Kosovo. But Clark was willing to bend doctrine — he proposed that they thread their way through mountain passes to conduct nighttime assaults on Serb tanks in Kosovo or fire their long-range missiles from Albania. "When you are in a conflict, you use what you've got the best way you can," one of Clark's advisers said in an interview.

Ralston, who is now a business partner with Cohen, said that "we never got a concept [from Clark about the Apaches] that would pass any kind of common-sense test." Clark recalled being told by Reimer, the Army chief of staff, that the Apaches would add nothing, a viewpoint Clark said was based on the Army's anxiety about being drawn into a ground war it did not wish to fight.

"I said, 'What about me?,' " Clark recalls telling Reimer. " 'I think they're important, and you're not going to support me.' " Reimer declined comment, but colleagues say Clark's personalization of the squabble was not unusual. A friend who visited him during the war said Clark "was exclusively talking about the infighting in which he was a key actor. ... It's the way he sees the world."

The Apache deployment to Albania was eventually approved, but proved to be a fiasco. Clark was never authorized to use the Apaches in the war, and two of the $14 million helicopters crashed in training accidents.

In the end, 23,000 bombs and missiles were dropped on Kosovo and the rest of Yugoslavia over the 78 days that ended on June 10. By NATO's measures, the war, which cost an estimated $3 billion, was a success. Milosevic withdrew Serbian military forces from Kosovo and accepted U.N. control of the province. The majority ethnic Albanian population no longer fears Serbian repression.

But thousands of ethnic Albanians were killed by Yugoslav ground forces that NATO did not directly challenge. The province's institutions and housing were battered, and many Serbs who hated Milosevic say the outpouring of nationalism NATO provoked may have extended his tenure in office by several years. Few Serbs who fled the province in fear of reprisals after the war have been able to return.

The Pentagon's official "lessons learned" study of the Kosovo conflict attributed Milosevic's capitulation to NATO's cohesion, the escalating damage inflicted by the bombers, Yugoslavia's growing diplomatic isolation and NATO's eventual preparations — begun mostly at Clark's urging in late May — for possible ground combat.

But Rand's Air Force report, written by analyst Benjamin Lambeth, said "NATO's leaders ... had little to congratulate themselves about, when it came to the way in which the air war was planned and carried out." A second Rand report, prepared by a team of Army analysts, concurred that "problems abounded during the NATO military operation," citing in particular the absence of "any significant military planning" for a sustained conflict.

Clark's relations with his former colleagues only worsened when he published a book about their frictions in 2001. It generally depicted Shelton and Cohen as timid and overly concerned with domestic politics in the face of a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing.

One military official involved in Clark's disputes called it "a very bitter piece of work" that he thought Clark would regret. But roughly 80,000 copies have been printed so far.

In September, Shelton told an audience in California that Clark had been fired because of "integrity and character issues, things that are very near and dear to my heart." He has declined to elaborate. In his campaign, Clark has denounced the remark as a smear and compared himself to those attacked by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

In October, Reimer told the Associated Press that he felt "uncomfortable about the way he [Clark] does business," because he lacked the "right balance between ambition and selfless service." Clark's reply is that he and Reimer "had a different view about military leadership. ... If I was ambitious, I was ambitious for my units, and my units were successful." <p

This time with paragraphs. WASHINGTON - In the spring of 1998, the Monica Lewinsky scandal was in full flower, and Washington was stuck in a showdown with Iraq over U.N. inspections. Then violence erupted off-screen: On March 5 and 6, Yugoslav government forces in Kosovo, a small province in a distant corner of Europe, assaulted some rebels and killed more than 50 people, including women and children.
Shortly afterward, an unwelcome fax arrived at the Pentagon from Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, a man whose activism vexed his American superiors for much of his 34-month tenure as supreme allied commander in Europe. Writing from NATO military headquarters at Mons, Belgium, Clark urged that the West renew a six-year-old threat of military intervention to protect Kosovo's majority populace, which supported the rebels.
But Clark, as usual, was ahead of others in the administration in his enthusiasm for applying military force. The administration already had too much on its plate, especially on Capitol Hill, Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman Gen. Joseph W. Ralston told him in a late-night phone call, according to the accounts of both men. Washington had not decided whether — much less how — to intervene in Kosovo.
A year later, Clark got the exercise in "coercive diplomacy" he had sought, in the form of a bombing campaign that lasted 78 days, then the longest U.S. combat operation since Vietnam. His management of that campaign, which forced the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo, is at the center of his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination — and of criticism of his generalship by some former Pentagon bosses.
A detailed examination of Clark's role in the war and his tenure as NATO's senior military officer from 1997 to 2000 shows that three of Clark's most prominent traits — his willingness to defy convention, his persistence and his occasionally grating self-confidence in matters small and large — not only influenced his advocacy of the war, but also helped alienate some of his superiors.
Since Clark began his presidential bid in September, his campaign has described the war as a moment when "he led a multinational force that stopped a campaign of terror, liberated a people and brought peace without the loss of a single American soldier," as a recent advertisement says.
Lately, Clark has taken to pulling out a book of photographs of atrocity victims in Kosovo when he speaks with reporters about his experience. On Monday and yesterday, he confronted deposed Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic for the first time since the war, testifying behind closed doors at the U.N. war crimes trial of Milosevic in the Hague.
But the campaign's description of the war skips over a persistent debate not only over how Clark managed it and fought with his superiors over tactics, but also whether the war was avoidable or well planned. The debate has intruded on Clark's campaign, as he is frequently asked about recent criticism by former bosses who had argued that the war was an unworthy gamble.
Clark has not wavered about it, then or now. "No" was not a word he liked to hear, or heed, his friends and colleagues say. In April 1998, a month after Clark sent his memo, for example, national security adviser Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger felt so pressured that he asked Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright, a Clark ally: What is it with you people, always wanting to threaten force and bombing, according to two officials present. At that moment, Berger and much of the military's leadership thought the advocates were rushing ahead of the administration's deliberations.
Also in 1998, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen warned Clark, through Ralston, that he should heed the chain of command by limiting contact with Albright, according to Clark. Cohen separately warned him not to work too closely with U.S. Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke. But Clark wound up collaborating with both to convince others that Western military force should be brought to bear in Kosovo.
"It was Clark's liberal interventionism, very unusual for a general, which played a critically important role in the successful outcome," Holbrooke said. Clark's alienation from his superiors is hardly unprecedented, Holbrooke added, noting that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower had furious disagreements with superiors over the North African campaign in World War II.
Clark supported bombing Yugoslavia in an effort to force Milosevic to relinquish control over the province of Kosovo; the predominant Army, Marine Corps and Air Force views were that such a war would be unwise without clearly articulated U.S. interests, and political backing for overwhelming force.
At the same time, Clark's zealousness — his autobiography admiringly quotes Gen. Douglas MacArthur's remark that "there is no substitute for victory" — often stoked resentment among those who clashed with him. The frictions, stemming largely from a conviction that Clark had failed to respect his superiors' orders, culminated in 2000 with his dismissal by Cohen at a moment when he expected to be reappointed for another year.
A second role Clark explains that he wore a second hat, little understood in Washington, as the top NATO officer as well as the top U.S. officer in Europe. In that role, he says, he had a responsibility to meet with members of Congress and senior officials outside the Pentagon to inform them about "dangers looming in the Balkans," including the risk of genocide such as that seen in Bosnia.
"Maybe the flaws of excess, intensity and single-mindedness left him tone-deaf about how he might be received" by superiors, said a NATO colleague and friend during this period. The friend added that nonetheless, Clark had commendably forced the Pentagon to "face up" to the Kosovo crisis at a point when its doctrine and traditions favored avoidance.
The continuing discussion of Clark's role is relevant to the debate over the merits of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an issue that Clark admits he "bobbled" at the outset of his campaign by expressing weak support. Lately, Clark has been unremittingly critical of the timing of the war and the planning that preceded it. Those are the same issues on which Clark's Kosovo efforts drew criticism from the Pentagon.
Clark's independent streak at NATO was foreshadowed during his first tour of duty at its headquarters, in 1978. "Not a yes man," Gen. Alexander M. Haig Jr., then the supreme allied commander, said in Clark's performance rating that year, praising him as a "soldier-scholar" with qualities that set "him apart from his contemporaries."
Clark first involved himself in Balkan policymaking as a military envoy to Holbrooke during negotiations to end the Bosnian war in 1995. But Clark says his passion for intervening militarily in Kosovo grew out of watching the Clinton administration fumble during the slaughter of half a million people in Rwanda during 1994, when Clark was the director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"I was not going to stand by after Rwanda and let [expulsions occur in Kosovo] ... without raising the alarm in Washington," Clark recalled recently. "That was my duty." An official who worked closely with him at the time of the Kosovo crisis said, however, that he did not recall Clark mentioning Rwanda.
Clark also said he had a "professional gap" on the issue with Army Gen. Henry H. "Hugh" Shelton, then the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, because Shelton — a special forces veteran — was a "conventional military officer" and planner. Shelton and his Pentagon colleagues worried acutely about the absence of widespread public and congressional support for a Kosovo war, and told Clark that Washington had no vital interests at stake there.
‘Do you want to fight?’ Not shying from confrontation, Clark said he pressed Army Chief of Staff Dennis J. Reimer, asking, "Do you want to fight a war anywhere?" There was a problem in Europe, he said later, "and it did not fit their model," which envisioned major U.S. wars only in North Korea and the Persian Gulf area.
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.
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."
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."
A former senior military official confirmed the account. "If Wes did not agree, then he thought it was okay to call ... anyone else who would help," the official said. "We don't do that in the military." Shelton was provoked, largely by Clark, to demand in a classified 1999 memo that all the regional CINCs inform him in advance of all their meetings in Washington.
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."
By the spring of 1999, the administration reached a consensus that a NATO bombing campaign was inevitable, partly because of the indiscriminate use of force by Yugoslav troops against suspected rebels in Kosovo. But tensions persisted between Clark and Washington, even after the war began on March 24. On the second day, Clark announced that NATO bombers would "ultimately destroy" Yugoslav military forces if Milosevic did not concede.
His use of the word "destroy" had not been cleared with Washington or London, and some officials in both capitals complained that Clark had overreached. Clark said his goal was to convince Belgrade from the outset that resistance would bring dire consequences. "No one said I had to get everybody's approval," he said in an interview. It was not the only time that Clark's news conferences produced red faces at the Pentagon, said a former military official in Washington: "He would always be out front of where policy was." 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. Clark's management of the war was complicated by the absence of a strong NATO consensus about how to wage it — Italy and other allies favored light strikes and bombing pauses, while the United States and Britain generally sought an aggressive escalation once it got under way. Clark also had competing goals to juggle, having been told by Washington to minimize casualties — a task he met mostly through high-altitude bombing of fixed targets outside Kosovo proper — while also protecting Kosovo's ethnic Albanian population against artillery fire, house-burnings and expulsions by Yugoslav forces. Sandwiched between European pressure for air raids against Yugoslav forces inside Kosovo and the Air Force's unyielding conviction that such raids would have no impact on Milosevic, Clark chucked a strategic bombing plan given to him by subordinates and chose to "cut and paste different elements of different plans that he thought were most appropriate," according to a subsequent study for the Air Force by the Rand Corp. The result, the report said, was "a continuously evolving coercive operation featuring piecemeal attacks against unsystematically approved targets." Clark and others at NATO headquarters had to scramble because they assumed, in error, that Milosevic would capitulate after a few days of bombing. Rand called this a "misjudgment of near-blunder proportions that came close to saddling the United States and NATO with a costly and embarrassing failure." "We called this one absolutely wrong," Navy Adm. James O. Ellis Jr., then NATO's commander in southern Europe, said in a postwar briefing to military officials. That "affected much of what followed: ... lack of coherent campaign planning ... [and] the race to find suitable targets." The number of aircraft assigned to the bombing started at 366 and rose to nearly 1,000 by late May. NATO personnel at the air operations control center in Italy swelled from 400 to 1,300. The process by which targets were cleared was not streamlined until more than six weeks into the war. Even so, about 500 civilians were killed by accident, according to a study by Human Rights Watch. In the interview, Clark blamed much of the disarray on the U.S. target planning staff, which he said was too distracted by the threat of conflict in Iraq and did not follow his orders. He also said "it was the best that could reasonably have been anticipated," given that his superiors in Washington blocked "realistic military planning." But Clark also acknowledged some responsibility, explaining that "I tried too hard to prevent . . . [the war], as opposed to just preparing it, by working the diplomatic piece" in concert with Holbrooke and other Western envoys. Clark waged unsuccessful battles with Washington in March and April for permission to deploy missile batteries in nearby Croatia and to begin planning for a possible ground war — an option that Clinton had ruled out in a speech delivered the night the bombing began, with Shelton's advance knowledge.
Clark had to fight with the Navy to have an aircraft carrier placed under his command. He also had to fight for repairs to roads in northern Albania that might eventually be needed for a ground invasion. And he had to fight to attend NATO's 50th anniversary summit in Washington, on the 30th day of the war, after Cohen initially insisted he stay in Europe.
But Clark's biggest wartime dispute concerned a request — made only four days before the war began — for the deployment of Apache helicopters.
Apaches were created to support Army ground assaults against massed troop formations, which did not exist in Kosovo. But Clark was willing to bend doctrine — he proposed that they thread their way through mountain passes to conduct nighttime assaults on Serb tanks in Kosovo or fire their long-range missiles from Albania. "When you are in a conflict, you use what you've got the best way you can," one of Clark's advisers said in an interview.
Ralston, who is now a business partner with Cohen, said that "we never got a concept [from Clark about the Apaches] that would pass any kind of common-sense test." Clark recalled being told by Reimer, the Army chief of staff, that the Apaches would add nothing, a viewpoint Clark said was based on the Army's anxiety about being drawn into a ground war it did not wish to fight.
"I said, 'What about me?,' " Clark recalls telling Reimer. " 'I think they're important, and you're not going to support me.' " Reimer declined comment, but colleagues say Clark's personalization of the squabble was not unusual. A friend who visited him during the war said Clark "was exclusively talking about the infighting in which he was a key actor. ... It's the way he sees the world."
The Apache deployment to Albania was eventually approved, but proved to be a fiasco. Clark was never authorized to use the Apaches in the war, and two of the $14 million helicopters crashed in training accidents.
In the end, 23,000 bombs and missiles were dropped on Kosovo and the rest of Yugoslavia over the 78 days that ended on June 10. By NATO's measures, the war, which cost an estimated $3 billion, was a success. Milosevic withdrew Serbian military forces from Kosovo and accepted U.N. control of the province. The majority ethnic Albanian population no longer fears Serbian repression.
But thousands of ethnic Albanians were killed by Yugoslav ground forces that NATO did not directly challenge. The province's institutions and housing were battered, and many Serbs who hated Milosevic say the outpouring of nationalism NATO provoked may have extended his tenure in office by several years. Few Serbs who fled the province in fear of reprisals after the war have been able to return.
The Pentagon's official "lessons learned" study of the Kosovo conflict attributed Milosevic's capitulation to NATO's cohesion, the escalating damage inflicted by the bombers, Yugoslavia's growing diplomatic isolation and NATO's eventual preparations — begun mostly at Clark's urging in late May — for possible ground combat.
But Rand's Air Force report, written by analyst Benjamin Lambeth, said "NATO's leaders ... had little to congratulate themselves about, when it came to the way in which the air war was planned and carried out." A second Rand report, prepared by a team of Army analysts, concurred that "problems abounded during the NATO military operation," citing in particular the absence of "any significant military planning" for a sustained conflict.
Clark's relations with his former colleagues only worsened when he published a book about their frictions in 2001. It generally depicted Shelton and Cohen as timid and overly concerned with domestic politics in the face of a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing.
One military official involved in Clark's disputes called it "a very bitter piece of work" that he thought Clark would regret. But roughly 80,000 copies have been printed so far.
In September, Shelton told an audience in California that Clark had been fired because of "integrity and character issues, things that are very near and dear to my heart." He has declined to elaborate. In his campaign, Clark has denounced the remark as a smear and compared himself to those attacked by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.

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