Posted on 01/02/2004 7:16:10 PM PST by Destro
POSTED AT 4:28 AM EST Friday, Jan. 2, 2004
Wesley Clark's record is a miserable failure based on a lie
By MARCUS GEE
From Friday's Globe and Mail
If Wesley Clark wins the Democratic Party nomination for president of the United States this year, it will be partly on the strength of his performance in the war over Kosovo. General Clark, who was NATO commander during the 78-day conflict in 1999, has made his conduct of the war a centrepiece of his campaign. Here, he claims, was an armed intervention that worked.
Unlike last year's invasion of Iraq, which he opposed, the Kosovo war was, as he sees it, both necessary and successful. As his campaign ads modestly put it, in Kosovo he "stopped a campaign of terror" and "liberated a people." Even better, he did it with friends. Gen. Clark accuses U.S. President George W. Bush of intervening against Saddam Hussein's Iraq without bringing important allies along. He, by contrast, helped assemble a grand coalition against Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic.
It would be a strong platform if it bore any resemblance to the truth. In fact, Gen. Clark is painting a glorified portrait of the Kosovo campaign, which was far less triumphant and multilateral than he would like Americans to think.
Gen. Clark is right to say that president Bill Clinton assembled a bigger coalition for Kosovo than Mr. Bush did for Iraq. All of NATO was on board in Kosovo, while in Iraq, Washington's only true military partner was Britain, with minor support from Australia, Poland and a few others. But Kosovo was still mostly a U.S. mission. The thrust of the bombing campaign in that air war came from U.S. warplanes, and the decision to go ahead was essentially made in Washington.
And while NATO may have been on board, the United Nations decidedly was not. Washington avoided seeking support for the war from the UN Security Council when it became clear that Russia and China, each wielders of a possible veto, were opposed. Canada, which was to say four years later that it could not possibly participate in the Iraq conflict without UN support, went merrily along to the Kosovo war, UN be damned. To call Kosovo a victory for multilateralism, when its architects bypassed the world's most important dispute-settling body is a bit much.
To call it a triumph of humanitarian intervention is an even greater stretch. When Gen. Clark unleashed his bombers on Serbia, it was in the throes of a messy conflict with ethnic Albanians who form the majority in its southern province, Kosovo. There had been many killings and at least one terrible massacre. NATO bombed Serbia to force Mr. Milosevic to call off his killers and avert a humanitarian disaster. Instead, it caused one. Rather than halt the conflict, the bombing intensified it. As the bombs fell and furious Serb militias did their worst, hundreds of thousands of Kosovo Albanians fled the country in a refugee exodus that captivated the world.
In the end, Mr. Milosevic did call a halt, pulling his troops out of Kosovo, making way for a NATO protection force and letting the refugees come back to their homes. But only after thousands of people had died, including at least 500 Serb civilians killed in this "humanitarian" bombing. Though Gen. Clark is right to say the Albanians of Kosovo were liberated from Serb oppression, he says nothing about the Kosovo Serbs, 180,000 of whom had to run for their lives as the Albanians took their revenge.
Far from ending ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Gen. Clark's war only set off another round. The result has been to establish a new, ethnically cleansed, fiercely nationalistic mini-state in the Balkans -- and a pretty unpleasant one at that.
Despite hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, and a NATO garrison of more than 12,000 troops, Kosovo today is still a poor, dangerous, unstable place. The remaining Serbs live in fear. Last summer, in a sign of the times, someone opened up with a machine gun on a group of Serb boys swimming in a stream, killing two and wounding four.
Talks on Kosovo's final status are not scheduled to begin until the middle of 2005, and even then, it is hard to see a compromise between the Albanian demand for independence and the Serbian refusal to give up its historic heartland.
Things in Serbia proper are not much better. Mr. Milosevic is gone, overthrown by mass protests in 2001 and delivered to an international war-crimes tribunal in 2002. But instead of walking tamely into the post-nationalist European family, post-Milosevic Serbia has remained prickly, proud and volatile.
Last week, Serbians showed their defiance by handing an election victory to an extreme nationalist and accused war criminal, Vojislav Seselj, who is in jail awaiting trial before the UN war-crimes tribunal in The Hague. Mr. Milosevic, on trial in The Hague himself, also effectively won election when his Socialist party took 7.6 per cent of the vote.
If Americans are looking for a model of good intervention, they will have to look beyond Kosovo. The conflict there was far from the clean little war that Gen. Clark makes it out to be. It was, and is, a mess.
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51 |
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I stopped right there. The Racak Massacre was a fraud.
Our reports of hundreds of destroyed tanks? As many as 13 were disabled - though most were mechanical in nature, rather than by being hit by weapons.
In the 1600s, land warfare was at a stalemate due to the perfection of pike squares. This defensive formation was able to thwart cavalry attacks and fight off infantry, while being able to disperse if fired upon by artillery. Gustavus Adolphus' armies ended that with combined arms tactics. Cavalry would be sent towards a pike square, forcing it to form up. The cavalry would veer off, and the artillery would pound the heck out of the square until it broke. If the square tried to disperse so as to negate the artillery, the cavalry and infantry cut it down.
For some reason, Clark forgot this very basic 400 year old principle: for artillery to work, there must be a credible threat of ground attack. There are a wide variety of ways to do this, but that it was completley overlooked is pretty astounding. The principle was executed beautifully in Afghanistan, with the Northern Alliance Afghan fighters putting pressure on the Taliban, and our bombers blowing the heck out of the Taliban concentrations. If the Taliban didn't - or couldn't - concentrate, the NA over-ran them.
As I recall, some were likely killed by each the Serbians in a fire-fight, and some by the Albanians - and the KLA collected the bodies, redressed them, and moved them to the ravine. Regardless, that it was a manufactured site, and that the area was controlled by KLA was known by the (Finnish?) inspectors prior to the U.S. attack on Kosovo.
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