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WND 8/5/99
Col. David H. Hackworth If any top commander ever says something political that goes against policy, then he is sure to be slapped down. And that leads us to what recently happened to Gen. Wesley Clark, NATO supreme commander.

Well, he's not supreme for long.

It appears that Gen. Clark did something rather foolish last month when he testified before a Senate committee about the Russians capturing Pristina airport. When asked why he'd been caught off guard by the Russian march on Pristina, Clark replied that he hadn't been caught off guard. According to Clark, a [higher authority] had purposely allowed Pristina to fall to the Russians.

Uh oh. This was a naughty thing to have said. Everybody knows that only one authority stands higher than a four star general. It's not nice to imply that the president was to blame for the most embarrassing debacle of the Balkan campaign. Obviously, this could not go unpunished. So it wasn't surprising when President Clinton retaliated by cutting short General Clark's term as supreme NATO commander by two months.

Worse yet, a story was leaked to Newsweek suggesting that Clark had risked World War III by ordering an air assault to grab Pristina before the Russians could reach it. Clark's subordinate, British Lt. Gen. Michael Jackson, refused to carry out the order.

So now Gen. Clark -- who was Clinton's dromedary in NATO -- is now Clinton's whipping boy. From henceforth Clark is to be depicted as an irresponsible warmonger who almost unleashed a global holocaust.

What a wonderful twist. The president pushes NATO into an act of aggression against a Slavic country. He enrages the Russian people, he enables Russia to mobilize hundreds of thousands of troops, he uses up precious cruise missiles bombing a country that has no significance for our national security, then he allows the Russians to capture the most significant facility in the contested province. When this is pointed out by Gen. Clark -- bang, crash, kaboom. Smoke curls up from a smoldering Clark.