Democrat leader Clark: "I love the smell of burnt American children in the morning".
Posted on 07/05/2008 3:25:13 PM PDT by Red Steel
Kosovo war commander and decorated Vietnam vet Wesley Clark was never shot down during war. Maybe that's why the retired general, ex-NATO war leader and former presidential candidate chose this aspect of John McCain's war record to carp about last Sunday, when he said, "I don't think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president." Yet McCain wasn't just shot down. He also was brutalized and tortured during five years of North Vietnamese captivity, a period during which McCain gallantly refused the early release his captors offered because he was an admiral's son. Those are leadership qualities that Clark's maladroit comments reveal he does not share. This is not the first time that Clark's ego and ambition have gotten in the way of political and military realities -- but they show what a slow learner he is.
Instead of burnishing his credentials, he managed to eliminate himself from vice presidential contention, while also revealing how little interest he has in Barack Obama's own qualifications to be president.
Obama quickly distanced himself from Clark's remarks. But if Clark, who only recently came to the Obama campaign after supporting Hillary Clinton, really was acting as an Obama "surrogate" on CBS's "Face the Nation" -- which he denies -- he would never have talked about military service, since Obama has not served.
Clark had in mind not the blank on Obama's r sum , but his own illustrious one.
And it's true: Clark was a brilliant military student. He was first in his 1966 West Point class, a Rhodes scholar, and later Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe during the alliance's first and only aggressive war, over Kosovo in 1999.
Yet that career ended in tatters, with Clark ignominiously dumped from the top NATO military job for repeatedly going behind the backs of his Pentagon superiors, as they saw it.
How acrimonious those feelings were was made clear five years ago, when Clark was running for president.
During an appearance at tiny Foothill College in California, Gen. Hugh Shelton, the former chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, was asked about his erstwhile subordinate.
"The reason he came out of Europe early had to do with integrity and character issues," Shelton bluntly said of Clark, as quoted in the Los Altos (Calif.) Town Crier.
"Wes won't get my vote," Shelton added.
Where Clark really teed off his military superiors was in how persistently he tried to end-run them, and possibly at times, President Clinton, on the issue of ground troops in the war.
Clinton had publicly and privately nixed the idea of ground forces. That didn't keep Clark from pushing the idea in war plans he sent back to Washington and, none too subtly, in press conferences and while briefing other NATO leaders.
The New Yorker magazine reported five years ago that Clark, during a meeting in Brussels with Tony Blair a month after war started, helped persuade the British prime minister to press the idea with Clinton, causing a temporary rift between the two leaders.
His micromanagement of aspects of the Kosovo war alienated not just his Pentagon superiors but also allies, contributing to NATO divisions -- and to Pentagon suspicions about how well NATO can function during wartime -- that persist to this day.
In the interest of alliance unity, Clark supported a limited, politically dictated set of bombing targets instead of the big initial attacks the U.S. Air Force advocated against Slobodan Milosevic's command and control centers, including in Belgrade.
Yet this created a strategy of incremental warfare where every tiny target set could be debated, and often was -- and where an increasing number of the targets were chosen for political, rather than military, reasons. These included the building housing Milosevic's wife's political party, a downtown hotel and the main Serbian television station when only lowly technicians, most of them political opponents of the Milosevic regime, were at work. That Clark and other NATO leaders weren't indicted for war crimes for the civilians predictably killed in some of bombings may have been solely due the fact that the U.N. war-crimes tribunal charged with such prosecutions owed its existence, its rules and its funding largely to Washington.
Note to readers: Starting this week, Elizabeth Sullivan's Thursday columns will be published online at The Plain Dealer.
Gen. Weezylie Clark is a JERK!
A lesson learned as a "Ticket-Puncher" in Vietnam.
Issues he obviously still has.
Wheezly Clark is a backfire ... of the double bean burrito variety.
At least he bombed the Chinese Embassy.
I have an old mattress spring, a couple of car batteries, and some other stuff (used previously only for an halloween display) that could be "charged up". Actually, I have other stuff ~ a large steel vice ~ put your hand or elbow in it size. And, finally, a galvanized steel tub, a water hose, some towels ~
I think there's still some hardwood splints around like you use to tighten up a hammerhead on a hickory handle.
Doggone this has set me to thinking about so many things ~ may have to call Yakobanis and see if he's got some of his friends from the old days (when he was a KGB guy in DC) and send 'em over if we do get Wesley to volunteer for this.
Wesley Clark was fired from NATO!
Clark is an SCUMBAG... no other way to tiptoe around it
Wesley Clark is more than a jerk; he’s a low-life, scumbag. And for including him in that category, I must apologize to all the other low-life scumbags.
weasley is funny!
“Ticket puncher!”
How true, how true.
He will throw enlisted men and officers under the bus if it will earn him accelerated promotion.
Not to denigrate a hero of mine, the following exchange comes to mind.
REPORTER: “General, what do you think of General Eisenhower being elected president?”
GENERAL MacARTHUR: “Why, he will make a fine President...he’s the best damn clerk I ever had.” [note: then Major Eisenhower served as aide during MacArthur’s celebrated second tour of duty in the Philippines]
Told what was said about him, the President-elect responded that he studied dramatics under General MacArthur.
General Clark...he’s a a genuine witless opportunist given to DRAMATICS who should have shut his mouth and stayed retire, instead of going about making comments against a real warrior like Sen. McCain.
Wasn’t it Weasley Clark who was photographed wearing a foreign officers uniform hat?
I wonder,... anyone check to see if Atty Gen Ramses Clark and Gen-er-OIL Clark are related?
They might be as they are both bloody BUNG-HOLES named Clark.
NOT! WC IS A BACKFIRE.
Democrat leader Clark: "I love the smell of burnt American children in the morning".
"The picture shows General Clark trading hats with his pal, Bosnian Serb Gen. Ratko Mladic, now an indicted war criminal and fugitive from justice. Have a look at the expression on the face of the British officer to Clark's left."
Wez-lee Clark looks like a monkey with all the hair singed off his face.
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