At War With Himself <edited - see full text at link>>
.....Let's go back here. Clark essentially concedes that the war in Kosovo was, under international law, indistinguishable from the war in Iraq. Actually, even that's not entirely true. It should be recalled that the United States and its allies, particularly Great Britain, secured a 15-0 Security Council Resolution demanding complete and unfettered access to potential sites of WMD development--or else--in Iraq. The "else" was subject to debate, but the notion that it ruled out any military action is one only Dominique de Villepin would argue with a straight face. No such 15-0 vote occurred at any time before the Kosovo war. So, if anything, the war against Iraq had more international legitimacy than the war in Kosovo. If viewed as a continuation of the 1991 war--the terms of which cease-fire Saddam had grotesquely and systematically violated--it was impeccably legitimate. The 1991 war, after all, was one of very few post-World War II conflicts that had unimpeachable U.N. credentials.
Moreover, the "imminent threat" of ethnic cleansing is an odd casus belli. By the time of the Kosovo operation, the world had already stood by and watched the slaughter of a quarter of a million Bosnians by the Serbian fascist machine. That had triggered no war from the West. The same could be said for the holocaust in Rwanda, which the Clinton administration (and the United Nations) observed from afar. For Clark to argue that Kosovo was worse than either of those events is bizarre.
The threat of genocide in the Balkans was also, of course, another way in which the two wars were identical in legitimacy. There are an estimated 300,000 mass graves in Iraq today. Saddam's genocidal campaigns against the Kurds and the Shia and the Marsh Arabs are and were no different than the monstrosities of Milosevic--except in scale and viciousness. Does Clark believe that leaving Saddam in power would have removed the "imminent threat" of further genocide and mass murder against the peoples of Iraq? Who is he kidding? Does he think that Uday and Qusay Hussein represented the hope of a more humane future? Of course not. If your criterion for intervention is the "imminent threat" of genocide, then Clark's defense of the Kosovo war necessitates an identical defense of the Iraq war. One more obvious distinction: Milosevic hadn't actually used gas or chemical weapons to kill civilians. Saddam did. Moreover, Milosevic had restricted his murderous military campaigns to the territories of the former Yugoslavia. Saddam had already launched wars against two neighboring states, Iran and Kuwait. A final point: Milosevic hadn't threatened the United States and hadn't attempted to assassinate the president of the United States. Saddam had. On humanitarian and realist grounds, toppling Saddam was far more legitimate than toppling Milosevic.
Now let's take Clark's final point: that the war against Saddam was conducted "under false pretenses." Does he mean that Saddam had publicly and openly disarmed as he promised to do in 1991? Not even Jacques Chirac believed that; and the Kay report has already documented a vast apparatus of concealment and subterfuge to keep the WMD programs alive. Does Clark mean that he knew that no such WMDs existed? Nope. He already opined on CNN that Saddam "absolutely" had WMDs, adding, "I think they will be found. There's so much intelligence on this." Was it because the war turned out to be more destructive than had been planned for and promised? Again, it was a miraculously speedy, humane and successful war, as Clark also conceded on CNN. In the Times of London, as Boyer points out, Clark even went into hubristic mode: "American military power, especially when buttressed by Britain's, is virtually unchallengeable today. Take us on? Don't try!" If the Bush administration's intelligence was faulty, Clark signed onto it at the time. If the administration's strategy was wrong, Clark praised it at the time. He has absolutely no credibility in arguing that the war was conducted "under false pretenses."
But it appears that Clark has something else in mind when referring to these "false pretenses." It comes next in the Boyer piece:
[Clark] then told me--as he has told others--how he came to learn of a secret war scheme within the Bush Administration, of which Iraq was just one piece.
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Clark said, he visited the Pentagon, where an old colleague, a three-star general, confided to him that the civilian authorities running the Pentagon--Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his team--planned to use the September 11th attacks as a pretext for going to war against Iraq. "They made the decision to attack Iraq sometime soon after 9/11," Clark said. "So, rather than searching for a solution to a problem, they had the solution, and their difficulty was to make it appear as though it were in response to a problem." Clark visited the Pentagon a couple of months later, and the same general told him that the Bush team, unable or unwilling to fight the actual terrorists responsible for the attacks, had devised a five-year plan to topple the regimes in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Iran, and Sudan ... Clark, in repeatedly telling his account, seems to suggest that he had special knowledge of a furtive Pentagon plan that would have the Administration "hopscotching around the Middle East and knocking off states," as he put it. He has acknowledged, "I'm not sure that I can prove this yet."
Let's put this kindly: This is Ross Perot-crazy. First off, there obviously was a primary and clear attempt to destroy al Qaeda and its base of operations in Afghanistan. The war against Saddam was not an alternative to going after Al Qaeda. It was a supplement. You can argue whether it is or was necessary; you can argue about how deeply it is or was connected to the war on terror in terms of tactics, philosophy, and strategy. But the notion that the Bush administration decided to go after Saddam instead of Al Qaeda is just contrary to what we know happened.
The idea that this was also some subterfuge is also loopy. The Bush administration and its supporters have long argued that something drastic was needed to turn the culture and politics of the Middle East around. They openly eschewed the notion that the only thing that mattered was the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. And September 11 showed all too clearly how true that analysis was. The narrow arguments about the threat to the West from the combination of terrorists with WMDs was always supplemented by the broader argument that democracy had to come to the Middle East as a whole if we were to turn off the spigot of intolerance and murder and dysfunction at its source. Again, you can argue whether the war against Saddam made sense as part of this strategy. But there was no top-secret plan; no cabal; no hidden agenda. It was all out in the open--to be attacked, supported, dissected.
What we know about Wesley Clark from this brief extract is therefore quite damning: His logic about the differences between Iraq and Kosovo is illogic; his own position on both wars has been contradictory and confused; his fundamental argument is based on an unsubstantiated conspiracy theory that even he admits he cannot prove. And this man wants to be president of the United States?
Andrew Sullivan is a senior editor at TNR.
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