Gen. Clark: Saddam Not a Criminal
In a little noticed interview with Fortune Magazine last week, presidential frontrunner Gen. Wesley Clark defended Saddam Hussein against charges that he was engaged in crimes against his own people at the time the Iraq war started, contending instead that the Iraqi dictator should have gotten a pass because his atrocities took place ten years ago.
Asked why it was right for President Clinton to use military force to halt Slobodan Milosevic's crimes against humanity in Kosovo, but not for President Bush to do the same thing against Saddam, Clark said that in Iraq, "The imminence of stopping a guy from committing a crime in progress - it wasn't there."
"In Kosovo you had ethnic cleansing actually unfolding, and we had intervened to stop it," the ex-NATO commander insisted, without commenting on the torture chambers, rape rooms and mass graves discovered in Iraq by coalition forces.
Instead, the Democratic frontrunner suggested that the Iraqi dictator deserved a pass by outlining what Fortune described as Clark's "Statute of Limitations for Genocidal Thugs."
"It was ten years ago that Saddam brutalized the Shiite Muslims in the south," he argued. "And he used chemical weapons 15 years ago."
Instead, said the retired military man, Saddam brutality was really no worse than crimes committed by leaders in China more than a decade ago, telling Fortune:
"We still deal with communist China, right? During the Cultural Revolution they had cannibalism in China. And the same guys that ran over the students in Tiananmen, they're still there."
Fortune writer Bill Powell pointed out, however, that while China is still a police state, "the recently departed General Secretary Jiang Zemin, to take but one example, was promoted from mayor of Shanghai to succeed Deng Xiaoping in part because he avoided bloodshed during Tiananmen. . . . Have you ever heard of Saddam promoting someone because he avoided killing somebody?"
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