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Clark's Role in Kosovo Exemplifies His Traits
Apaches were created to support Army ground assaults against massed troop formations, which did not exist in Kosovo. But Clark was willing to bend doctrine -- he proposed that they thread their way through mountain passes to conduct nighttime assaults on Serb tanks in Kosovo or fire their long-range missiles from Albania. "When you are in a conflict, you use what you've got the best way you can," one of Clark's advisers said in an interview.
Ralston, who is now a business partner with Cohen, said that "we never got a concept [from Clark about the Apaches] that would pass any kind of common-sense test." Clark recalled being told by Reimer, the Army chief of staff, that the Apaches would add nothing, a viewpoint Clark said was based on the Army's anxiety about being drawn into a ground war it did not wish to fight.
"I said, 'What about me?,' " Clark recalls telling Reimer. " 'I think they're important, and you're not going to support me.' " Reimer declined comment, but colleagues say Clark's personalization of the squabble was not unusual. A friend who visited him during the war said Clark "was exclusively talking about the infighting in which he was a key actor. . . . It's the way he sees the world."
The Apache deployment to Albania was eventually approved, but proved to be a fiasco. Clark was never authorized to use the Apaches in the war, and two of the $14 million helicopters crashed in training accidents.
In the end, 23,000 bombs and missiles were dropped on Kosovo and the rest of Yugoslavia over the 78 days that ended on June 10. By NATO's measures, the war, which cost an estimated $3 billion, was a success. Milosevic withdrew Serbian military forces from Kosovo and accepted U.N. control of the province. The majority ethnic Albanian population no longer fears Serbian repression.
But thousands of ethnic Albanians were killed by Yugoslav ground forces that NATO did not directly challenge. The province's institutions and housing were battered, and many Serbs who hated Milosevic say the outpouring of nationalism NATO provoked may have extended his tenure in office by several years. Few Serbs who fled the province in fear of reprisals after the war have been able to return.
The Pentagon's official "lessons learned" study of the Kosovo conflict attributed Milosevic's capitulation to NATO's cohesion, the escalating damage inflicted by the bombers, Yugoslavia's growing diplomatic isolation and NATO's eventual preparations -- begun mostly at Clark's urging in late May -- for possible ground combat.
But Rand's Air Force report, written by analyst Benjamin Lambeth, said "NATO's leaders . . . had little to congratulate themselves about, when it came to the way in which the air war was planned and carried out." A second Rand report, prepared by a team of Army analysts, concurred that "problems abounded during the NATO military operation," citing in particular the absence of "any significant military planning" for a sustained conflict.
Clark's relations with his former colleagues only worsened when he published a book about their frictions in 2001. It generally depicted Shelton and Cohen as timid and overly concerned with domestic politics in the face of a concerted campaign of ethnic cleansing.
One military official involved in Clark's disputes called it "a very bitter piece of work" that he thought Clark would regret. But roughly 80,000 copies have been printed so far.
In September, Shelton told an audience in California that Clark had been fired because of "integrity and character issues, things that are very near and dear to my heart." He has declined to elaborate. In his campaign, Clark has denounced the remark as a smear and compared himself to those attacked by Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s.
In October, Reimer told the Associated Press that he felt "uncomfortable about the way he [Clark] does business," because he lacked the "right balance between ambition and selfless service." Clark's reply is that he and Reimer "had a different view about military leadership. . . . If I was ambitious, I was ambitious for my units, and my units were successful."
URL:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6340-2003Dec16_4.html |
