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Politics : SUPPORT OUR TROOPS -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neeka who wrote (2770)	9/23/2003 1:35:54 AM
From: calgal	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3592

THE WESTERN FRONT Tinkerer, Taylor, Soldier, President? Gen. Clark won't win by promising to fight the last war. BY BRENDAN MINITER Tuesday, September 23, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT On paper, Wesley Clark is the perfect Democrat to challenge George W. Bush. He's a warrior, and he's also the candidate likely to put the best public face on the party by shutting down Howard Dean--whose liberal, antiwar rhetoric risks sending the party down to another McGovern-type defeat. Democrats are happy, then, to see poll numbers showing Gen. Clark running strong against both Dr. Dean and President Bush. Presidents, however, aren't often elected on their résumés. Gen. Clark has a commendable military career, having graduated first in his class at West Point and led NATO to victory in Kosovo. But ultimately that record will not hand him the presidency. The problem is that he's preaching a military doctrine that became obsolete on Sept. 11, 2001. Gen. Clark argues in his book, "Winning Modern Wars," and has argued as an analyst on CNN that wars today must be fought much like he fought Kosovo. American (or coalition) aircraft should pound the enemy from above. Ground troops should not move in until the enemy is largely defeated, and then an "internationalized" force should sweep in for relatively minor operations and peacekeeping missions. In the Clark view, the United Nations or some other multinational body should then administer the conquered territory. The U.S. is clearly capable of winning wars this way. Kosovo was a victory, although not a resounding one. The Taliban would probably have succumbed to an intense aerial bombardment even without American forces on the ground. And a sustained bombing campaign probably could have destroyed Saddam Hussein's regime--although at the cost of a lot more Iraqi lives. In any case, Gen. Clark says he would not have launched a military campaign without the U.N.--meaning the French--on board. Gen. Clark's preferred style of warfare is the product of a left-leaning political climate still gun-shy after Vietnam. The war on terror requires defeating enemy forces, but it also demands the remaking of civil societies so that they do not coddle the kind of thugs who ram jetliners into skyscrapers. Gen. Clark and the Kosovo campaign don't offer a good template for that. But President Bush and Tony Blair do. The Bush doctrine--to make no distinction between terrorists and the states that harbor them--has already put two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, under the control of America and its allies. That has already reoriented the region's politics, so that the Arab world must now choose between the freedom offered by the West or the tyranny of terrorists and dictators. Gen. Clark's supports can cite two well-known presidents who won the White House with little political experience. But he's not the next Ulysses S. Grant or Dwight D. Eisenhower. Kosovo wasn't a world-changing event like the Civil War or World War II. The tactics developed during the Civil War dominated war-fighting strategies through World War I. World War II and the Cold War so changed history that more than a decade after Nazi Germany fell, Ike warned the nation about the "military-industrial complex." Two other "war hero" presidents may make for more apt comparisons: Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce. Both won acclaim in the Mexican War and were propelled into the White House by party elders who were looking for a candidate who was above politics. In the contentious period before the Civil War, voters in the North and South alike could read what they wanted into each candidate. The strategy worked, sort of. Taylor, elected in 1848, had never held elective office prior. As a career soldier he didn't even vote, saying he didn't want to be in the position of voting against a president he then had to serve. His tenure in office was undistinguished; three years ago he ranked 31st out of 39 in the Federalist Society/Wall Street Journal survey on the presidents, just below Jimmy Carter. He probably would have driven the country into civil war if he hadn't become sick and died a year and a half into his term. After his death, political leaders cobbled together the Compromise of 1850 and averted war for another 10 years. Taylor was the last Whig to be elected president. Pierce had been elected to the New Hampshire House at 24 and served a decade in Congress. But by 1852, when Democratic Party elders asked him to run for president, he'd long since retired to his Granite State farm. The party settled on Pierce after first exhausting every other political alternative in 48 other ballots at the nominating convention. Pierce--the last general to be elected president as a Democrat--did even worse than Taylor in the Federalist/WSJ survey, tying with Warren Harding for the second-worst president ever. Taylor and Pierce both represent a political class that was unable to face up to the pressing national problem of the day, slavery. Like these two presidents, Gen. Clark was propelled into the race by party elders (Bill and Hillary Clinton) and is trying to be everything to everyone. In an attempt to soften him in the eyes of angry Democrats, he has flip-flopped on Iraq. And his warrior credentials, as well as news that he thinks he remembers voting for both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan before becoming a Democrat, are a clear attempt to soften him in the eyes of the broader electorate. But unlike in the 1840s and '50s, at least one political party is willing to face up to the pressing national problem of our times, terrorism. What Gen. Clark is left with is an impossible argument: that he somehow found a better way to defeat al Qaeda in the skies over Kosovo, than Mr. Bush has in defeating first the Taliban and then Saddam Hussein. Mr. Miniter is assistant editor of OpinionJournal.com. His column appears Tuesdays.