Clark is the rock in a hard place
usatoday.com
[USATODAY.com columnist Kirk Spitzer covered the U.S. military mission in Bosnia in 1994 and 1995.]
03/26/99
The man on the hot seat in the attacks on Kosovo and Serbia is a politically savvy, former Rhodes Scholar from Arkansas who has rocketed to the top of his profession.
No, it's not President Bill Clinton.
It's Gen. Wes Clark, NATO's military commander and the man who may have more influence on how the Balkan mini-war proceeds, and when it ends, than anyone else.
It's not an enviable job. The Clinton administration has saddled Clark with a risky and poorly defined mission. The goal, in Clinton's words, is "to deter an even bloodier offensive against innocent civilians in Kosovo and, if necessary, to seriously damage the Serbian military's capacity to harm the people of Kosovo."
Those are tough objectives to measure, let alone achieve. How long are you supposed to deter an attack to be successful? A month? A year? Five years?
How much damage is serious damage? Fifty tanks destroyed? A hundred? If you've knocked out 15 ammo dumps, is it worth risking the lives of American - or French or British - pilots to knock out one more? Two more? Three?
Gen. Wesley Clark (AP).
"It's not a good strategy. 'Degrading' the military may work in Iraq, but not in this situation," says Michael O'Hanlon, a foreign policy specialist at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C.
Luckily for Clinton, Clark, 54, may be the man for the job. He's smart, he's experienced and he may know both sides of the military-political equation better than anyone else in uniform.
"I can't imagine a four-star (general) anywhere who is better equipped to put this (mission) together than Wes Clark," says John Hillen, senior fellow in political-military affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank. "He has an intense understanding of the military, obviously, and he also has a keen political sense."
Clark's star rose early.
Born in Chicago but raised in Little Rock, Clark turned down full scholarships to Harvard and Yale to enroll at West Point. He graduated number one in his class, then moved on to Oxford University, where he earned a master's degree in politics, economics and philosophy.
Later, he enrolled at the Army's Command and Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, and again graduated number one in his class, earning his second master's degree with a thesis on Military Contingency Operations: The Lessons of Political-Military Coordination. He also taught at West Point, was selected as a White House Fellow and in an article in Esquire magazine in the late 1970s was called 'probably the most brilliant junior officer" in the Army by novelist Josiah Bunting, himself a former Rhodes Scholar and West Point instructor.
In 1994, Clark was tapped as director for strategic plans and policy for the Joint Staff - in other words, the top thinker on political-military affairs for the four armed services.
But Clark was always more than a drawing room soldier. He left Oxford early to command a mechanized infantry company in Vietnam and was wounded four times. He earned a Silver Star for continuing to command his troops despite his injuries.
In 1989, he was given command of the Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., and was credited with training tens of thousands of U.S. troops for the blitzkrieg through Iraqi forces in the Gulf War.
Ironically, it was in the Balkans that Clark suffered one of his few embarrassments. While trying to build bridges with Serb leaders, Clark lunched with Serb commander and accused mass-murderer Ratko Mladic. Impulsively, the soft-spoken and ever-smiling Clark exchanged hats with Mladic and accepted an engraved service pistol, only to find the Serb press waiting, cameras ready, to record the apparent show of support as he emerged from the meeting.
Despite the faux pas, Clark was selected the following year by U.S. ambassador Richard Holbrooke to help negotiate the Bosnia Peace Accords in Dayton, Ohio. In part because of his Arkansas and Rhodes Scholar background, Clark has emerged one of the few military leaders with whom Clinton, a fellow Arkansas and fellow Rhodes Scholar, reportedly feels comfortable with and to whom he is willing to defer.
"There's not much military experience or even expertise in the (Clinton) administration, so Clark is likely to have disproportionate influence in Kosovo," says O'Hanlon.
That could be bad news for Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic.
In a press conference Wednesday with NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana, Clark minced few words.
"We're going to systematically and progressively attack, disrupt, degrade, devastate and ultimately - unless President Milosevic complies with the demands of the international community - we're going to destroy these forces and their facilities and support," said Clark. "In that respect, the operation will be just as long and difficult as President Milosevic requires it to be."
Hillen says he doesn't doubt it.
"He's a hard guy. There's steel under that smile. I think he'll see this through." |
