Reply #36: You are wrong AGAIN.... [View All]

[FrenchieCat]

Do you know why Clark was retired right after the Kosovo War?
Didn't think so.

Clark was retired because he kept on insisting that he wanted boots on the ground, and he wanted low flying Apache helicopter to do the bombing...not high altitude Bombers. Do you know why? Because High altitude bombers tend to kill civilians because it is harder to aim accurately at your target from way up high. Boots on the Ground was what he wanted because again, that not the US just dropping bombs from way up high...but putting soldiers lives on the line, on the terrain for a more efficient mission....IF the mission is supposed to be worth it.

Do you know why he didn't get what he wanted? Because the Clinton administration and the Republican Defense Secretary didn't want any American soldier casualties considering what had happened in Somalia, and the fact that Clinton didn't need that kind of press.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A51403-2000May1¬Found=true
http://wesleyclark.h1.ru/departure.htm


Further you are wrong on your statement that the Kosovo bombing killed thousands although more than should have been. Also note that the bombing saved the lives of many more than it destroyed. That's why the pope labeled Kosovo the last honorable war fought.

V Casualty Figures
53. In its report, Civilian Deaths in the NATO Air Campaign, Human Rights Watch documented some 500 civilian deaths in 90 separate incidents. It concluded: "on the basis available on these ninety incidents that as few as 488 and as many as 527 Yugoslav civilians were killed as a result of NATO bombing. Between 62 and 66 percent of the total registered civilian deaths occurred in just twelve incidents. These twelve incidents accounted for 303 to 352 civilian deaths. These were the only incidents among the ninety documented in which ten or more civilian deaths were confirmed." Ten of these twelve incidents were included among the incidents which were reviewed with considerable care by the committee (see para. 9 above) and our estimate was that between 273 and 317 civilians were killed in these ten incidents. Human Rights Watch also found the FRY Ministry of Foreign Affairs publication NATO Crimes in Yugoslavia to be largely credible on the basis of its own filed research and correlation with other sources. A review of this publication indicates it provides an estimated total of approximately 495 civilians killed and 820 civilians wounded in specific documented instances. For the purposes of this report, the committee operates on the basis of the number of persons allegedly killed as found in both publications. It appears that a figure similar to both publications would be in the range of 500 civilians killed.
http://www.un.org/icty/pressreal/nato061300.htm#IVA5

Further, Clark did offer to form a department of Foreign Aid that sounded similar in some ways to Kucinich's Peace Department.
http://www.clark04.com/speeches/012/

I'm starting to realize that you don't know Jack about Clark...That's what I am starting to realize. You seem to spew some stuff that you've heard, but are grossly misinformed...

You should have done some homework other than buying the extremist right and left's rendition of things. In life, one must his own homework, or suffer the possibility of sounding uninformed when it's important to be otherwise.

Waiting for the General
By Elizabeth Drew
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16795
Clark displeased the defense secretary, Bill Cohen, and General Hugh Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by arguing strenuously that—contrary to Clinton's decision— the option of using ground troops in Kosovo should remain open. But the problem seems to have gone further back. Some top military leaders objected to the idea of the US military fighting a war for humanitarian reasons. Clark had also favored military action against the genocide in Rwanda.

http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001104.html
Clark was almost alone in pushing for a humanitarian intervention in Rwanda.

Pulitzer award winning Samantha Power for her book "A Problem from Hell" : America and the Age of Genocide
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060541644/qid=1114936910/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-7692952-2877630?v=glance&s=books
endorsed Wes Clark http://www.kiddingonthesquare.com/2003/12/redeeming_wes...
The following excerpts from Power's book give the details. The narrative surrounding the quotes was written by another person commenting on the book. Note especially Power's last comment below on Clark's pariah status in Washington:

General Clark is one of the heroes of Samantha Power's book. She introduces him on the second page of her chapter on Rwanda and describes his distress on learning about the genocide there and not being able to contact anyone in the Pentagon who really knew anything about it and/or about the Hutu and Tutsi.

She writes, "He frantically telephoned around the Pentagon for insight into the ethnic dimension of events in Rwanda. Unfortunately, Rwanda had never been of more than marginal concern to Washington's most influential planners" (p. 330) .

He advocated multinational action of some kind to stop the genocide. "Lieutenant General Wesley Clark looked to the White House for leadership. 'The Pentagon is always going to be the last to want to intervene,' he says. 'It is up to the civilians to tell us they want to do something and we'll figure out how to do it.' But with no powerful personalities or high-ranking officials arguing forcefully for meaningful action, midlevel Pentagon officials held sway, vetoing or stalling on hesitant proposals put forward by midlevel State Department and NSC officials" (p. 373).

According to Power, General Clark was already passionate about humanitarian concerns, especially genocide, before his appointment as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe.

She details his efforts in behalf of the Dayton Peace Accords and his brilliant command of NATO forces in Kosovo. Her chapter on Kosovo ends, "The man who probably contributed more than any other individual to Milosvevic's battlefield defeat was General Wesley Clark. The NATO bombing campaign succeeded in removing brutal Serb police units from Kosovo, in ensuring the return on 1.3 million Kosovo Albanians, and in securing for Albanians the right of self-governance."

"Yet in Washington Clark was a pariah. In July 1999 he was curtly informed that he would be replaced as supreme allied commander for Europe. This forced his retirement and ended thirty-four years of distinguished service. Favoring humanitarian intervention had never been a great career move."


Samantha Power's comments on Wesley Clark at the December 17, 2003, press conference in Concord, New Hampshire after the General's testimony at the Hague .

"Good afternoon. It's a real honor for me to be here with General Clark, and with Edita Tahiri. My name is Samantha Power. I spent about seven years looking into American responses to genocide in the twentieth century, and discovered something that may not surprise you but that did surprise me, which was that until 1999 the United States had actually never intervened to prevent genocide in our nation's history. Successive American presidents had done an absolutely terrific job pledging never again, and remembering the holocaust, but ultimately when genocide confronted them, they weighed the costs and the benefits of intervention, and they decided that the risks of getting involved were actually far greater than the other non-costs from the standpoint of the American public, of staying uninvolved or being bystanders. That changed in the mid-1990s, and it changed in large measure because General Clark rose through the ranks of the American military.

The mark of leadership is not to standup when everybody is standing, but rather to actually stand up when no one else is standing. And it was Pentagon reluctance to intervene in Rwanda, and in Bosnia, that actually made it much, much easier for political leaders to turn away. When the estimates started coming out of the Pentagon that were much more constructive, and proactive, and creative, one of the many deterrents to intervention melted away. And so I think, again, in discussing briefly the General's testimony, it's important to remember why he was able to testify at the Hague, and he testified because he decided to own something that was politically very, very unfashionable at the time."
http://www.kiddingonthesquare.com/2004/01/index.html