from:
http://slate.msn.com/id/2076528/
The centerpiece for the 58-year-old Clark's campaign would obviously be his biography, and it's an impressive one: first in his class at West Point, Rhodes scholar, wounded in Vietnam, recipient of both the Purple Heart and the Silver Star. In 1981, when Clark was a 36-year-old lieutenant colonel, the Washington Post magazine profiled him as "the ideal, the perfect modern officer." Since then, he continued his career as an Army "water walker," moving effortlessly up the ranks to four-star general. Just as Dr. Bill Frist gives the Republicans some moral authority on health care, a traditional GOP weakness, Gen. Clark could strengthen the Democrats' national-security hand.
One of the most compelling things about Clark is his ability to articulate—better than other Democrats, who sometimes resort to tiresome calls of "chickenhawk" or "quagmire"—the intellectual justification for what many Democrats feel in their gut: skepticism about the need for immediate war with Iraq; concern about the status of the war against al-Qaida; a preference for working with allies over going it alone; and a respect for the institutions that make up the international order that the United States built upon the ashes of World War II.
Clark is no dove. But he argues that the biggest mistake the Bush administration made in the aftermath of Sept. 11 was its refusal to conduct the war under the auspices of NATO, despite the alliance's declaration that an attack on the United States was an attack on all its member nations. As a result, Europe is not accountable for success in the war on terrorism, only the United States is. European leaders see it as George W. Bush's war, according to Clark, because Bush has made it his war. "Not a single European election hinges on the success of the war on terrorism," Clark wrote in the September Washington Monthly. Clark even went so far as to employ a classic Vietnam metaphor to describe Bush's policies: "Because the Bush administration has thus far refused to engage our allies through NATO, we are fighting the war on terrorism with one hand tied behind our back."
Clark calls this "the lesson of Kosovo": If you bring allies into a war, they will want to win it as badly as you do. That's counterintuitive: The lesson most Americans took from Kosovo was that war by committee was a disaster that allowed, for example, a British commander to refuse Clark's order to take an airfield. But, as David Halberstam showed in War in a Time of Peace, the fact that so many leaders had staked their reputations on the Kosovo war meant that they had to win it, despite strong opposition at home: "What [losing] would do to NATO—effectively signal the end of it—and to their countries (and it was known but never said, to their own careers and place in history) was also unacceptable."
09-16-2003
Hybrid Mode
