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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
The war hero, CNN analyst and potential Democratic presidential candidate speaks frankly to Salon about the tragic turn in Iraq and how Bush bungled the case for war.
Mar 24, 2003 | While the CNN makeup artists apply their craft to his increasingly familiar, chiseled mug, retired four-star Gen. Wesley Clark talks to me on his cellphone. "I gotta get off in a second here, I'm about to go on the air," he says.
The highly decorated former Supreme Allied Commander of the NATO forces in Europe, Clark, 58, is one of the most ubiquitous experts explaining the war to TV viewers. He's a natural, "at his best when he's talking about the specifics of warfare," according to CNN's Tucker Carlson, cohost of "Crossfire." "Clark can talk in detail about military hardware, tell you that Scuds are 60 or 70 feet long, he knows about war." And he's nimble with analogies; when asked why the U.S. military couldn't locate Scud missiles the Iraqis are said to have, Carlson recalls with appreciation, "He said it was 'like trying to find something on a carpet while looking through a straw.'"
He's also a much-rumored possible Democratic presidential candidate, a prospect he will neither confirm nor deny. In fact, he doesn't like to talk about it at all. But his appeal to Democrats is undeniable. Clark graduated first in his class from the United States Military Academy at West Point and was a Rhodes scholar. After a lengthy military career that included stints in Vietnam, Panama and Dayton, Ohio (where he led the military negotiations for the Bosnian Peace Accords), Clark achieved the most notice in his three years as commander of the NATO forces that defeated the forces of former Yugoslav President Slobodon Milosevic in 1999. He was headstrong and controversial -- and not on good terms with Defense Secretary William Cohen.
After being abruptly relieved of his command right after his Kosovo victory, Clark returned home to Little Rock, Ark., and began work on his memoirs -- "Waging Modern War: Bosnia, Kosovo, and the Future of Combat" -- and worked as a corporate consultant for the Stephens Group. His name was mentioned, then self-removed, as a possible Arkansas Senate candidate in 2002. But his subsequent trips to first-in-the-nation primary states Iowa and New Hampshire and his chats with key politicos such as Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, keep Clark in the Democratic dark horse category -- even if he hasn't registered yet as a Democrat.
You're unlikely to hear Clark the candidate speak up on CNN, now that we're in the middle of war. But when Salon spoke to Clark just before Operation Iraqi Freedom commenced, he didn't shy away from criticizing Bush foreign policy. "I don't think the case has been made well," Clark told Salon about a war with Iraq. "It's been made very poorly." But little is known about Clark's views on much else other than foreign policy and military matters. Clark told a dinner gathering of New Hampshire Democrats that he is pro-choice and opposes the presence of "out" gays and lesbians in the military. And he was one of several former military men to file a pro-affirmative action "friend of the court" brief on behalf of the University of Michigan. But tax cuts, healthcare, guns -- Clark is a blank slate, likely to remain that way at least until the end of the war. And, for possibly much longer than that, Democrats and political geeks will be left to wonder: Will he or won't he?
Salon spoke to Clark several times by telephone last week. On Sunday, four days into Operation Iraqi Freedom, we caught up with him again to talk about the status of the war. Those questions and answers are at the end of the interview.
I know you're not going to declare your intentions to run on the phone with me right now. But help me out here -- other than on abortion, gays in the military and affirmative action, is there any other domestic issue you've stated your take on?
I haven't given any positions recently, because I'm just trying to work on national security stuff and my CNN stuff.
If you do run, the media will end up combing through your life. Is there anything that might not withstand that scrutiny? Are you ready for those questions?
I'm just not going to answer that. I will say this: If I were to make such a decision, obviously I'd have to be prepared for those issues.
You've had kind words to say about your fellow Arkansan, President Clinton. When's the last time you talked to him?
A few weeks ago, maybe.
What did you talk about?
I talk to a lot of people, and I just like to leave it at that. We talked about international affairs, our national security policy, and other things.
What, if anything, would you have done differently in the current crisis?
Well, I would have said that at the outset we should have built a stronger legal framework on the whole war on terror and then worked to bring NATO into it so we had the NATO nations engaged more actively for the war on terror. And that in turn would have led naturally into the work against Iraq.
