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I just read this post on an Ebay Wes Clark announcement thread. A woman who idolizes the shrub posted it. This is just a taste of things to come, I think. I can only post a portion of it because she didn't give a link. I hope I don't break any posting rules here. If I do, just remove it, I'll understand. By none other than Rich Lowry. Isn't that the guy Al Franken wanted to fight in his book? :-)
The hollow Clark boomlet Rich Lowry
Call him "General Chutzpah." Former Gen. Wesley Clark, perhaps soon-to-be a Democratic presidential candidate, is riding high on his prescience about the difficulties of the current Iraq war. But he utterly lacked prescience about his own war, in Kosovo in 1999. It is just one reason why -- as a political commodity -- there is probably less than meets the eye to the telegenic general.
Back then, Clark was the NATO supreme commander and confident that the threat of bombing would make Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic buckle and relinquish plans to cleanse the Serb province of Kosovo of its Albanians. If Clark had been a TV pundit during the Kosovo war -- which he became afterward -- he would no doubt have subjected his own handiwork to his earnest, know-it-all tsk-tsking.
President Clinton believed, like Clark, that Milosevic would back down immediately. So, he began a limp NATO bombing campaign, and when that didn't work, he had nothing to fall back on except more of a limp NATO bombing campaign. Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O'Hanlon write in their account of the war, "Winning Ugly": "NATO did not expect a long war. Worse, it did not even prepare for the possibility."
To Clark's credit, he pushed for ground troops, but that was a nonstarter, because no one in Washington thought it worth the risk in a war that had little connection to the American national interest. Clark has criticized Iraq as a "war of choice." But Kosovo was even more so, conceived as a splendid little humanitarian war that would infuse NATO with new life. No one even bothered to try to argue that Milosevic constituted an "imminent threat" to the United States -- Clark's standard for the Iraq war.ouncement thread. A woman who idolizes the shrub posted it. This is just a taste of things to come, I think. I can only post a portion of it because she didn't give a link. I hope I don't break any posting rules here. If I do, just remove it, I'll understand. :-)
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