Since we have so many tired, old Clark slams being rehashed lately, I thought it only fair to post one of the BEST Clark articles I've ever read. Here is an excerpt that demonstrates clearly the honor, integrity and courage of Wesley Clark:
WE LIKE OUR PRESIDENTS to have been soldiers because we like them to have shown courage under fire, which is to say that we do not like them to be cowards. We do not like our presidents to have been generals because we do not like our presidents to have had military ambitions, which is to say that we do not like them to be warmongers. The general, however, takes care to distinguish between the courage required for soldiering and the courage required for being a general, between physical courage and the courage required to make difficult decisions, even at personal expense. It was not so long ago that he had to show both kinds.
In August 1995, the general—three stars, working as J-5 for the Joint Chiefs—went to Bosnia as part of the negotiating team Ambassador Richard Holbrooke had put together to end the civil war that had resulted in the massacre of as many as eight thousand Muslim men and boys at the town of Srebrenica the month before. In Belgrade, Clark had met for the first time Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, who was sponsoring the Bosnian Serbs. Now the team had to travel to Sarajevo. Told that the airport in Sarajevo was too dangerous to fly into, the team decided to drive and asked Milosevic to guarantee its safety on a road held by Bosnian Serbs. Milosevic did not, and so the team wound up taking a fortified Humvee and an armored personnel carrier on a pitched, narrow, winding mountain road notoriously vulnerable to Serb machine-gun fire. Clark and Holbrooke went in the Humvee, the rest in the APC. In his book, the general describes what happened this way: "At the end of the first week we had a tragic accident on Mount Igman, near Sarajevo. were killed when the French armored personnel carrier in which they were riding broke through the shoulder of the road and tumbled several hundred meters down a steep hillside."
It is not until one reads Holbrooke's book, To End a War, that one finds out that after the APC went off the road, Clark grabbed a rope, anchored it to a tree stump, and rappelled down the mountainside after it, despite the gunfire that the explosion of the APC set off, despite the warnings that the mountainside was heavily mined, despite the rain and the mud, and despite Holbrooke yelling that he couldn't go. It is not until one brings the incident up to the general that one finds out that the burning APC had turned into a kiln, and that Clark stayed with it and aided in the extraction of the bodies; it is not until one meets Wesley Clark that one understands the degree to which he held Milosevic accountable. Full article at:
http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2003/030801_mfe_clark_1.htmlDTH
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