Wesley Clark: Another Democratic Nutcase By Andrew L. Jaffee, January 24, 2004	Home   Search   Forum   Terms

As General Wesley Clark plunges into the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, he would be wise to recall the warning of a shrewd Roman historian. Tacitus wrote of a gifted but disastrous political leader: "capax imperii nisi imperasset."

This crabbed Latin judgment is famously hard to translate but its rough meaning goes: "He would have made a very fine emperor if, poor fellow, he had not actually become emperor."

- John O'Sullivan, National Review Online

I rank Wesley Clark as 3rd in the top three nutcases of the Democratic presidential nominees, with Kucinich in 1st place, and Dean as 2nd. Yes, Clark is a former military big shot, but he is too unpredictable, volatile, and inconsistent to even be considered for the post of president of the most powerful country on Earth. Let's look at why I feel this way.

Clark entered the race amid great fanfare probably because he presented Democrats with an alternative they previously didn't have: someone who could challenge Bush's command over national defense issues while also catering to the rest of the boilerplate party concerns (universal health care, support of abortion rights, etc.). But chinks started appearing almost immediately in Clark's 34-year military career's suit of armor. According to the Peter J. Boyer of The New Yorker, Clark didn't get along too well with his other military big shot peers:

Soon after Clark entered the race, though, another Clinton-era general, Tommy Franks, who retired this summer after directing the capture of Baghdad, was asked in a private setting whether he believed that Clark would make a good President. “Absolutely not,” Franks replied. Retired General Hugh Shelton was asked the same question after giving a talk at a college in California. Shelton, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was Clark’s boss in 1999 when Clark was unceremoniously told that he was being removed from his position as Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. “I’ve known Wes for a long time,” Shelton said. “I will tell you the reason he came out of Europe early had to do with integrity and character issues, things that are very near and dear to my heart. ... Wes won’t get my vote.” Shelton has refused to explain how he came to his conclusion. ...

Yet he [Clark] also had a certainty about the rightness of his views which led to conflicts with his colleagues and, sometimes, his superiors. ...

Still, the antipathy to Clark was real and pervasive. Clark’s last three Army jobs, including two at the highest rank, were awarded to him without the Army’s recommendation.

Boyer, who interviewed Clark personally, found the general to be generally tense:

Clark has often been described as tightly wound. He seems almost physically to exude an inner tension.

I myself saw Clark blow his top on national television (MSNBC) when he was simply presented with a record of his own words. He obviously isn't used to being challenged, even if challenged with the truth. What's the old cliché, "Do you want this guy to have his finger on the button?" (the button controlling the U.S.'s vast nuclear arsenal). How would he react as president, when daily life is filled with not just tactical challenges, but political ones?

So far we've found that Clark is a volatile man, not fully trusted by his peers. Next we find him to be failing what seems to be a litmus test for Democratic party candidates: opposition to the Iraq war. Now that Clark is in the Democratic spotlight, he's trying to convince the faithful that he is critical of Bush's handling of Iraq and the war on terror. The problem is, the facts don't support such a notion.

John O'Sullivan of the National Review Online pointed out that,

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, the left-wing media watchdog, has unearthed a wonderful series of embarrassing contradictions about the Iraq invasion that Gen. Clark committed in the last year.

For instance: George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair "should be proud of their resolve in the face of so much doubt" (the London Times, 4/10/03). Or, in the same newspaper on the following day, "... if there is a single overriding lesson, it must be this: American military power ... is virtually unchallengeable today. Take us on? Don't try. And that's not hubris, it's just plain fact." And much more in like vein.

It is embarrassing for Clark to be faced with such revelations, but more so to see him now fumbling to deal with them. From the January 14, 2004 issue of NewsMax.com,

Democratic presidential hopeful Gen. Wesley Clark insisted Wednesday morning that he's been against the Iraq war going all the way back to the 9/11 attacks - even though he told reporters just four months ago that he "probably" would have voted for the October 2002 Iraq War resolution. ...

In the next breath Clark turned pro-war once again, telling the same reporters, "What happens is you have to put yourself in a position. On balance, I probably would have voted for it."

Whether Clark is pro- or anti-Iraq war is completely unclear to me. His claim to now be against the liberation of Iraq is just plain hypocritical. According to the The New Yorker, Clark has stated that the Iraq war was a “historic blunder” which was executed without “the mantle of authority” which only the United Nations can provide. This is strange. Has he forgotten that he commanded the U.S.-led war to protect Kosovo from Serbia's genocidal intentions? That war didn't have the approval of the U.N. Security Council. How is the Iraq war any different, General Clark? In the same interview with The New Yorker, Clark flip-flopped and admitted that the Kosovo action was “technically illegal.” So which end is up? Sounds like double-speak/double-think.

Clark has also made claims that the American people were misled into the Iraq war:

In Clark's telling, the Iraq war wasn't just misconceived, it was — in Clark's favorite charge — unpatriotic. According to Clark, unnamed sources in the Pentagon told him after 9/11 that the administration was hell-bent on toppling Saddam Hussein, which he characterizes as "Kind of crazy. Not patriotic. Not smart." He continues: "I don't think it was a patriotic war. I think it was a mistake, a strategic mistake, and I think that the president of the United States wasn't patriotic in going after Saddam Hussein. He simply misled America and cost us casualties and killed and injured America's reputation around the world without valid reason for doing so. It's not patriotic; it's wrong."

Patriotism is a subjective topic, though I fail to see how toppling Saddam was unpatriotic. I've yet to see any evidence to substantiate Clark's claim that we were misled. I'm still waiting.

So far, not so good. Next we find a former general -- former Supreme Commander of NATO -- making a promise which no good military leader should ever make: Clark claimed that as U.S. president, there would be no terrorist attacks against this country. In an interview with the Concord Monitor, he said,

If I'm president of the United States, I'm going to take care of the American people. We are not going to have one of these incidents. ... Nothing is going to hurt this country - not bioweapons, not a nuclear weapon, not a terrorist strike - there is nothing that can hurt us if we stay united and move together and have a vision for moving to the future the right way.

President Bush has made no such claims. In fact, he's gone out of his way to brace the American people for a long and tough road ahead in the war on terror. Just how can Clark make such a guarantee with the U.S.'s thousands of miles of borders, millions of illegal immigrants, and millions of visitors coming and going through airports, sea ports, and land crossings? Clark's statement is completely unreasonable.

Clark's gaffes have had one main effect on his Democratic constituency: He has alienated them. According to the left-wing online website, The Left Coaster, the faithful aren't even sure Clark is a Democrat:

There was the voting record:

He said he "probably" voted for Richard M. Nixon in 1972 and backed Ronald Reagan.

General, skip the "probably" crap - you ought to remember if you voted for Nixon. This is an easy question to answer, even if Democrats don't like the answer. He at least recovered some by explaining how Clinton converted him:

He did not start considering himself a Democrat until 1992, when he backed fellow Arkansan Bill Clinton. "He moved me," Clark said. "I didn't consider it party, I considered I was voting for the man."

Rich Lowry of the National Review Online sums up the Clark campaign rather astutely:

Anyone who listens to what Clark says on the stump every day can only consider his surge — fueled partly by doubts about the seemingly out-of-control Dean — with incredulity. Clark isn't much of a substantive or tonal alternative to the former Vermont governor. He's just Dean with medals. If anything, Clark is more outrageous than the front-runner...

Too bad that most Democrats are too far left to consider Joe Lieberman for president. The party faithful believe that the U.S. liberation of Iraq was the greatest evil of 20th and 21st centuries. They don't like Lieberman mainly because he, unlike the rest of the candidates, is completely unashamed for supporting the Iraq war. I could certainly vote for Lieberman, but as things now stand, he'll never make it to opposing George Bush. This leaves me with little choice than to vote for Bush, whom I'm sure will stand tough against the civilized world's greatest enemy, Islamism.