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November 12,
1999
Gen. Wesley Clark
Fights On and On
At the beginning of the Kosovo conflict,CounterPunch
delved into the military career of General Wesley Clark and discovered
that his meteoric rise through the ranks derived from the successful
manipulation of appearances: faking the results of combat exercises,
greasing to superiors and other practices common to the general
officer corps. We correctly predicted that the unspinnable realities
of a real war would cause him to become unhinged. Given that
Clark attempted to bomb the CNN bureau in Belgrade and ordered
the British General Michael Jackson to engage Russian troops
in combat at the end of the war, we feel events amply vindicated
our forecast.
With the end of hostilities it has become
clear even to Clark that most people, apart from some fanatical
members of the war party in the White House and State Department,
consider the general, as one Pentagon official puts it, "a
horse's ass". Defense Secretary William Cohen is known to
loathe him, and has seen to it that the Hammer of the Serbs will
be relieved of the Nato command two months early.
Adding to this humiliation have been numerous
post-war reports from the ground in Kosovo making it clear that
the air campaign supervised by Clark inflicted little damage
on the Serb army. Derisive comments from Serb generals on the
general ineffectiveness of Nato's tactical air campaign have
only rubbed salt in his wounds. Accordingly, on September 16,
in a desperate effort to redeem the tarnished record of his military
command, Clark summoned the Nato press corps in Brussels to hear
his own version of events.
True to form, Clark's presentation opened
with a gross distortion of the truth: "From the outset of
this campaign, we said we would be attacking on two air lines
of operation. There would be a strategic attack line" against
Serb air defenses, headquarters, supply lines and a "tactical
line of operation against the Serb forces in Kosovo and in southern
Serbia".
In fact, neither Clark nor anyone else in
the U.S. chain of command imagined that the war would involve
more than a brief demonstration of Nato firepower in the forms
of attacks on air defense radars, communications centers and
other fixed targets, thus providing Milosevic with the excuse
the U.S. thought he wanted to throw in his hand.
"The Joint Chiefs went along with [the war] on the strict
understanding that it would last a maximum of two days",
says one Pentagon official with direct knowledge of these events.
"No one really planned for what to do after that."
Clark intended the briefing to provide unassailable
confirmation of his wartime claims that Nato pilots had destroyed
hundreds of Serb tanks and other heavy weapons. Yet he had a
problem, since the teams he dispatched to Kosovo immediately
after the war could only find 26 tanks and self-propelled artillery
pieces destroyed on the ground. Accordingly, Clark tried to dazzle
his audience with military managerial techno-speak about the
"building block methodology" employed in preparing
his assessment, which permitted NATO's supreme commander to add
another 67 "successful strikes" to the "catastrophic
kills" represented by the 26 tanks and self-propelled artillery
pieces he had already claimed.
With the sleight of hand of a true briefer,
Clark left the impression in the minds of the press corps that
in each of these 67 strikes the targets had actually been destroyed.
But the "methodology" meant merely that the target
was added to the score so long as two or more sources-i.e. the
pilot's claim, plus perhaps video footage or a report from someone
else in the area-indicated that the weapon had hit the target.
With such casuistry, Clark was able to inflate the total figure
to 93-not far from the wartime boast of 110 such kills.
Even the paltry claim of 26 destroyed targets
in this category should be viewed with skepticism. An alert friend
of CounterPunch in the defense community points out that slide
# 27 in the briefing features a "tank" destroyed by
a U.S. Navy F-14 mission. Actually, slide #27 shows not a tank
but a second world war U.S. tank destroyer known as the M-36,
famously ineffective even when introduced in 1943, and later
donated to Yugoslavia some time in the 1950s. Perhaps, our friend
suggests, "The Yugos took one look at what they got, and
then put the things in front of the nearest VFW-equivalent meeting
halls. Then, along come [the Nato attacks] and the word goes
out: 'we need hulks to serve as decoys for the Americans to blow
up.' Wes Clark & staff collect the imagery and proudly display
their 'kill'".
This same observer notes that the Pentagon
is working on what will be a "lying, cheating, thieving"
after-action report, basing his description on news that the
work is being supervised by deputy defense secretary John Hamre,
a noted time-server and catspaw of the uniformed military.
Among the many issues the report is not expected
to address is the sudden disappearance, half way through the
conflict, of the $2 billion B-2 stealth bomber, described by
Clark as one of the "heroes" of the war. Forty-three
days into the conflict, the B-2 was reported as having flown
"nearly fifty" sorties. When the war ended after 78
days of bombing, an authoritative report stated that the B-2
had flown a total of 49 missions, indicating that it "fell
out of the war" half way through. Presumably, the costly
behemoths were deteriorating at such a rate that the Air Force
decided to relegate the plane to its alternative mission as backdrop
for President Clinton's demonstrations of martial resolve on
TV.
Another topic on which we may expect Hamre
to remain diplomatically silent is the ingenuity with which the
Serbs diverted the anti-radar Harm missiles launched in enormous
numbers by Nato's planes. Early on, the Serbs discovered that
a microwave oven, adjusted to operate with the door open, appears
exactly like an air defense radar to the $750,000 missiles -
a very cost-effective exchange.
Despite such embarrassments, Clark can take
heart from the fact that his influence on warfare already transcends
the Balkans. Since Operation Allied Force laid waste to the Serbian
civilian infrastructure, the targeting of such infrastructure
has become routine and acceptable. The Israelis, who have for
years shown relative care in avoiding the Lebanese infrastructure
in their raids, were quick to change tactics, citing the Balkan
operation as a legitimizing precedent. More recently the gangsters
in the Kremlin have used the same justification for their terror-bombing
of Chechnya.
Since Clark may be chagrined at his reception
in post-war Washington, he should perhaps look to Tel Aviv and
Moscow for a more fulsome recognition of his role in history.
CP
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