The other day I noted that one of Wesley Clark’s version of his views on Iraq is that he supports the idea of going to war against Iraq, but thinks “We could have waited” and conducted the war at a time TBA. So far, however, Clark has not offered his opinion on when the stars would have been aligned properly to begin such a war.
Maybe there is a hint of what Clark was looking for, however, in a decade-old blunder by Clark when he was doing that whole Bonsia thing. Here’s the Weekly Standard’s summary,
On August 27, 1994, representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff during a fact-finding mission to Bosnia, Clark “ignored State Department warnings not to meet with Serb officials suspected of ordering deaths of civilians in a campaign known as ethnic cleansing” and paid a courtesy call on Serbian army commander Ratko Mladic. Mladic was already the subject of multiple U.S. war-crimes charges: “artillery attacks on civilians in Sarajevo” and the “razing of Muslim towns and villages,” along with random acts of “mass murder.” According to a contemporaneous Washington Post report: “On Friday [August 26, 1994] and again on Saturday, State Department officials said, they instructed [Clark] not to go, but he went anyway.” The meeting “occurred as the Clinton administration is trying to isolate the Serbs in advance of possible military action against them.”
. . .
“What State Department officials said they found especially disturbing was a photograph of Clark and Mladic wearing each other’s caps. The picture appeared in several European newspapers, U.S. officials said. Clark accepted as gifts Mladic’s hat, a bottle of brandy, and a pistol inscribed in Cyrillic, U.S. officials said. ‘It’s like cavorting with Hermann Goering,’ one U.S. official complained.”
So maybe Clark’s upset that hostilities with Iraq started before he was able to exchange hats and ceremonial side arms with Chemical Ali.
Mladic, by the way, is still a fugitive wanted for crimes against humanity.