Tag: Wesley Clark

Why Is Wesley Clark Spamming Me?

Today I received my first political spam of the year — some lame piece of nonsense trying to get me to visit Wesley Clark’s lame web site. Apparently I’m not the only one receiving this spam.

I suppose, though, that if Clark were president he would have favored forming a coalition to go to the UN to ask for further study by the Security Council on spam.

Thank goodness Clark as all but cratered in the campaign and we won’t have to hear about him in the context of the presidential campaign much longer.

Clark Digs Himself Even Bigger Holes

According to a Village Voice story, Wesley Clark’s new book Winning Modern Wars is going to allege that the Bush administration had begun planning its attack on Iraq at least two months prior to the 9/11 attacks,

As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. I left the Pentagon that afternoon deeply concerned.

The most obvious problem about the above excerpt is, if it is true, why had Clark never mentioned it before? Similarly, Clark writes in the book that,

After 9/11, during the first months of the war on terror, a critical opportunity to nail Al Qaeda in Afghanistan was missed. Additionally, our allies were neglected and a counter-terrorist strategy was adopted that, despite all the rhetoric, focused the nation on a conventional attack on Iraq rather than a shadowy war against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks: Al Qaeda. I argue that not only did the Bush administration misunderstand the lessons of modern war, it made a policy blunder of significant proportions. . . . [E]vidence and rhetoric were used selectively to justify the decision to attack Iraq. . . . [W]e had re-energized Al Qaeda by attacking an Islamic state and presenting terrorists with ready access to vulnerable U.S. forces. It was the inevitable result of a flawed strategy

But as the Voice points out, as recently as April 2003 Clark an op-ed 2003 praising President Bush and Prime Minister Blair for their courage in taking on Iraq. (And who in their right mind thinks Al Qaeda was re-energized by the war in Afghanistan? I guess that’s true if you define re-energized as seeing most of your top leaders killed and dozens others imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay — Al Qaeda seems to have largely been eliminated as a serious player in international terrorism). Source: The Secrets Clark Kept. Sydney H. Schanberg, Village Voice, September 29, 2003.

Who Is Lying — Michael Moore Or Wesley Clark?

Michael Moore has a bizarre post on the front page of his web site. Bizarre because it is another of Moore’s rambling essays in support of Wesley Clark for president, but on the other hand if Moore is right then Clark is again lying (one way or the other) about that mysterious call he claims to have received after 9/11 telling him to blame the attacks on Iraq.

Clark originally implied that the call came from the White House, but backed off and later maintained it was from a Middle Eastern think tank in Canada. According to Clark, nobody from the White House ever asked him to blame 9/11 on Iraq. Clark’s last version of events was that he simply learned later that people in the White House were supposedly also discussing spinning the attacks to blame Iraq.

But Moore writes,

My wife and I were invited over to a neighbor’s home 12 days ago where [Wesley] Clark told those gathered that certain people, acting on behalf of the Bush administration, called him immediately after the attacks on September 11th and asked him to go on TV to tell the country that Saddam Hussein was “involved” in the attacks. He asked them for proof, but they couldn’t provide any. He refused their request.

Now the person with the Canadian Middle Eastern think tank has already come forward and said that he didn’t call Clark until days after the 9/11 attack and he was relying on information passed along by people he knows in the Israeli intelligence community.

So is Clark changing his story on this mysterious call again? Or is Moore just distorting what Clark said (that wouldn’t be the first time for Moore distorting reality)?

Source:

“And Now a Chance to Bid Farewell to Mr. Bush”. Michael Moore, September 23, 2003.

When Would Wesley Have Went to War?

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.

If You Liked John Kerry, You’ll Love Wesley Clark

Apparently Wesley Clark is running for president because the country needs a politician willing to change his positions even more frequently than John Kerry. Here’s Clark on Sept. 18 on whether or not he would have voted to go to war with Iraq,

I don’t know if I would have nor not. I’ve said it both ways because when you get into this, what happens is you have to put yourself in a position — on balance, I probably would have voted for it.

And on Sept. 19,

Let’s make one thing real clear, I would never have voted for this war.

This is consistent with Clark’s claims about that call he supposedly received on 9/11 telling him to connect Saddam Hussein to the attacks. Here’s Clark on NBC on June 15,

CLARK: There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein.”

RUSSERT: “By who? Who did that?”

CLARK: “Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, ‘You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.’ I said, ‘But–I’m willing to say it, but what’s your evidence?’ And I never got any evidence.”

Then a slightly different version on Hannity & Colmes, responding to a question about who specifically told him to connect 9/11 and Hussein,

CLARK: It came from many different sources, Sean.

HANNITY: Who? Who?

CLARK : And I personally got a call from a fellow in Canada who is part of a Middle Eastern think tank who gets inside intelligence information. He called me on 9/11.

HANNITY: That’s not the answer. Who in the White House?

CLARK: I’m not going to go into those sources.

Clark waited until July 18 to send a letter to the New York Times acknowledging that no one from the White House had called him,

I would like to correct any possible misunderstanding of my remarks on ‘Meet the Press’ quoted in Paul Krugman’s July 15 column, about ‘people around the White House’ seeking to link Sept. 11 to Saddam Hussein. I received a call from a Middle East think tank outside the country, asking me to link 9/11 to Saddam Hussein. No one from the White House asked me to link Saddam Hussein to Sept. 11. Subsequently, I learned that there was much discussion inside the administration in the days immediately after Sept. 11 trying to use 9/11 to go after Saddam Hussein. In other words, there were many people, inside and outside the government, who tried to link Saddam Hussein to Sept. 11.

Finally the Toronto Star has an article including quotes from the mysterious person from the Middle East think tank who made that call to Clark,

[Thomas] Hecht said he called Clark either Sept. 12 or Sept. 13 — not the morning of the attacks, as the former general said — but he merely passed on information he had received from Israel which drew a purported link. Hecht said Clark called him in Montreal Sept. 7 this year to clarify the conversation the two men had, perhaps in anticipation of the question being raised again as part of his campaign. “I told him the Begin-Sadat Centre is a center for strategic studies in Israel and has made various studies on the Iraqi threat to the state of Israel and therefore we have carried out analyses of what connection there could be between Saddam Hussein and other militant Islamic groups,” Hecht said. “I don’t know why I would be confused with the White House. I don’t even have white paint on my house,” he added. “I saw those comments he made and I just chuckled.”

In an appearance in Iowa, the New York Times reported that Clark seemed ready to run an Arnold Schwarzenegger-style campaign,

“I don’t know enough to give you a comprehensive answer at this point,” he said in response to a voter’s question about universal health insurance. What he did say, over and over, was how happy he was to be in Iowa. He exulted over the egg-white omelette a waitress put in front of him — “Now this is an Iowa breakfast!” — and complimented a woman’s overalls — “That’s a real Iowa outfit!” — and said, literally, “some of my best friends from the military are from Iowa.”

That’s his story, and he’s sticking to it. At least for the next few days.