Most highly decorated military officer since General Dwight D. Eisenhower

[Tinksrival]

Albania
The Skanderbeg Medal
Argentina
Order of Merit
Belgium
The Grand Cordon of the Order of Leopold
Bulgaria
Order of the Madara Horseman, First Class with Swords
Canada
The Meritorious Service Cross
Croatia
Grade of Prince Branimir with Ribbon and Star
Czech Republic
Cross of Merit of the Minister of Defense First Class
England
Honorary Knight Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire
Estonia
Order of the Cross of the Eagle
France
Commander of the Legion of Honor
Germany
Grand Cross of the Order of Merit
Hungary
Order of Merit of the Hungarian Republic
Italy
Grand Officer of the Order of Merit
Lithuania
First Class Order of Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas
Luxembourg
Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Grand Duchy
Morocco
Grand Cordon of the Ouissam Alaoui
Netherlands
Knight Grand Cross in the Order of Orange-Nassau, with Swords
Poland
The Commander's Cross with Star of the Order of Merit
Portugal
Grand Cross of the Medal of Military Merit
Slovakia
Commemorative Medal of the Minister of Defence of the Slovak Republic First Class
Slovenia
Commander's Cross, The Silver Order of Freedom
Spain
Grand Medal of Military Merit (White Band)

Republic of Vietnam VIETNAM
Republic of Vietnam Combat Medal

This is International Awards. There are many more civilian and military awards like this:

Defense Distinguished Service Medal (with 4 Oak Leaf Clusters)


The Defense Distinguished Service Medal (DDSM) is a United States military award presented for exceptionally distinguished performance of duty contributing to national security or defense of the United States. The decoration is awarded only at the highest levels of the military while assigned to a joint activity. The DDSM may also be awarded to other senior officers whose direct and individual contributions to national security or defense are recognized as being so exceptional in scope and value as to be equivalent to contributions normally associated with positions encompassing broader responsibilities. General Clark received this award on five separate occasions.

It is the United States's highest peacetime defense award.

The Wes Clark websight, securingamerica.com, has been completely updated, looks beautiful! I found a link to all his awards, all five pages!There is complete decriptions of the awards and the circumstances in witch they were awarded.:
http://securingamerica.com/taxonomy/term/76
His latest was May 25 from Latvia

:patriot:Can you imagine having such a honored and esteemed person as our President?
Well a girl can dream, right?:patriot:


Edit to add:
(One of the most highly decorated military officers since General Dwight D. Eisenhower)
I reduced it in subject to fit but this is factual correct.

[Redstone]

1. How the hell does he keep his shirt buttoned with all that weight

hanging on it?

Redstone

[Tinksrival]

3. Redstone, you cracked me up!

Big time! :rofl:

[Redstone]

7. Well, there's gotta be SOMEONE who's oblivious enough

to point out stuff like that.

Redstone

[Tinksrival]

11. just curious.....

Does Redstone have anything to do with the Arsenal?

[Redstone]

13. No. Nothing to do with the arsenal or the rockets.

It's my coming-of-age name.

I appreciate the curiosity.

Redstone

[Tinksrival]

16. Ok

Well I'm glad "coming of age" doesn't mean you lost your good sense of humor!
Lived at Redstone Arsenal in the eighties while doing time as an Army wife.:hi:

[Redstone]

91. No, that was MANY years ago. I've resisted growing up since. Good thing

I never took another ("adult") name, because then I'd probably be known as "tall-guy-who-forgets-a-lot."

Redstone

[AllegroRondo]

80. Seriously, its because he cant wear them all at once

Army regulations say that you can only wear one foreign award at a time. So I guess he would have to pick whichever one he liked best. Or not wear any so as not to offend any countries.

[whistle]

2. Pretty impressive, where were George W Bush's military service...

...medals when he landed on the aircraft carrier and declared "Mission Accomplished"? I think it was pinned to his underwear to hold them up and back so it could show off his package!

[rosesaylavee]

5. Heavens no! The danger to the national jewels

would be too great if they were holding his shorts up. What if the pin opened!!!!11111!!! Wasn't Gannon along on that trip to carry his special things?

[Tinksrival]

6. HHHHAAAA HHHAAA !!!!

I can't believe how funny you guys are! :rofl:

[Generic Other]

26. George was awarded all of these medals and more

American Star


Leadership Star


Silver Superstar


http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/medals/medals.html

[Tinksrival]

34. Oh Man! Those are perfect! Ha ha ha !

:rofl:Creepy mommy Babs must be soooo proud!

[NastyDiaper]

71. Gusher

[butterfly77]

82. lol- the dumb bastard

:rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:

THATS BUSH

[madokie]

36. his package being a sock I suspose. on a different note isn't General

Wes Clark a Rhodes Scholer. Clinton is, Feingold is. I think we need someone who has intelligence not someone who has a department of intelligence to be setting in the oval office. not to mention cajones

[Gloria]

4. Thanks for organizing all this in one post! It's pretty amazing

to know that America does, indeed, have someone who is held in high esteem by other countries.

Clark's diplomatic skills would actually be more useful than his military experience if we could be so lucky to get him into the White House....

[Tinksrival]

10. I stumbled upon this will poking around his new sight

I thought the awards were so beautiful and the descriptions and presentation so cool.
I just thought this could beat any repub! In my world anyway. Too bad we arn't living in my world cause it would be peace and prosperity with President Clark!:grouphug:

[pushycat]

20. Gen Clark would be a terrific SecDef w/Feingold-Warner ticket!!!

Our best and brightest encapsulated in Gen Wesley Clark. Love this guy...


Edited to correct spelling

[serryjw]

30. I know it's crazy but

He can be Commander-in- Chief but can't be SecDef, isn't out of the military 10 years!

[HannibalBarca]

8. It's shocking isnt it???

...the white hot contrast between a man such as Wes Clark and Commander BunnyPants. A lifetime of courage, service, dedication, bravery, compassion, discipline versus......?????? for Bunnypants.

[democrank]

9. Wes Clark is a top-notch Democrat.

Supported him in `04 and would be proud to do so again in `08.

[Liberal In Texas]

12. Here, Here!

Hope he's our guy in '08.

[Wesin04]

14. Global recognition

These beautiful and historic medals are symbolic of the respect for the valor, intelligence, integrity that Wes Clark is. He can go anywhere in the world and sit down with leaders to have real, meaningful dialog because he'd be accepted and welcomed. That's the kind of leader we so badly need.

[Tinksrival]

17. Your describing my fantasy planet!

Do we dare to dream?.............Will we ever wake-up from this nightmare?
Will the media drug induced Americans seek the truth?

[madmom]

15. color me impressed!!!!

:patriot: :patriot: :patriot:

[Old and In the Way]

18. Yeah, but do they equal AWOL distinguished TANG record or Cheney's

5 deferments? Somewhere in Freeperville there is a person who'd debate this.

I guess that tells you what the world thinks of Wes Clark. If he wins the primary, I'd happily and proudly support him.

[MrSlayer]

21. "Those medals only show him to be soft" said the Freeper.

All those people liking him must mean he sucks up to the socialists, they aren't scared of him. The best solution is to put another mindless, chickenhawk fascist in the white house.

[obreaslan]

74. That's gonna be a lot of fake band-aids at the RNC Convention in 2008...

:eyes:

[FrenchieCat]

89. Gonna have to be "fake" tourniquets.......

cause Wes almost "Died" from his 4 bullet wounds! :patriot:

[Canuckistanian]

22. Cheney earned several "Pink Heart" awards

For injuring himself while filling out deferment forms. Those paper cuts can be nasty!

[Ilsa]

19. K&R #6. Thanks for such a wonderful post.

I can't wait to work on his campaign again next year. (Please, oh please, run)

[Rabrrrrrr]

23. Freeps will dismiss every one of them as foreign, then raise Reagan's GBE

as proof of republican betterness, because GBE (an award from a country that matters, unlike every other country in the world) tops the KBE.

[pkspiegel]

33. Then they can look at his military and civilian awards

Anyone who reads through the three types of awards this amazing individual has received will have a new image of him. No thinking person could possibly dismiss them as irrelevant. This man is a treasure chest just waiting for more poeple to discover him.
:patriot:

[stepnw1f]

100. That's Just Crazy Then

Denying facts is a sign of sickness and those using it as a tactic for political gain, should be shut out of the debate all together. I am thoroughly convinced these people are sick or dumb.

[Dinger]

24. A Dream Indeed - See Y'all At The Inaugural Balls In '09!

I will explode with joy!
:patriot:


Oh yeah, K & R!!!!!!

[Rex]

25. If only the Republicans would wise up, they should have voted for

Wes Clark, along with all the Dems in 2004. Wes Clark IS OUR modern day Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Hey lurkers, if ya want all this mess fixed that George Walker Bush created over the last 6 years...vote for Clark. He can fix all the bad stuff because unlike Bush, Wesley Clark is a true American hero. Goldwater would have approved of Clark as well as Burke. I'm not conservative in the least, but I'd vote for Clark first before anyone else (well Kucinich, but no one believes in peace, so) in the Dem party! We need him! The MIC needs Clark to get the system back in place and running without all this govt waste! I know he could clean up the corruption in the CIA/FBI and it would be a tremendous boost in moral for our troops fighting all over the world.

Think about it.

[serryjw]

32. NOW that is one of the best lines yet

well Kucinich, but no one believes in peace:spank: :nuke:

[Rex]

42. Thank you, thank you...

and now...Jesus and his rifle!!!

:spank:

[Texas_Kat]

27. I noticed you included only his international honors

His military honors deserve a thread too!

http://www.securingamerica.com/taxonomy/term/81

[tabasco]

28. I bet he even has a couple ARCOMs and AAMs too !

However, I know for a fact he doesn't have a Good Conduct Medal.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
(officers aren't eligible for a GCM)

[rusty_parts2001]

29. He gave a great speech in Fort Worth

to the Texas Democratic Party State Convention. Watch it if you haven't seen it yet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpMV2G3TajA

[BikeWriter]

31. Hey, I'd vote for him in a minute!

[young_at_heart]

35. Ditto!

My husband and I wanted him as soon as he declared....unfortunately, he did it too late in 2004.

[BikeWriter]

65. It would be so nice to have an intelligent leader for a change.

[kansasblue]

37. Clark Fiengold 2008

[LeftofU]

38. He's O.G.....

How's he go to the bathroom with all that on?

[ConsAreLiars]

39. Remember, Eisenhower was elected in part to get the US out of a failed war

in Korea. His appeal was both his "leadership" qualifications as a general and his ability to seem "apolitical." Clark will run under the same conditions and with the same qualifications, butwith the added bonus of being a man of integrity running against a thoroughly criminal and corrupt opposition party. He is our best hope for saving the planet.

[roguevalley]

40. why did I know who you were talking about right away?

:evilgrin:

[upi402]

41. Fire up the Swift Tanker! n/t

[Hardrada]

43. Hey, Scandinavia, get with the program!!

He needs the Order of St. Oskar with crossed lutefisks!

[Pastiche423]

44. No

I can not imagine any person that supports the School of Americas to be honored or esteemed.

[Tinksrival]

45. Please.....

Don't poop on my thread.


If you want to start a post of your own that would be cool.:hi:

[mojowork_n]

51. So is it un-American, or un-D.,U., not to respect Clark?

I wouldn't vote for Wes Clark, either. It's not
just the SOA support. He wasn't a very effective
officer and got fired from his job by Defense
Secretary Bill Cohen, toward the end of the second
Clinton administration.

And why replace one war criminal with another one?
Clark dropped cluster bombs on civilians during
the NATO war on Yugoslavia:

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/5/2003/764

http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair09172003.html

[Tinksrival]

53. Becareful!

Your gonna unleash the Frenchie Cat.:o:o:o

[FrenchieCat]

57. I got your War Criminal in my back pocket, and his name AIN'T

Wes Clark!

In reference to the REPUBLICAN Sec. of Def. Bill Cohen, yes, he retired Wes Clark early. Do you know why, or do you just post smears on great American Democratic patriots on Democratic discussion boards on spare week-ends?

You see, there were CIVILIANS in Kosovo.....

Clark didn't want HIGH ALTITUDE BOMBING as that is how one kills maximum civilians.

Clark WANTED LOW FLYING APACHE HELICOPTERS to AIM AT ACTUAL TARGETS IN A MORE ACCURATE MANNER.

COHEN DIDN'T WANT THAT because he was shell shocked AFTER the SOMALIA debacle.....COHEN cared more about U.S. casualties and the public perception of that than about civilian casualties. In addition, COHEN'S attitude is why 800,000 were left to their death in Rwanda.

Clark WANTED "BOOTS ON THE GROUND" in Kosovo (he also drew up a plan for intervention in Rwanda, which was ignored), which was the other way of AVOIDING CIVILIAN CASUALTIES.

CHICKENSHIT CIVILIAN REPUG SEC. OF DEFENSE COHEN didn't want that either. "Too risky", he said.

Clark still threatened "BOOTS ON THE GROUND" to Malosovic when the bombing wasn't deterring Malosovic to stop his offensive against the Muslim Albanians. That's what made Malosovic back off.......AND HOW WE WON THE WAR.

Civilian casualty numbers from 79 days of arial bombing-- Approx 500.

According to Wes Clark and to me, 500 deaths too FUCKING many!

[mojowork_n]

69. If your whole post is ALL-CAPS, can I still disagree?

First off, if slamming a member of the Clinton administration for Republican affiliations is what good Democratic patriots do on Democratic discussion boards, how do you square Clark's own political origins with his current aspirations? The man voted for Richard Nixon, Bush Senior, and that doddering, dozing-off, who-won-world-warII? Alzheimer's president -- twice. As recently as 2001, he was speaking at Republican fund-raisers.

http://www.laweekly.com/news/news/the-chameleon-candidate/2365/

This is the candidate quoted as saying, he "would have been a Republican, if Rove had returned my phone calls."

All I know about the bombing campaign is what I remember seeing on CNN, while it was happening. One Saturday, they showed civilian targets hit with cluster bombs. The things break apart in mid-air, before exploding. The TV report showed the effects of the bombing on cars and brick walls, but they did not show any people. The report was still graphic enough, so that it was never repeated. For all I know, the video footage was consigned to the nether region of a memory hole, and lost forever. Which doesn't mean that no one remembers:

Agence France Press, reports from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch

http://www.balkanpeace.org/hed/archive/june00/hed190.shtml

Your guy was Supreme commander of all forces, Europe. Bombing the civilians (and then coming back to bomb the rescue workers and para-medics, 15 minutes later) happened under his watch.

[FrenchieCat]

90. All in caps just means, if you don't read anything, at least string the

capped words together to get the drift!

In reference to the lameness of your argument, please note:

Bill Cohen was and is a Republican who was appointed by Bill Clinton to counter the same old tired meme that Democrats were not strong on National Security. That's why he got the job from Clinton.

Clark stating who he voted for (cause that's how we know)as an independent, when he was in the military and was concerned about defense issues makes him honest; not a Republican.

I've already responded to your "but he said he would have become a Republican" tired tripe put out by Karl Rove. You ought to not repeat over and over again what Republicans want you to repeat. Looks bad on these here boards!

I've have also explained why Clark got retired early, which has everything to do with civilian deaths....his attempting to minimize such.....

Clark took full responsibility for those bombings, regardless of whether his hands were tied. There were a total of approx 500 civilian deaths attributed to 79 days of NATO Bombing. Clark understands that this occurred under his watch, regardless of the fact that he submitted plans to avoid some of those deaths. He also understands (As I) that 1.4 million Muslim Albanians are currently vying for independence and are not lodged in refugee camps starving to death (as they are in Darfur). Clark also understands that if his plans for intervention in Rwanda would have been adopted, 800,000 may not be just a pile of bones at this moment. War ain't pretty.....but some outcomes are better than others........those are the reality of wars in this unperfect world....where there are many who would wish many harm.

Clark has been unwilling to describe Allied Force as an airpower success. The now-retired SACEUR, appearing in May at National Defense University in Washington, D.C., declared to all assembled that airpower could not be expected to do much in future armed conflict. "Boots on the ground," he said, would be needed for decisive military action.

Incredibly, Clark's 479-page memoir does not even mention the Air Force B-2 stealth bomber-one of the war's most effective weapons-much less recognize the B-2's key contribution to the success of the operation.

In contrast, the Army's AH-64 Apache attack helicopter (the core of Clark's boots-on-the-ground fantasy) gets extended and favorable attention-despite the fact that it did not ever engage in combat.

However, Clark had misgivings about airpower. He believed that the limited NATO air strikes had been effective in Bosnia in 1995 (Operation Deliberate Force), but his professional view of airpower was shaped in the 1970s, a time in which, as a student at the Army's Command and General Staff College, he researched and wrote a thesis about the "ineffectiveness" of Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam.

Clark's skepticism about airpower was only reinforced by what he thought he knew about Desert Storm. The general believed (incorrectly) that the Gulf War coalition's airpower hit only about 10 percent of the Iraqi forces.

It was exactly this obsession with trying to put boots on the ground in the form of an invasion in Kosovo that likely cost Clark his job as SACEUR. Even in its rockiest periods, the US military Chiefs and White House officials offered steady support for the NATO air campaign. Clark, however, lobbied hard for a NATO decision to gear up for land war.

Clark had warned Albright that the Serbs would most likely attack the civilian population in Kosovo as soon as air strikes started. Worse, NATO could do nothing to prevent it. It would be "a race" between NATO air strikes and what the Serb forces could do on the ground, and in the short term, Clark said of the Serbs: "They can win the race."

Meanwhile, Clark was doing his utmost to get Apache helicopters, Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) ballistic missiles, and lead elements of Army ground forces into theater to turn up the pressure on Milosevic. By midApril, Clark had developed a very strong interest in a ground option because he wanted a backup plan to pull out in case the NATO air campaign fizzled. The potential outcome of the air attacks was "unknowable," he said, and "without a ground force, there was no assurance that we could actually force Milosevic out of Kosovo."

Clark wanted the Apaches to rapidly target and strike Serb ground forces, and he had asked for them the day before the start of Allied Force. Although he did not receive authorization to employ them during the air campaign, the Apaches were a consuming interest.

A backup plan was a prudent step, but Clark ultimately pursued the ground option with a personal determination stronger than anything else he did during Allied Force. He estimated the air campaign effectiveness would peak by July then start to diminish. However, good summer weather, support from Albania, and NATO's firepower advantage meant that ground operations could force the Serbs out, Clark thought. Clark also felt that visible preparations for ground operations would "significantly raise the pressure on Milosevic." By "working backward from the first snowfalls in the mountains of Albania," he decided that he must have national decisions from the NATO allies "to begin preparation of the ground forces on May 1."

Clark's urge to champion a ground campaign could not have come at a worse time. He took his plan to Washington during the NATO 50th anniversary summit where there was arrayed against him a formidable lack of interest. The Macedonians refused to let NATO use their territory for offensive operations. The NATO allies, many with long experience of peacekeeping in Bosnia, were not eager to insert ground troops. Throughout Washington, the ground option was a nonstarter. Shelton warned Clark not to lobby for the ground option behind the scenes at the NATO summit. "If that option is going to be sold, it will be sold by the President, not by you," Shelton told Clark. The Secretary of Defense, William S. Cohen, ordered Clark to say nothing about ground forces during the NATO meetings. "We have to make this air campaign work, or we'll both be writing our résumés," Cohen added.
http://www.afa.org/magazine/Sept2001/0901clark.asp

[Kire]

94. AIN'T

REPUBLICAN CIVILIANS HIGH ALTITUDE BOMBING WANTED LOW FLYING APACHE HELICOPTERS AIM AT ACTUAL TARGETS IN A MORE ACCURATE MANNER COHEN DIDN'T WANT THAT AFTER SOMALIA COHEN COHEN'S "BOOTS ON THE GROUND" AVOIDING CIVILIAN CASUALTIES CHICKENSHIT CIVILIAN REPUG SEC. OF DEFENSE COHEN "BOOTS ON THE GROUND" AND HOW WE WON THE WAR. FUCKING

:snark:

[Donna Zen]

121. Bill Cohen voted for all of the Rep. you name

...and Bill Cohen never ever voted for a Democrat...ever, nor will he. During his time at the Pentagon he was known as "Senator Cohen" because he was so blatantly partisan. Check the quotes about what the republicans had to say about Clinton, and then you'll understand exactly who Pres. Clinton unleashed on us. And it came back to haunt us in 2004, because that asswipe Cohen was given credibility on talk shows where he shilled for bush.

Clinton turned the Pentagon over to the republicans, and when they stabbed General Clark in the back, Clinton sat on his thumb.

And now, DU is being treated to their wingnut propaganda.

General Clark stood up for all of us when he tried to stop this war. He went behind closed doors and told every Democrat what bush was up to. He has stood up for Dean when other Democrats were turning their backs. He's stood for John Murtha over and over again.

It is nothing short of disgusting to read such intellectually dishonest tripe.

[Pastiche423]

92. Not pooping

Just stating a fact.

A fact, btw, that I heard come straight from clark's mouth.

[dogman]

68. That would be a valid point if it were true.

Clark actually reformed the SOA. But, since you have posted this so many times, I'm guessing you knew that. The truth never stopped the Swift Boaters for Truth from repeating their lies either. Why don't you repeat this rant in the threads on our many Democratic Congresspersons who actually supported the SOA by voting for it's funding before Clark reformed it and since the neo-cons have restored its former missions.

[mojowork_n]

70. Clark reformed the SOA? While still a Republican?

Not according to this report. All he ever did was ask critics
to suspend their criticsm, or blame the institution for the
actions of some known bad apples:

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0117-01.htm

[Tinksrival]

73. Tsk Tsk,

:spank: General Clark was never a republican. Please don't post garbage on my nice awards thread.
(but thanks for the kick)}(

[dogman]

76. Couldn't be more clear.

Snip>Clark told the woman who questioned him in Concord. "If you find anything in that curriculum material or anything that's taught there that looks in any way remotely connected with human rights abuse or torture, you let me know, and I promise you, we'll close the School of the Americas when I'm president," he said.<snip

Your "Republican" remark indicates your real agenda is to smear. That seems to be a common trait of "commondreams" citing critics of Clark.

[mojowork_n]

77. Smear? Did he or did he not vote for Nixon, Bush I and Reagan?

Did he routinely make appearances at Republican fund-raisers? Did he or did he not say
he'd be a Republican, if "Rove had returned calls?"

I'm not making those things up. They've been out there for a while. I've never seen
any one refute them effectively, except in that lame and half-assed way that defenders of
The Shrub/Chimpy, on the right, have stood up for their guy, by making direct, personal
attacks on his critics... as in, "they hate Bush/Clark sooooo much, that's all they
can do."

I mean, I could almost see the appeal of Clark as a candidate, but he's too much like
Lieberman-lite to merit real interest. I am *not* won over by his response to the woman
in Concord, placing all the responsibility on her, to find evidence of abuse or torture
that's only been too-well documented by the folks at SCOAW. He's going to be an apologist
for the Pentagon, not a reformer.

[dogman]

85. Who do Independents vote for?

Who did "Reagan" Democrats vote for? Do you have any proof who he voted for? You only have his admission that he voted for Nixon and Reagan. I have not seen that he voted for Bush I. It's strange you accept his honesty for this but not other issues. He appeared at one Republican fundraiser in Arkansas and appeared at a Democratic fundraiser that year also. The Rove call has been debunked before but some find Rove to be a more credible source than Clark. The prime pusher of the Clark is a Republican theme was Lieberman, another highly credible source. The folks at SCOAW cannot provide any direct link to Clark in spite of their well documented research. If you look at policies and issues, you will be surprised to find Clark stands closer to Kucinich on many issues than he does to Lieberman.

[FrenchieCat]

86. Yes, it does appear that you want to "throw" in your bag of smears

about Clark!

No, he did not make "routine" appearances at Repug fundraisers. He appeared at one, and appeared at a Dem one the next week. He has appeared at exactly ONE (1) PUG fundraiser....and he was paid....and he was stressing that the Bush admin keep strong ties with NATO (which is what Clark desperately wanted....which of course didn't happen).

Yep, Clark jokingly said that if Rove would have called, he would have been a Republican. Guess he didn't figure that some would be so anal and choose not to get the joke. here's background on that Joke gone wrong out of the mouth of a non-politician--

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/sept0304.html#092303125pm
Fineman's evidence is the say-so of Colorado's Republican Governor Bill Owens and one of his appointees, Marc Holtzman.

"I would have been a Republican if Karl Rove had returned my phone calls," they say Clark told him.

Clark told Fineman he had just been kidding around. But Owens and Holtzman assured Fineman that Clark was dead serious.

Now, Owens is a Republican and he's close to Karl Rove and President Bush. So I don't think you've got to use your imagination too creatively to see what agenda Owens might be advancing -- especially since the story doesn't really add up on several other counts as well.

http://www.jessicaswell.com/MT/archives/000839.html

Jeeze, if Clark wasn't joking....and he really did call the WH....why is this the story in a RW hack mag?
Clark Never Called Karl
Wesley Clark says he would have been a Republican if Karl Rove had returned his phone calls. White House phone logs suggest otherwise.
by Matthew Continetti
09/22/2003 1:45:00 PM
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/152tuawi.asp

----------------

No, Wes Clark is not like Lieberman - Wrong again....Lieberman SPONSORED THE IWR......

Which is the one that John Edwards Co-Sponsored (Lieberman's) and Hillary, Bayh and Kerry Voted for.

Wellstone, Kennedy and Levin all quoted Wes Clark in their senate floor speech they gave prior to voting "NO".

Lieberman, Hillary, Edwards and Kerry did not.

Here's is Ted Kennedy on Larry King a few weeks ago....

KING: Why did you vote against?

KENNEDY: Well, I'm on the Armed Services Committee and I was inclined to support the administration when we started the hearings in the Armed Services Committee. And, it was enormously interesting to me that those that had been -- that were in the armed forces that had served in combat were universally opposed to going.

I mean we had Wes Clark testify in opposition to going to war at that time. You had General Zinni. You had General (INAUDIBLE). You had General Nash. You had the series of different military officials, a number of whom had been involved in the Gulf I War, others involved in Kosovo and had distinguished records in Vietnam, battle-hardened combat military figures. And, virtually all of them said no, this is not going to work and they virtually identified...

KING: And that's what moved you?

KENNEDY: And that really was -- influenced me to the greatest degree. And the second point that influenced me was in the time that we were having the briefings and these were classified. They've been declassified now. Secretary Rumsfeld came up and said "There are weapons of mass destruction north, south, east and west of Baghdad." This was his testimony in the Armed Services Committee.

And at that time Senator Levin, who is an enormously gifted, talented member of the Armed Services Committee said, "Well, we're now providing this information to the inspectors aren't we?" This is just before the war. "Oh, yes, we're providing that." "But are they finding anything?" "No."
snip
There were probably eight Senators on the Friday before the Thursday we voted on it. It got up to 23. I think if that had gone on another -- we had waited another ten days, I think you may have had a different story.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0604/20/lkl.01.html

and Sen. Levin, who showed up with Clark at a WesPAC fundraiser a few months ago....here's what he said on the floor of the Senate BEFORE THE IWR VOTE when he submitted his own resolution THAT WASN'T A BLANK CHECK...:

"General Clark, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, who testified at the same hearing, echoed the views of General Shalikashvili and added "we need to be certain we really are working through the United Nations in an effort to strengthen the institution in this process and not simply checking a block."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/10.05B.levin.dont.p.htm

and here's what Clark said on 9/16/02 (one month before the vote)...

September 16, 2002:
Clark said Congress shouldn't give a "blank check," to Use Force Against Iraq.

On September 16, 2002, Clark said, regarding Iraq and possible Congressional authorization to use force, "Don't give a blank check. Don't just say, you are authorized to use force. Say what the objectives are. Say what the limitations are, say what the constraints and restraints are. What is it that we, the United States of America, hope to accomplish in this operation?"

WOODRUFF: How much difference does it make, the wording of these resolution or resolutions that Congress would pass in terms of what the president is able to do after?

CLARK: I think it does make a difference because I think that Congress, the American people's representatives, can specify what it is they hope that the country will stand for and what it will do.

So I think the -- what people say is, don't give a blank check. Don't just say, you are authorized to use force. Say what the objectives are. Say what the limitations are, say what the constraints and restraints are. What is it that we, the United States of America, hope to accomplish in this operation.

And I think that the support will be stronger and it will be more reliable and more consistent if we are able to put the specifics into the resolution.
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0209/16/ip.00.html

Clark opposed the Bush Administration's ill-advised war in Iraq, often citing its inability to involve allies and properly plan for post-war reconstruction:

On August 2, 2002, Clark said, regarding a possible invasion of Iraq, "We seem to have skipped some steps in the logic of the debate. And, as the American people are brought into this, they're asking these questions."

August 29, 2002--Clark said there is "War Fever Out There Right Now in Some Quarters of the Leadership Elements in this Country...Where is That Coming From?"

On August 29, 2002, Clark said regarding a proposed invasion of Iraq, "Well, taking it to the United Nations doesn't put America's foreign policy into the hands of the French. What you have to do as the United States is you have to get other nations to commit and come in with you, and so you've got to provide the evidence, and the convincing of the French and the French public, and the leadership elite. Look, there's a war fever out there right now in some quarters of some of the leadership elements in this country, apparently, because I keep hearing this sense of urgency and so forth. Where is that coming from? The vice president said that today he doesn't know when they're going to get nuclear weapons. They've been trying to get nuclear weapons for -- for 20 years.So if there's some smoking gun, if there's some really key piece of information that hasn't been shared publicly, maybe they can share it with the French."

On August 29, 2002, Clark said, regarding a possible invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, "I think -- but I think that underneath, what you're going to have is you're going to have more boiling in the street. You're going to have deeper anger and you're going to feed the recruitment efforts of Al Qaeda. And this is the key point, I think, that we're at here. The question is what's the greater threat? Three thousand dead in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon underscore the fact that the threat we're facing primarily is Al Qaeda. We have to work the Iraq problem around dealing with Al Qaeda. And the key thing about dealing with Al Qaeda is, we can't win that war alone."

On August 29, 2002, Clark said, regarding a possible invasion of Iraq, "My perspective would be I'd like to see us slow down the rush to go after Saddam Hussein unless there's some clear convincing evidence that we haven't had shared with the public that he's right on the verge of getting nuclear weapons.

On August 30, 2002, Clark said, regarding a possible invasion of Iraq, "Going after Iraq right now is at best a diversion, and at worst it risks the possibility of strengthening Al Qaeda and undercutting our coalition at a critical time. So at the strategic level, I think we have to keep our eye on the ball and focus on the number one strategic priority. There are a lot of other concerns as well, but that's the main one."

On August 30, 2002, Clark said, regarding a possible invasion of Iraq, "It seems that way to me. It seems that this would supercharge the opinion, not necessarily of the elites in the Arab world, who may bow to the inevitability of the United States and its power, but the radical groups in the Middle East, who are looking for reasons and gaining more recruits every time the United States makes a unilateral move by force. They will gain strength from something like this. We can well end up in Iraq with thousands of military forces tied down, and a worse problem in coping with a war on terror here in the United States or Europe, or elsewhere around the world."

On September 23, 2002, Clark said, regarding Iraq and possible Congressional authorization for the use of force, "When you're talking about American men and women going and facing the risk we've been talking about this afternoon... you want to be sure that you're using force and expending American blood and lives in treasure as the ultimate last resort. Not because of a sense of impatience with the arcane ways of international institutions."
http://armedservices.house.gov/openingstatementsandpressreleases/107thcongress/02-09-26clark.html

On September 25, 2002, Clark said, regarding a possible invasion of Iraq, "If we go in there, this government will be displaced, and there will be a new government put in place. But what about the humanitarian issues? What about the economic development? What about the energy? What about the opening of commerce? What about tariffs? What about taxes? What about police? What about public order? All those issues, we should be working on now, because they will help us do a better job of reducing the adverse, potentially adverse, impact of the war on terror if we have to do what we might have to do?"

On October 5, 2002, Clark said, regarding debate on Congressional authorization for war against Iraq, "The way the debate has emerged, it's appeared as though to the American people, at least to many that talk to me, as though the administration jumped to the conclusion that it wanted war first and then the diplomacy has followed."

On January 23, 2003, Clark said, regarding the case the United States had made for war against Iraq to the United Nations, "There are problems with the case that the U.S. is making, because the U.S. hasn't presented publicly the clear, overwhelming sense of urgency to galvanize the world community to immediate military action now.....You need the cover of legitimacy, and afterwards, you're going to need allies and other people to help share the burdens of peacekeeping."
http://www.clark04.com/faq/iraq.html

[stepnw1f]

99. lol... man o' man

try being more humble next time. That way, when you make a false or erroneous assertion, people won't shove it where the sun don't shine. Arrogance is reall really bad form when backed by ignorance.

[high density]

95. He was never a Republican and he's guilty of being sarcastic

How many thousand times has this come up on this message board, anyway?

[mojowork_n]

72. From "School of Americas Watch" website, on Clark's oversight

http://www.soaw.org/new/article.php?id=721

[dogman]

75. Same old same old.

It cites incidents from before and after Clark. Show a link that points to Clark.

[mojowork_n]

79. From the SOAW article:

‘contrary to the army’s claims that the School of the Americas has corrected past faults and that professional standards have been raised over time to promote the highest respect for human rights, there is no statistical evidence that students who attended the School in the 1990s were less likely to engage in human rights violations than those who graduated in the 1960s.’”

McCoy was not able to study the rate of human rights abuses by soldiers who have graduated from WHINSEC in recent years because the Bush administration has blocked the release of new data about the school...

So, saved by The Chimp. But as is amply demonstrated in the article, he's not bashful at all about defending the goals and reputation of the school, against and all critics.

[FrenchieCat]

87. Looks like this a non statement then.......

because IF: McCoy was not able to study the rate of human rights abuses by soldiers who have graduated from WHINSEC in recent years because the Bush administration has blocked the release of new data about the school...

Than of course, there is here is no statistical evidence that students who attended the School in the 1990s were less likely to engage in human rights violations than those who graduated in the 1960s.’”

meaning there is no evidence that in 90's there were more or the same amount of human rights violations......But we do know that Latin America has seen betterments in the 90s. Not perfect, of course, but certainly Latin America may be as democratic as is the United States at this point. Latin America as a whole did oppose the Iraq Invasion......

And what we did see in the '96 is this (this was the one year that Clark was Chief of Southern Command).....
http://www.exeter.edu/communications/pr/Clark.html

Columbia atrocities
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/Columbia/TiesThatBind.h...
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1996/killertoc.htm
It appears instead that 1996 is the year that a lot of these investigations occurred and a lot of these reports were written up. The date that I see the most after that is 1999 as a year that shit happened. Clark was NATO Commander of Europe for two years by than.

In reference to the School of the Americas, the SOA is always only used against Wes Clark, but the institution has been around Since before his time.

Not to defend this Red Herring against "only Clark", I believe that the attrocities discussed so frequently when SOA is brought up date back to the '80 and before.

"if you find anything that teaches human rights abuses . . . I'll close the SOA."--Wes Clark
http://www.birddogger.org/news.php?id=150

Context is important and something Democrats always accuse the GOP of lacking when making statements against our own.

by the middle of the Clinton Administration, the U.S. had started to clean up its act significantly, with even State Department officials admitting that "they had done a lot of bad stuff in South America" in the '50s-'70s. The School now has a mandatory democratic education and civil rights component. It is a military training center that helps train officers from South American countries: newsflash--by the 1990s, most of the countries in South America had become developing democracies, as opposed to the authoritarian regimes the U.S. had supported in the '50s-'70s. The SoA also went through further reform, with an external independent oversight board. It's supported by countries like Canada--OK, not ALWAYS the paragon of virtue, but hardly an enthusiastic supporter of imperialism in the contemporary era.

[mojowork_n]

97. Meme. "...tired meme," you wrote in one of the posts above

That's a great word. I'm impresssed that you used it correctly in a sentence.

But subtract that credit and penalize yourself double, for having taken a Gallic appellation, without taking a minute to sound out, "chacun à son goût" correctly.

Yeah, sure, Wes Clark is the greatest general of all time. A Genius. Next to him, George S. Patton, himself, is Pinky, not Brain.

His defense of the School of the Americas shouldn't be considered in real world terms, but in the abstract. In the rarefied air of purely metaphorical scholarship, and solipsistic onanism. Forget about second-guessing, with hindsight, any possible ties to the military coup that almost succeeded in toppling Hugo Chavez, in Venezuala, for 2 or 3 days. That was democracy in action. It had nothing to do with the C.I.A., or any intelligence assets of the Bush administration. None of which ever set boot in Georgia, at what was the name of that Fort, outside Atlanta? I forget.

I would really be curious to see what Clark wrote about Rwanda, because much more than anything that happened in Kosovo, that really was a catastrophic and horribly tragic failure.

You can put lipstick and earrings on a pig, but it's still going to look relatively porcine. However much you may want to pretty up Clark's record, he's still the guy that was in charge of the air war, when NATO intentionally cluster-bombed civilians. (I'm telling you, I saw the footage on CNN. It was a Saturday morning. The holes in the cemented walls, and sides of the cars, spoke volumes, even though there was no film footage of casualties.) **Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose** but that record of achievement is not going to be rubbed out of the record any time soon.

[FrenchieCat]

98. I don't use Internet "translate" programs....cause I'm already French.....

A Chaque-un son gout said exactly what I wanted, and I'm glad that you were able to understand. Good for you!

It is unfortunate that you come to DU to attempt to disparage DUer posters personally....

and to disparage a good Democrat like Wes Clark!

I'm sure that in your book Clinton and everyone else associated with his administration were war criminals. And I'm sure that your pronouncement of what resulted in Kosovo is just that; your pronouncement. The Albanian Muslims hold a different view from yours, and I will trust them with the assessement of what they have and are experiencing. And I'm sure that you just loved Malosovic, and were crying at his funeral--they weren't!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2647330


In reference to Hugo Chavez, you are talking about things that happened under this administration.....which I'm sure Wes Clark had no control over. What the facts are on that, I don't know.....and neither do you, although I guess in your desperation to attempt to maligne a good Democrat who is trying very hard to help us win 2006.....you willing to say anything, with scant if any back up at that!
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2639735

I'm sure that you can find many websites that call the Clinton administration war criminals, while hardly spending any time on Bush and his minions and what they have done. That might be where you should travel, IMO....as you'll find yourself right at home.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=clinton%2C+war+criminal
Results 1 - 10 of about 12,900,000 for clinton, war criminal. (0.27 seconds)

[mojowork_n]

105. OK, I did get snarky

...and I apologize for that. I didn't mean for you to take any of my criticsms of Clark personally. You're obviously very loyal to your candidate, and that's great. Keep supporting Democrats! (I mean, what's the alternative?) I did get annoyed with the sideways, indirection of some of your replies, but I'm sure that was mutual. No personal disrespect intended.

I don't have "a book" on Bill Clinton, or war crimes, in general. David Hackworth was a fierce critic of Clark, and apparently changed his attitude before he passed on. I saw something on Wes Clark on the Discovery Channel (?), which featured his involvement in an experimental vehicle project that looked really interesting. A company he was involved with was developing rough-terrain two-wheelers with the powertrain integrated with the wheel assemblies. Impressive and efficient energy transfer.

All that being said, if you're comparing tragic, preventable and unnecessary war-time deaths, Clark maybe isn't even as bad as Barry MacCaffrey, if we're to believe Sy Hersh's reporting in the New Yorker, on the Rumalia massacre. But the fact remains that Wes Clark did preside over a methodical, deliberate and brutal assault on civilians. And he's kept up the pretense (standard PSY-OPS tactics), repeating the lies about "uncanny accidents." Elsewhere, decades earlier, when he was in command of refugee camps for Haitains, in the post-Baby Doc days of chaos, he "ordered the refugees sprayed repeatedly with highly toxic chemicals," which resulted in serious medical complications.

http://www.counterpunch.org/cohen09172003.html

When the Busheviks have personally taken it on themselves to turn overwhelmingly positive world regard for America, and stand that on it's head, making us the 'most-feared' nation on the planet, I don't think I want another PSY-OPS-schooled military disinformation specialist trying to set the country on a better course. Do we really need a 21-st century Georges Boulanger? The mythic figure on a white horse, to whitewash the record of that Military-Industrial Complex you referred to?

[FrenchieCat]

106. Funny you should mention the Haitian smear.....cause here it is debunked!

As well, Sy Hersch very much respects Wes Clark......as you can see at the bottom 1/2 of this post--

First for the Haitian Boob Smear!

Nitpicker 9/24/03
http://nitpicker.blogspot.com/2003/09/sadly-no-tracks-down-truth-about-clark.html

Tracking down the truth about Clark and Haitian immigrants

Yesterday, I talked about the attack from Wesley Clark's left-flank and showed that, according to his command bio, there's no way it could be true. (My own links are bloggered, so just scroll down to "Now Clark's getting it from the left.") The even more industrious Sadly, No! was intrigued, however, and checked with the Haitian Embassy.

Sadly's e-mail:

To whom it may concern:

I hope the following email can be forwarded to Ira Kurzban, or that you can let me know how to reach him.

Thank you.

Dear Mr. Kurzban:
My name is With the announcement by (ret.) Gen. Wesley Clark that he would seek the Democratic nomination for presidential candidate in 2004, a number of stories have circulated that allege that:

"Ira Kurzban, attorney for the Haitian Refugee Center, managed to pry free government documents via a lawsuit on behalf of the refugees. These contained the startling information that prison officials had ordered the refugees sprayed repeatedly with highly toxic chemicals never designed for such generic use. The officer in charge of the refugee camp? None other than Gen. Wesley Clark, chief of operations at the US Navy internment camp at Guantanamo..."
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/COH309A.html

I wonder if you can confirm or deny these allegations, and/or provide any additional information as to the documents you are reported to having acquired?

I thank you in advance for your kind consideration and attention.

The reply, from Ira Kurzban:

Dear Mr ,

Here is Mr Kurzban's reaction to your missive:

"This story is inaccurate. As you know, Wesley Clark was the person at the Pentagon who worked with the Government of Haiti on the military intervention preceding the President's return. The events in regard to the spraying of Haitians at the detention camps occurred at Krome, not at Guantanamo. It also occurred in 1981 not 1991 when the Haitians were at Guantanamo.

I have no knowledge as to whether or not Clark ran the Guantanamo camp in 1991-94 (Nitpicker does, and he didn't. See aforementioned post). There were an number of horrible things that happened at the Guantanamo camp, but I never met Clark in connection with the camps. My only dealings with him were related to the military preparations for Aristide's return. Although he was not particularly friendly toward me, I found him to be bright, competent, enlightened and relatively easy to deal with."

Kind regards,
_____________________
John C. Kozyn, Consultant
Embassy of Haiti, Washington, D.C.

Kudos to Sadly, no! for his efforts.

And, while I'm at it, kudos also to Fantastic Planet for updating readers on this issue.

(I should mention that Sadly, no! sent me these e-mails saying that he thought Nitpicker was "really the best place to mention it." Again, I give him full credit for going the extra mile and checking with primary sources. I owe him a beer.)
posted by Terry at 12:05 PM

-------------------------------


SEYMOUR HERSH:....I got there after action started, which was just devastating, I mean, brutal. There's always interesting warfare, but this was extraordinary. They just said, this was the worst they have ever seen. One air force colonel, who is a wonderful, bright young air force colonel said to me, "Well, the army demonstrated that they were able to send a bunch of boys up a mountain to their death." That's what they showed in this mission. Complete disaster. They tried to tell the press as many as 700 al Qaeda were killed. Newsweek reported ten bodies were found. Shades of Vietnam again. But I didn't write it.

What makes it interesting, while doing reporting on it, I called Wesley Clark, the former NATO commander, who is sort of an interesting guy in this stuff, because early in the war, early in my reporting on the war, I had written critically about a Delta Force operation. Delta is the secret unit of the army. The commander unit. They had been ambushed. The Delta guys were enraged. I'm talking about the first month of the war because they had been sent on this stupid operation and they had gotten hurt very badly. And they don't like it. Delta guys, they like to crawl in little holes for a week and get to their target. They were ordered to do it in a different way.

Everybody denied the story like crazy. And Wes Clark, to his credit, told a bunch of newspapers, "Look, I know this is right." I had said 13 people were hurt and he said 12 was the number that he had. I saw in him somebody with a great streak of integrity, difficult he may be. In any case, I called him about this story while I was doing it. He encouraged me to write it. I didn't write it.

About a year-and-a-half later, he's running for president. I mention this in the book, and I bump into him, and he jumped all over me. He said, "Why didn't you do that story?" I said, "Well, I just thought, it just would have been -- I just didn't do it." He said, "You should have done it. That was your job." Pretty scary. You know, he was right.
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/14/1351212

Seymour Hersh's Alternative History of Bush's War
By Mary Jacoby
Salon.com
Saturday 18 September 2004
The crack investigative reporter tells Salon about a disastrous battle the U.S. brass hushed up, the frightening True Believers in the White House, and how Iran, not Israel, may have manipulated us into war.
<snip>
To talk about the new revelations ...

Let me tell you the one I like the most; aside from the obvious stuff about Abu Ghraib, there was a story I didn't write two years ago about Operation Anaconda. I didn't write it because, oh, a lot of complicated reasons. One, it was very hostile to our soldiers, and the military, and General Franks, and Hagenbeck, a very nasty story. And then secondly, there was bad blood between the Marine Corps, and General Franks, and CentComm and the Air Force, and it just didn't, uh ... it's one of those stories. The real reason in a funny way is that even though my sources were angry in talking about it, it's one of the stories they really would have regretted, because you're talking about internecine warfare among the services. It's about boys ... anyway.

They would have regretted it?

They would have regretted talking to me about that. In there is an account of the Marines insisting that General Franks sign an MOU, a memorandum of understanding, of how the Marines would be used. We're talking about in combat, this kind of war going on between the services. And, you know, I probably guess it was the right decision, because I had to do obviously an alternate history of the war. And obviously there were certain people talking to me. People on the inside know what's going on. And so, I probably agree it was OK to do it. But I felt bad when I saw Clark later. I had talked to Clark about the story at the time. Then two years later I ran into him when he was running for president, or right before, and he said, "Whatever happened to that story?" I said, "Well, I just decided not to write it." And he said, "Well, you should have. It's your job."

He's an amazingly straight guy. A difficult guy. "You should have." He basically told me, "Punk kid. You didn't know what you were doing." I also respect him because ...

Q-Let's talk about some of these revelations.

Oh, so that was the one I liked the most.

Q-But why didn't you write it at the time? You thought it would be too hostile?

No! There was, you know, it was a tough story about troops running from the battlefield, you know; it was just a tough story. I was writing a lot of other tough stories, and, uh ... it just didn't work. Let's put it that way.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/091904D.shtml

[mojowork_n]

120. Boy, looks like the Haiti business was all about a messy lawsuit

And you score points for digging into it more deeply than I did.

Nice job. I'm glad for the Haitians and I'm glad for your very Model of a Modern Major General.

Unfortunately for you, the more important part of that link was the testimony of the Spanish pilot talking about the methodical, deliberate way that plans were made to use fragmentation munitions in bombing runs on the civilian population.

[FrenchieCat]

124. I hear you! Once someone has debunked one of your bunk attack.....

then you change the subject.

how so "Right" of you! :eyes:

[formercia]

46. Judging by General Clark's foreign awards

He must be a Knight of Malta since many of those awards are given to members of the Knights.

[Texas_Kat]

47. Nope,

knighthoods from Britian and the Netherlands, but not from the Vatican.

Methinks you need a bit more tin-foil in that hat there.

[formercia]

60. My Father was a Knight of Malta

Served in the OSS under Serge Sobolensky in North Africa and was one of the jedburghs that jumped into France just before D-Day in World War 2. Fought with the Maquis in France until relieved.

[Tinksrival]

52. Funny you should say that!

Went to Malta in '03. I think I posed with him!

[formercia]

54. Yes, that ole eight-pointed cross

It's like a secret handshake hiding in plain sight.

[in_cog_ni_to]

48. Before I scrolled to the bottom to see the pic...I KNEW IT WOULD BE WESLEY

CLARK!:loveya:

I love that man. I hope he runs again.

[JNelson6563]

49. Very impressive

I'll bet * would rather sever a limb than stand side by side with Clark.

[Avalux]

50. I imagined it 2 years ago when he ran, I still have hope.

:patriot:

[Ian_rd]

55. He obviously injured himself for half of those and lied in order to get

the other half.

I am the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and I approve this message.

[FrenchieCat]

64. Here's what Clark has to "say" to the

Tidy bowl Swifters -- http://www.dunckleystreet.com/clark/shitout.mp3

In addition to using --

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

56. He'd make a great vice-president.

Ideally I'd like a civilian as a commander-in-chief.

[FrenchieCat]

58. Clark IS A CIVILIAN!

And George Bush was a civilian (far as I'm concerned) without a military record.

Question is, which was the biggest fuck up? (asking rhetorically )

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

59. He's career military.

Calling Clark a civilian is a bit like calling Bush a great military leader because he's commander-in-chief.

[FrenchieCat]

61. He is a civilian........

and was a great military leader.

I believe that if anyone can, he could reign in the MIC! No one else on the Dem side could....and no one else on the Repub side would.

This from an interview with Laura Knoy:
1. http://www.nhpr.org/node/5339

"I think General Eisenhower was exactly right. I think we should be concerned about the military industrial complex. I think if you look at where the country is today, you've consolidated all these defense firms into a few large firms, like Halliburton, with contacts and contracts at the highest level of government. You've got most of the retired Generals, are one way or another, associated with the defense firms. That's the reason that you'll find very few of them speaking out in any public way. I'm not. When I got out I determined I wasn't going to sell arms, I was going to do as little as possible with the Defense Department, because I just figured it was time to make a new start.

But I think that the military industrial complex does wield a lot of influence. I'd like to see us create a different complex, and I'm going to be talking about foreign policy in a major speech tomorrow, but we need to create an agency that is not about waging war, but about creating the conditions for Peace around the world. We need some people who will be advocates for Peace, advocates for economic development not just advocates for better weapons systems. So we need to create countervailing power to the military industrial complex."

Clark: Don't spare Pentagon
Clark cited his neophyte status when queried about Bush's request for $87 billion next year for military operations and reconstruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"We need to put all the government spending programs on the table, including the military programs," he said.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/09/25/elec04.prez.debate/

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

62. He's a civilian technically.

But you can't really have it both ways.

I'd rather not have him as commander-in-chief.

[FrenchieCat]

63. You can't have it both ways, but fortunately, the rest of us can!

I respect your "decision" to support MIC enablers and appeasers, if that is what you so choose.

Me, I'll support someone who I feel can put "in check" one of the "rackets" that really is affecting our way of life.......those who would make war for profit....and profit from war.

Chaque-un son gout!

[Tinksrival]

67. Hi FrenchieCat!

:hi: Thanks for aways coming though with the FACTS!! It's funny how they "drop in" but all they accomplish is to "kick" the post! :rofl:

[FrenchieCat]

102. Hi!

:hi: and thanks for that thread!

[Tinksrival]

66. HE'S AN AMERICAN!

And a damn fine one at that! But your entitled to your oppinion. :hi:

[jokerman93]

78. If President Gore says he has other work to do for '08 and beyond...

...until he says otherwise, I'll take him at his word.

Wes Clark is on the right side of the issues. He's proven his talent and skill, and is qualified in the eyes of the world in every way that matters to be a world leader as well as a strong U.S. president. I supported him actively in '04 and would do so again if he runs for '08.

J

[Radical Activist]

81. Biography campaigns don't work.

Kerry already proved that along with many other candidates. Clark's service is great but that doesn't mean he can get elected President.

[FrenchieCat]

83. Comparing 4 months of Kerry's service 35 years ago as a Bio compared to

Clark's 34 years of service, including a won war six years ago cannot be compared.

And Kerry almost/probably really win against an incubent Wartime President.

I therefore, disagree with your premise.

[Radical Activist]

84. "along with many other candidates"

Its not about Kerry's service. Kerry ran a biography campaign and it wasn't just based on his service in Vietnam. Those type of campaigns don't work anymore and rarely connect with voters. If people always voted for who had the greatest qualifications for office then Bush 2, Reagan, Carter and Clinton would have never been elected. They all ran against candidates who had better resumes. It doesn't impress most voters.

[FrenchieCat]

88. But Wes Clark is not a resume alone......But I didn't have to tell you!

and What else in his BIO did Kerry run with? Please let me know.

[Kire]

93. So Clark received all of those awards?

It looks more like an inventory of all the best awards in the world.

[Philosoraptor]

96. Yeah but did he really earn those medals?

Why hasn't this man been swiftboated yet? But seriously, that's amazing.

Thanks or reminding us what real valor is.

[FrenchieCat]

101. Oh....Wes Clark has been Swiftboated plenty times....but Like Cream....

he floats back to the top...whole!

[mojowork_n]

107. Swiftboated? SWIFTBOATED? You flatter yourselves.

But this balanced article in the New Yorker is far from being a puff piece. It deliberately shies away from "controversial" areas of the Clark performance record, to try and profile the man himself. ("Bad intelligence" was responsible for the bombing of the Chinese Embassy, the number of civilian casualties is csually under-reported, and the author accepts Clark's own statements, or those of his friends, at apparent face value, wherever possible.)

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031117fa_fact

The portrait of Clark's leadership style that emerges from this overview of his career is hardly flattering. In the end, although his military preparations for an invasion through Albania are compared to the WWI disaster at Gallipoli, he comes off as the individual most responsible for the avoidable confrontation that led to the bombing option in Yugoslavia, and who lost his job through circuitous machinations, none of it discredits him from being a candidate to head "an international force in post-Saddam Iraq." (The piece is written in 2003, before it became apparent to everyone what a collosal screw-up Iraq was going to turn into.)

In the end, Clark hardly seems the sort of leader who would ever challenge this sort of American military tradition:

http://www.counterpunch.org/santina06262006.html

("American Rituals -- Massacres, Baseball and Apple Pie")

[FrenchieCat]

108. You can take your counterpunch and stuff it, as I have debunked

all of your smears, and I will leave you with this warning, that at DU we try NOT to smear good Democrats with lies and exaggerations.

I have, thus far debunked your accusations about Wes Clark.
your accusation that he was a Republican who spoke at multiple GOP fundraisers; I have also shown that his "I would have been a Republican" statement was a sarcastic comment meant kiddingly and only taken seriously, on purpose, by the Republicans who used it during Democratic primaries to further question Clark's credentials; that the Haiti Spray Boob smear is nothing but that, as the timeline of what happened nor the location does not line up with Clark having anything to do with it and is backed up by an Haitian official in writing who should know;

Wes Clark is not a war criminal, and to boot, according to Sy Hersch is a person of integrity; that it was Bill Cohen's plan, as Sec of Defense who was truly responsible for allowing more civilians to be harmed during the NATO Bombing due to his resistance to Wes Clark's plan for more targeted strikes with lower altitude bombing Apache Helicopters and Boots on the ground which is the "controversial incident" that led to Clark being retired early, although he still won a war with zero U.S. Casualties and minimal Civilian's death (compared to all other wars the U.S. has fought).

Wesley Clark was commended by Bill Clinton and many countries all around the globe for his work in the Balkans, including the leaders of Kosovo itself. That's no accident. And if you want to label all of those countries suspect, then you just have a problem with Wes Clark. He not only advocated going into Rwanda, and Kosovo, but he has been a strong voice on what is happening in Darfur long before Angelina Jolie and George Clooney. He has been writing and talking about that particular issue since the death count there was in the thousands, not the high hundreds of thousands! He also has been a consistent voice against going into Iraq, and we can talk about that if you want to as well.

I'll leave you with this interview Clark did with the "Young Turks" just a few weeks ago, in where he explains his views on war, and you will see him take responsibility for casualties, how he truly felt about it....
http://www.theyoungturks.com/story/2006/6/9/144548/6073

And I will say this:
It is your responsibility to verify both sides of an issues prior to making serious accusations against any good Democrat. In that quest, I find that you lack due diligence and therefore I question your honesty as a poster of good will. It appears that you have many facts wrong, and that you take as facts anything you read at any website, whether it be an opinion backed with dubious information. The problem is that websites are not always right, and they sometimes have their own agenda to pursue. In this case, maybe your agenda is the same as theirs which is why you prefer to smear Democrats with dubious opinions as opposed to straight up facts.

To conclude, General Clark is an honorable man who should be admired for many reasons, not the least being his character, integrity, and speaking to power when it is the least popular. That is the kind of individual I want leading this country, and at this point, all you have to do, if he chooses to run is not vote for him. :shrug:
-----------------------------------------
Waiting for the General
By Elizabeth Drew
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16795
Clark displeased the defense secretary, Bill Cohen, and General Hugh Shelton, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, by arguing strenuously that—contrary to Clinton's decision— the option of using ground troops in Kosovo should remain open. But the problem seems to have gone further back. Some top military leaders objected to the idea of the US military fighting a war for humanitarian reasons. Clark had also favored military action against the genocide in Rwanda.

http://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001104.html
Clark was almost alone in pushing for a humanitarian intervention in Rwanda.

Pulitzer award winning Samantha Power for her book "A Problem from Hell" : America and the Age of Genocide
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060541644/qid=1114936910/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-7692952-2877630?v=glance&s=books
endorsed Wes Clark http://www.kiddingonthesquare.com/2003/12/redeeming_wes...
The following excerpts from Power's book give the details. The narrative surrounding the quotes was written by another person commenting on the book. Note especially Power's last comment below on Clark's pariah status in Washington:

General Clark is one of the heroes of Samantha Power's book. She introduces him on the second page of her chapter on Rwanda and describes his distress on learning about the genocide there and not being able to contact anyone in the Pentagon who really knew anything about it and/or about the Hutu and Tutsi.

She writes, "He frantically telephoned around the Pentagon for insight into the ethnic dimension of events in Rwanda. Unfortunately, Rwanda had never been of more than marginal concern to Washington's most influential planners" (p. 330) .

He advocated multinational action of some kind to stop the genocide. "Lieutenant General Wesley Clark looked to the White House for leadership. 'The Pentagon is always going to be the last to want to intervene,' he says. 'It is up to the civilians to tell us they want to do something and we'll figure out how to do it.' But with no powerful personalities or high-ranking officials arguing forcefully for meaningful action, midlevel Pentagon officials held sway, vetoing or stalling on hesitant proposals put forward by midlevel State Department and NSC officials" (p. 373).

According to Power, General Clark was already passionate about humanitarian concerns, especially genocide, before his appointment as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe.

She details his efforts in behalf of the Dayton Peace Accords and his brilliant command of NATO forces in Kosovo. Her chapter on Kosovo ends, "The man who probably contributed more than any other individual to Milosvevic's battlefield defeat was General Wesley Clark. The NATO bombing campaign succeeded in removing brutal Serb police units from Kosovo, in ensuring the return on 1.3 million Kosovo Albanians, and in securing for Albanians the right of self-governance."

"Yet in Washington Clark was a pariah. In July 1999 he was curtly informed that he would be replaced as supreme allied commander for Europe. This forced his retirement and ended thirty-four years of distinguished service. Favoring humanitarian intervention had never been a great career move."


Samantha Power's comments on Wesley Clark at the December 17, 2003, press conference in Concord, New Hampshire after the General's testimony at the Hague .

"Good afternoon. It's a real honor for me to be here with General Clark, and with Edita Tahiri. My name is Samantha Power. I spent about seven years looking into American responses to genocide in the twentieth century, and discovered something that may not surprise you but that did surprise me, which was that until 1999 the United States had actually never intervened to prevent genocide in our nation's history. Successive American presidents had done an absolutely terrific job pledging never again, and remembering the holocaust, but ultimately when genocide confronted them, they weighed the costs and the benefits of intervention, and they decided that the risks of getting involved were actually far greater than the other non-costs from the standpoint of the American public, of staying uninvolved or being bystanders. That changed in the mid-1990s, and it changed in large measure because General Clark rose through the ranks of the American military.

The mark of leadership is not to standup when everybody is standing, but rather to actually stand up when no one else is standing. And it was Pentagon reluctance to intervene in Rwanda, and in Bosnia, that actually made it much, much easier for political leaders to turn away. When the estimates started coming out of the Pentagon that were much more constructive, and proactive, and creative, one of the many deterrents to intervention melted away. And so I think, again, in discussing briefly the General's testimony, it's important to remember why he was able to testify at the Hague, and he testified because he decided to own something that was politically very, very unfashionable at the time."
http://www.kiddingonthesquare.com/2004/01/

"There were a lot of Democrats who wouldn't accept Clark as a "true Democrat." One of the worst things you can do to a Democrat is to call him or her a Republican, and this is something that Clark's opponents (and their supporters) often did. I don't think there is anything Clark could have done to prove his Democratic credentials to the people who shouted "But he voted for Nixon and Reagan! He spoke at a Republican Party dinner!" Perhaps many of these people find it difficult to understand why a career military man would have voted for Presidents who were strong on national defense issues during the Cold War...nor did they want to accept that Clark also attended the Democratic Party's dinner a few weeks after the Republican's, campaigned for Dems in '02 Congressional races, and voted Dem since 1992. The above does not matter to them, and those facts were not really instrumental in convincing me that Clark was a "true Democrat." If there was one thing that convinced me that Clark was a champion of Democratic values, it was his vocal support for humanitarian intervention to stop genocide in Rwanda and the Balkans. The fact remains that several Democratic leaders - the current standard bearers of our party - shirked from their duty of defending human rights and honoring multilateral agreements because it was not politically popular at the time. Clark, on the other hand, advocated intervention to stop the genocide in Rwanda and the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans. Well, those credentials are Democratic enough for me."
http://www.lindsayfincher.com/2004/02/

[mojowork_n]

110. OK, I will say it really sloooooowly

I am trying to be cordial, and disagree "agreeably", if that's at all possible.

Seriously.

1.) Cenk Uygur and the Young Turks, YES, for sure. I e-mailed a link last month, and this one is absolutely hilarious ("Democrats agree to confirm Beelzebub"). Funny as hell, as they say:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cenk-uygur/democrats-agree-to-confir_b_21687.html

Although on the topic of presidential endorsements, it may still be a little early for them to commit
to one candidate:

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/article.php?sid=24445

2.) As far as being too quick and free with the casting of evil party affiliation aspersions goes, the New Yorker link in the post that you replied to, (to which this is a reply)... the guy in The New Yorker brings it up near the very end, again, the whole "if Rove had returned my calls" snot-bubbler. But not, as you would have it, "a really funny joke", but something not to be dismissed lightly. I'm not saying it's true, necessarily, and the New Yorker guy adds under-the-subtext invisible italics and question marks, it's just not completely outside the realm of possibility. (For someone who voted for Nixon, Bush the First, etc., etc.) MY BAD for writing that Clark had addressed more than one Republican fund-raiser. That *was* too risky an assumption to make. (Did they only ask him once?)

3.) history is still Newtonian. (If you have enough eyewitnesses, and it's broadcast on TV on CNN.) Two atoms of hydrogen can combine with one atom of oxygen much more easily than with one atom of helium. Things will continue to fall down, not up. All the commendations, medals and honors for his efforts notwithstanding, the deliberate pattern of attacks on civilians were neither honorable, nor commendable. I'm more than willing to give you Darfur, and spot you Rwanda, too, but for me, Kosovo was the MIC's warm-up for Iraq. An opportunistic military adventure, not an exercise in a new kind of humanitarian diplomacy. And that's where we part company, and why I'm willing to consider the viewpoints of Clark's harshest critics (the folks at Counterpunch, among them) and you're not.

[FrenchieCat]

111. When talking about the "Guy in the New Yorker"....are you talking about

this guy, Peter Boyers?? :rofl: Cause if so, then yeah....I figure he would think (like you) that the whole "if Rove had returned my calls" snot-bubbler. But not, as you would have it, "a really funny joke", but something not to be dismissed lightly.

However, problem that you have is Peter Boyer's agenda.......read two "respectable" sources on Peter Boyers trail of clear propaganda against Democrats....including Wes Clark, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Ron Brown, etc., etc., etc.

Defending the General
The New Yorker's unfair slam on Wes Clark and his role in the Kosovo war.
By Fred Kaplan
http://slate.msn.com/id/2091194/#ContinueArticle

Boyer's plate
Who is New Yorker staff writer Peter Boyer -- and why is he after Wesley Clark?
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewWeb&articleId=1383
Excerpt...
Boyer appears to have made something of a career for himself as a conservative interloper at otherwise liberal media outlets. Back in 1992, his sympathetic profile of Rush Limbaugh for Vanity Fair drew praise from the conservative Media Research Center as being "fair." In 1997, as a Frontline correspondent, Boyer promoted one of the more obscure "scandals" of the Clinton years in a show (titled "The Fixers") based around an allegation that Commerce Secretary Ron Brown had been involved in a complicated scheme to convince a Hawaiian couple to buy an Oklahoma natural gas company. An independent counsel appointed to investigate the matter filed no charges against Brown.

Before Howell Raines became executive editor of The New York Times -- and before he became an object of hatred among conservatives -- he was known for his vast number of zealously anti-Clinton editorials during the late 1990s. Who leapt to Raines' defense? Boyer, with a 1995 New Yorker profile of the then-editorial page editor. Boyer's apparent interest in Clinton scandals later led him to write Frontline's 1997 documentary, "Once Upon a Time in Arkansas," which was ominously subtitled, "The deals and relationships at the heart of the scandal called 'Whitewater.'"

Later, Boyer produced "Secrets of an Independent Counsel" for Frontline, a highly sympathetic portrayal of Donald Smalz, the man who managed to spend $15 million dollars on an investigation into $36,000 in gifts received by Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy. Espy was successfully driven from office by the investigation, and then acquitted of all charges. Beyond the Clinton scandals, Boyer also authored a 1994 profile of Al Gore for The New Yorker. The piece's disparagement of Gore's military service and portrayal of his childhood in a Washington hotel became a source of the largely hostile storyline into which the media fit future Gore coverage during the 2000 campaign.


And Here.....for your reading pleasure....
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=364&topic_id=321522

COunterpunch is extreme to the point of meeting the extreme right in the arc of politics. They have never had much good to say about any Democrat. See this one on Al Gore.... http://www.counterpunch.org/goremanual.html
and here is Editor's St. Clair's other mean piece of Al Gore... http://www.commondreams.org/views/102100-105.htm

In fact, Counterpunch only does hit pieces on Dems......but
In the end, believe what you will.

In point of fact, far as I'm concerned, You have allowed yourself to be snookered for whatever your reasons, and that's too bad for you.
I haven't cause my BS meter is set really high (as I was marching AGAINST Bush before any war started!

Plus, my sources are clearly more credible than yours from any standpoint.......and so, I rest my case.
:hi:

[FrenchieCat]

113. Ironic,

That you would be willing to possibly acknowledge Clark on Rwanda and Darfur, but not Kosovo.

In an equation, that would read:

800,000 Rwanda death + 400,000 Darfur Death > 500 Kosovo Civilian Deaths + No U.S. Soldier Casualties


1.4 Million Albanian Muslims spared > 500 Kosovo Civilian Deaths + No U.S. Soldier Casualties

10,000 Albania Muslim Deaths + 200,000 Bosnia Deaths > 500 Kosovo Civilian Deaths + No U.S. Soldier Casualties


Guess you might want to shout out...."LONG LIVE MOLOSOVIC"...it appears.

According to the math, it appears that General Clark was on the correct side of the equations everytime.

[mojowork_n]

119. What the hell kind of math is that?

I read a book by Dr. Helen Fein, once, many years ago, called "Accounting for Genocide, National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust."

It was actually a serious attempt to address the the subject of genocide, which you confuse by conflating so many different out-of-a-hat raw numbers.

Dr. Fein’s book was focused on the interaction between Jews who survived the WWII Holocaust, and the effect of the attitudes of the local populations, as measured against statistically significant differences between Nazi zones of control. (Local populations had much more autonomy in Denmark, for example, than they did in the Baltic States, or even Belgium, so the extent to which the anti-semitism of the local population contributed directly to the genocide is held up against several different yardsticks.)

According to the type of math that you're using, the fact that the course of the military campaigns in World War II (almost incidentally?) caused the camps to stop operating should have been summed up like a baseball or a football game, with a line score toting up the millions of casualties against the totals of those who survived, with all of the credit for the final “victory” going to Our Side. (“Hooray for the Red, White and Blue. They *always* WIN!”)

Go ahead and sell that one to the passengers of the “St. Louis”, and their families.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/stlouis.html

Or maybe to Jan Karski’s ghost:

http://www1.yadvashem.org/odot_pdf/Microsoft%20Word%20-%206425.pdf

(In Claude Lanzmann’s 9-hour film, “Shoah”, Karski is the tragic bystander who apparently felt as though he should have shared in any assignation of collective guilt, since his personal witness and testimony of conditions in the camps and ghettoes -- to Churchill and to Roosevelt, several years before the camps were finally liberated -- resulted in no direct intercession.)

Helen Fein had another book, more recently, called "Teaching About Genocide: A Guidebook for College and University Teachers: Critical Essays, Syllabi and Assignments"

She writes, "There is a great deal of misuse of and ignorance about the subject of genocide… Paradoxically, the misuse and popularization of the term *genocide* coincides with both a growing scholarship about genocide and an increase in genocide denial."

She could have added that it has also been complicated by the influence of ex post facto political considerations on the institutions and commissions of inquiry that weigh these questions, and the difficulties of accessing accurate and credible sources.

From the Institute for the Study of Genocide / International Association of Genocide Scholars web page, the summary of the findings of the Brandeis Conference on the report of the “International Commission Evaluating Intervention in Kosovo”, submitted by that very same Dr. Helen Fein:

http://www.isg-iags.org/oldsite/newsletters/26/kosovo.html

It is a pastiche of academic source-parsing, cloned into one skin only through the biological intercession of several different institutional paper-propagation agencies. If it were a living, breathing thing, it couldn't walk, chew gum and poot, at the same time.

It is anything but an easily consumed and quick-to-digest *Happy Meal*. In this summary overview on the findings of the academic conference, regarding the officially-delegated Commission Report, there are just too many paragraphs that begin “several commentators observed”, while other paragraphs begin “others observed…”

Any interpretation of the commission summaries’ and conference findings’ comes down to trying to sort out whose agenda, and whose reporting of facts on the ground, might be the least biased.

And things get complicated in the extreme when it turns out, for example, that the chief Human Rights Monitor, sent in as the Head of the Verification Mission (before the Kosovo War even started, before the alleged mass expulsions and before any bombing) was leading a group of “observers… largely composed of undercover CIA operatives who, European diplomats asserted, were carrying out ‘an American policy that made airstrikes inevitable’ (London Sunday Times, 3/12/00)“

http://www.fair.org/press-releases/racak-update.html

So yes, to cut to the chase, I have problems with your mathematical “equations”, throwing big numbers into forcefully juxtaposed, conveniently upturned, large umbrellas, 'proving' “General Clark was on the right side of the equation every time.”

I mean, you can throw up tangles of numbers, like so many fistfulls of cold spaghetti, and some of them may end up creating interesting patterns on a wall, but what’s the meaning or purpose?

In “Shoah”, Lanzmann spends 9 hours collecting testimony from 3 categories of witnesses: survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders, trying to sort out who knew what, when; especially among the potentially decisive category of witnesses, the “bystanders.” (Much as Marcel Ophuls did, too, in “The Sorrow and the Pity.”) Laborious editing of carefully selected first-hand, reliable witness testimony permits certain, limited conclusions to be drawn.

It’s not “Shoah”, or “The Sorrow and the Pity”, but this is the complete transcript of the most comprehensive documentary on the subject of the Kosovo Intervention. It includes interviews with most of the principal players:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcript_12_03_00.txt

I'll let it speak for itself. Whoever started it, or what motivations they may have had, Kosovo still looks to me more like a warm-up exercise for Iraq. Make an excuse first, then go fight a “war” (from as high up as possible) until you’ve pulled off your land grab. (And commissioned the Halliburton Group, and Kellog, Brown and Root, to construct multi-multi-million dollar military bases there, to be manned by our troops in perpetuity.) The piles of medals and commendations heaped on your guy for this are an embarassment. He’s never apologized for it.

For his sake, I hope he does. Some day.

PS — If I’ve offended your delicate sensibilites by drawing from sources, or writers, that don’t meet your low bar for being inoffensive to your candidate, well – tough. The guy in The New Yorker wrote a piece that was interesting less because of what obvious opponents were quoted as saying (Tommy Franks, Hugh Shelton, Bill Cohen), and more because of what Clark himself had to say.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031117fa_fact

“…Clark had declared that chief among America’s mistakes was that it had gone to war in Iraq without “the mantle of authority” bestowed by United Nations approval. But hadn’t the Kosovo war also been conducted without the endorsement of the U.N. Security Council? Yes, Clark allowed, and in that regard the Kosovo war was “technically illegal. …”

And it’s interesting to consider how willingness to break inconsequential, silly little rules like starting wars (on behalf of a "purely defensive" alliance, such as NATO, at that) could possibly be followed by anything so resembling psychological denial:

“…When I asked Clark how he explained being fired by Clinton after winning a war for him, he said that he didn’t believe that Clinton had anything to do with it. The President did indeed sign the order that mandated Clark’s early removal from the saceur post, but Sandy Berger later explained to Clark that neither he nor the President knew what they were signing. It was, Clark says, a setup, engineered by Cohen’s office and by the Chiefs. As for Clinton, “He was hornswoggled. …”

[FrenchieCat]

123. As I had family members who died in the WWII camps, I suggest

That I know what Genocide is...so your first point is nonsense, and has not much to do with Wes Clark. If you want to say that it's good that we didn't go into Rwanda, and are for the most part ignoring Darfur (until very recently), go ahead.

In reference to Kosovo:

Genocide By Mass Starvation;
NATO Strategy Makes Sense On One Level. But, In Humanitarian Terms, It's A Fatal Miscalculation. Los Angeles Times
April 25, 1999, Sunday, Home Edition

http://www.refugees.org/news/op_eds/042599.htm
President Slobodan Milosevic's ability to stop and start massive refugee flows out of Kosovo is a chilling sign of his power and intent. From the Nazis to the Khmer Rouge, closed borders have been a serious sign that genocide is occurring. Genocide does not require gas chambers or even mass graves. A favored tactic is calculated mass starvation. That is what is happening in Kosovo.

Serb forces used food as a weapon during the war in Bosnia. They rarely engaged in battle, preferring to surround and besiege an area, subject it to shelling and cut it off from food.

Long before the bombing began, Milosevic began a systematic campaign to deplete Kosovo of its food resources. Beginning last summer, Serb forces:

restricted importation of basic items into Kosovo, including wheat, rice, cooking oil, sugar, salt, meat, milk, livestock, heating fuel and gasoline;

looted warehouses and burned fields, haystacks, winter food stocks and firewood.

killed livestock and often dropped their carcasses into wells to contaminate the water;

shot at ethnic Albanian farmers trying to harvest or plant;

Harassed, persecuted and sometimes killed local humanitarian aid workers;

created nearly 300,000 internally displaced people, most of whom stayed with private families, eating what private stores of food they had managed to save.

In the best of times, Kosovo is not a self-sufficient food producer. By early this year, with planting and harvesting brought to a halt and with food stocks consumed or destroyed, there were no food reserves outside Serbian government shops. Most of the population was dependent on humanitarian aid delivered through a network of U.N. agencies and local and international nongovernmental organizations. That network is gone. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Food Program are out of Kosovo. International nongovernmental groups have been expelled and are now working with refugees outside Kosovo. Local nongovernment groups have been decimated, their staff members lucky to become refugees themselves.

Before NATO's military objectives can be achieved, Milosevic will already have accomplished his objective: Grinding down Kosovo's 1.8 million ethnic Albanians. One rule of war is this: Men with guns do not starve; civilians do. NATO is not going to beat the Yugoslav military by starving them out, and if it did, the civilians would perish long before them.

As hunger and disease loom, various interim steps have been suggested: internal safe havens, food air drops, humanitarian corridors. Each is flawed, largely because each requires cooperation from Milosevic that in all likelihood will never come to be. Milosevic could achieve his aims simply by dragging his feet.

Everyone is concerned about the lives of NATO servicemen, but the people on the executioner's block cannot wait for a risk-free, soldier-friendly environment for their rescue. They can't wait for the amassing of 200,000 troops, if that will take months of buildup and field support. They can't wait for a "permissive environment."

The Bombing started in April of 1999--
September 1998
In mid September, the situation in Kosovo is getting worse and the lives of thousands of innocent people are at risk. Serb forces continue to pound villages in northern and western Kosovo, effecting over half of the province's population in the last seven months. International aid agencies estimate that between 270,000 and 350,000 people have fled the fighting, as many as 250,000 remaining "internally displaced" inside Although their plight has generated worldwide recognition, international attempts to foster a diplomatic resolution to the conflict have failed to yield tangible results.
According to the Associated press, there is talk of possible, eventual Nato-supported military action ranging from the deployment of troops along the Albania- Kosovo border, to air strikes, to the deployment of ground troops, but humanitarian organizations remain skeptical that decisive U.S., European, or Nato-supported action will come soon. In the mean time, daily reports of horrendous human rights violations, massive destruction, and increasing bloodshed document the dire prognosis for Kosavars "contained" in the crisis by recently erected border controls.
On September 16, the New York Times reported that Serbian forces were "rounding up men and boys from ethnic Albanian villages and refugee camps in Kosovo, an act that US officials fear could be the prelude to their execution, as happened during the war in Bosnia." One week earlier, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, Julia Taft said at a press briefing, "Without a cease- fire, without a pull-back from this intrusive fighting, there will be 100,000 to 200,000 casualties looming in the months ahead."
Still, there are no decisive plans by the U.S., NATO, or European allies to avert the current and impending disasters with military action. The U.S. is "considering a variety of options" for getting emergency aid into Kosovo and continues to support diplomatic interventions and the preservation of Yugoslavian borders.
On September 16, Serbian and Albanian leaders reported heavy fighting in the area between the towns of Kosovska Mitrovica, Podujevo, and Vucitrn, north of the capital, Pristina. German Defense Minister, Volker Ruhe, stated that the West could resort to military action "within three to five weeks," if Milosevic fails to comply with an impending U.N. Security Council Resolution designed to put an end to the conflict. According to U.N. officials, the Resolution will not explicitly authorize military action.

On September 17, the government of Montenegro began implementing a plan to send refugees from Kosovo to Albania. Over 4,000 refugees being held in the village of Meteh, Montenegro, were transported in busses to the Albanian border point of Vermosh.

On September 18, Ethnic Albanian Leader, Ibrahim Rugova, gave his preliminary endorsement to a 3-year U.S.-backed "temporary" plan to restore local autonomy to Kosovo (stripped by Milosevic in 1989). According to the associated press, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic "supported" the plan aimed at "normalizing the difficult and risky situation and halting the attacks and the use of force."

On September 21, amidst renewed Serbian attacks in the Drenica region, Ethnic Albanian leaders released their version of the U.S. supported "interim" peace proposal. Under the arrangement, Kosovo would become an "independent entity equal" to Serbia and Montenegro, with its own courts, police, and central bank. Its status as a province in Yugoslavia would be retained temporarily and negotiated in the future. Serbian officials rejected parts of the proposal but, reportedly, agreed to release their own version in the upcoming week.

On September 22, the New York Times reported that the "worsening plight" of refugees and internally displaced people from Kosovo was "increasing the possibility of NATO intervention." Britain and France urged the U.N. Security Council to finish drafting the Resolution designed to make (Serbian) "compliance mandatory," and raise the "specter of military force." According to U.S. officials, the pending resolution reflects an emerging consensus in favor of military action, however, "NATO allies have not yet reached an agreement on the use of force."

-----
You say The guy in The New Yorker wrote a piece that was interesting less because of what obvious opponents were quoted as saying (Tommy Franks, Hugh Shelton, Bill Cohen), and more because of what Clark himself had to say.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?031117fa_fact

“…When I asked Clark how he explained being fired by Clinton after winning a war for him, he said that he didn’t believe that Clinton had anything to do with it. The President did indeed sign the order that mandated Clark’s early removal from the saceur post, but Sandy Berger later explained to Clark that neither he nor the President knew what they were signing. It was, Clark says, a setup, engineered by Cohen’s office and by the Chiefs. As for Clinton, “He was hornswoggled. …”

and? :shrug:

EQUATING KOSOVO TO A SIMILAR INTERVENTION AS IRAQ IS DUMB....AND IS WHAT YOU DID! If there are any readers left to this thread, many are rolling their eyes at you, as I am..... :eyes:

[mojowork_n]

125. Successful generals don't get fired for no reason, only someone in denial

or with a severely distorted self-image would make a remark like that, on the record, to a journalist.

And seriously, I believe your contemporaneous, PR-firm-generated phony news story (LA times "mass starvation") must be from the same news-factory (Hill and Knowlton, most likely) as the Kuwaiti ambassador's daughter "baby incubator" tale of woe, that helped stoke the fires for the First Gulf War.

http://www.prwatch.org/books/tsigfy10.html

http://www.prwatch.org/node/3011

You can't recognize any similarities between what happened in Kosovo?

• Illegal war,
• No threat to international peace or security,
• Madelaine Albright goes to Rambouillet, knowing ahead of time what the outcome of peace talks will be.
• A furiously exaggerated media (psy-ops) campaign framed the conflict as a human rights issue.
• Radio/TV Belgrade was bombed, killing no journalists but taking out civilian staff.
• Pipeline terminal for new Caspian Sea oil route secured, blocking Europeans. Kosovo mineral reserves secured.
• Halliburton/KBR builds largest new American military base since the Vietnam War
• Kosovo, Bosnia under colonial administration for the foreseeable future.

And what's been happening in Iraq, under Bush?

• Illegal war,
• No threat to international peace or security,
• Colin Powell forced to give dog and pony show at UN, complete with bad PowerPoint presentation and graphics featuring mobile weapons labs.
• Furiously exaggerated media (psy-ops) campaign to frame conflict as “WMD” domestic threat to U.S. security, by known human rights violator.
• Al-Jazeera bombed.
• 2nd largest known oil reserves on planet secured.
• Just last night on the Daily Show, Helen Thomas recounted her attempts to ask Tony Snow “how long will we military bases in Iraq?”
• 20 billion dollars from U.S. treasury misappropriated, or unaccounted for

This was written before the Busheviks invaded Iraq, but the foundation of lies is only too similar.

http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/hermanmay2000.htm

The NATO-Media
Lie Machine


“Genocide” in Kosovo?

By Edward S. Herman & David Peterson



NATO’s “humanitarian” enterprise in Kosovo was built on a structure of lies, many of them flowing from NATO headquarters and officials of the NATO powers, and uncritically passed along by the mainstream media of the NATO countries. One of the great ironies of Operation Allied Force, NATO’s brief 1999 war against Serbia, was that Yugoslavia’s broadcasting facilities were bombed by NATO on the claim that they were a “lie machine” serving the Yugoslav apparatus of war. This was contrasted with the NATO media, which in the view of NATO officials, and in that of media personnel as well, were “objective” and provided what Richard Holbrooke described as “exemplary” coverage. It never occurred to media leaders and journalists that Holbrooke’s accolade should embarrass them —- although were Slobodan Milosevic to have lauded the Serb media’s performance as “exemplary” we suspect their NATO-bloc counterparts would have interpreted this as proof of the “lie machine” accusation. The double standard runs deep.

An important reason for the congruity between Holbrooke’s and the media’s views was the sense of self-righteousness that accompanied Operation Allied Force. The belief that NATO was fighting a “just war” against an evil enemy had been so well cultivated over the prior decade that for the media, “getting on the team” and thereby promoting the war effort seemed perfectly consistent with “objective” news reporting. This perspective, which was not shared by most governments and media outside NATO, or by a vigorous but marginalized media within the NATO countries, was ideal from the viewpoint of the NATO war managers, as it made their mainstream media into de facto propaganda arms of NATO. Ultimately, this gave NATO and its dominant governments a freedom to ignore both international opinion and international law—and to destroy and kill—that would have been far more difficult to achieve if their media’s performance had been less “exemplary.”




Genocide Politicized

One of the many successes of the NATO-media lie machine was effectively pinning the label of “genocide” on the Serbs for their operations in Kosovo. “Genocide,” like “terrorism,” is an invidious but fuzzy word, that has long been used in propaganda to describe the conduct of official enemies. It conjures up images of Nazi death camps and is frequently used along with the word “holocaust” to describe killings that are being condemned. On the Nazi-Jewish Holocaust model, genocide implies the attempt to wipe out an entire people. But in the Genocide Convention of 1948 the word was defined more loosely as any act “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such.” The Convention even included in genocide acts that were causing serious “mental harm” or inflicting “conditions of life” aimed at such destruction. This vagueness has contributed to its politicization, and Peter Novick notes how in the 1950s its users “focused almost exclusively on the crimes—sometimes real, sometimes imagined—of the Soviet bloc” (The Holocaust in American Life).

It is a notorious fact that the Clinton administration carefully refrained from using the word genocide to apply to the huge 1994 Rwanda massacres of Tutsis by the Hutus. To have allowed the word to be used there would have suggested a need to act, and having decided not to act, the decision to avoid using an emotive word that might have mobilized public opinion on the need to act followed accordingly. By contrast, in the case of Kosovo, the decision to act demanded the mobilization of opinion to support violent intervention, so the aggressive use of the word genocide followed.

In the context of the wars over the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and in its opportunistic use elsewhere, the word genocide has been applied loosely wherever people are killed who are deemed “worthy” victims. In our view this is not only opportunism but also a corruption of meaning of a word whose unique sense implies not just killing or massacre but an attempted extermination of a people, in whole or substantial part.




Genocide Pinned on Serbia

The word genocide was applied to the Serbs in the early 1990s by some Western analysts and journalists who had aligned themselves with other Yugoslav factions (notably the Bosnian Muslims), but it came into intense use during the NATO 78-day bombing campaign and briefly thereafter. In good part this escalated usage was a result of the virtual hysteria of NATO leaders at the Serb reaction to their bombing, which had been put forward as necessary to stop Serb brutalities against the Kosovo Albanians but which caused their exponential increase. With the help of the media, and cries of genocide, Tony Blair, Bill Clinton, Gerhard Schroeder, and other NATO spokespersons were able to transform the consequences of their bombing strategy—the refugee crisis—into its retrospective justification.

To make their case the NATO leaders needed generous numbers of victims, stories of Serb terror, and images of women and children in flight or being put on expulsion trains, allowing recollections of trains to Auschwitz. The number allegedly “missing” and suggested to represent massacre victims by William Cohen on May 16 was 100,000, a figure which peaked at 500,000 in a State Department estimate. Both during and after the bombing campaign the main interest of the cooperative NATO media was in finding victims; a scramble to unearth and report on “mass graves” was launched. There were many victims, but the media’s appetite for them was insatiable and their gullibility led them to make numerous errors, exaggerations, and misrepresentations (see Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman, eds., Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis, forthcoming from Pluto press, for many illustrations). Numerous published images of departing Albanian woman and children were linked to the “Holocaust,” although as one British commentator noted “the Nazis did not put Jews on the train to Israel, as the Serbs are now putting ethnic Albanian Kosovars on the train to Albania” (Julie Burchill, Guardian, April 10, 1999).

The word genocide was applied to Serb operations in Kosovo even before the NATO bombing, although the number killed in the prior 15 months was perhaps 2,000 on all sides and despite the fact that there was no evidence of an intent to exterminate or expel all Albanians. The Kosovo conflict was a civil war with defining ethnic overtones and brutal but not unfamiliar repression (less ferocious than that carried out by the Croatian army against the Krajina Serbs in August 1995, in which some 2,500 civilians were slaughtered in the course of a few days). Even for the period of the bombing the term genocide is ludicrously inapplicable. The Serb reaction to bombing, while frequently savage, was based on their correct understanding that the KLA was linked to NATO and that NATO was giving it air support (Tom Walker and Aidan Laverty, “CIA Aided Kosovo Guerrilla Army,” Sunday Times , March 13, 2000). Their brutalities and expulsions were concentrated in KLA stronghold areas, and those expelled were sent not to death camps but to safe havens outside Kosovo. The intensive postwar search for killings and mass graves has produced under 3,000 dead bodies from all causes—killings of the same order of magnitude as the 1995 Krajina massacres of Serbs, carried out with U.S. support.

In short, the use of the word genocide for Serb actions in Kosovo was gross propaganda rhetoric designed to mislead as to the facts and to provide the moral basis for aggressive intervention. It paralleled the use of the War Crimes Tribunal to indict Milosevic in the midst of the NATO bombing campaign—an indictment that was also designed to justify NATO’s increasingly civilian-oriented (and illegal) bombing of Serbia by demonizing the head of the state under NATO attack.

[FrenchieCat]

126. I'll leave you with this......

You go on and believe what you want, cause that is your aim.

Too bad you had to piss on this thread in where an American and a Democrat who is the most decorated since Eisenhower was being recognized. Debbie Downer has nothing on you.....

General Clark was not "fired", so your statement is not one of facts, of course.

Amazing that the Los Angeles Time is not considered a Source to you, although Peter Boyers, Democrat hater, is.

Kosovo is not Iraq, no matter how hard you try to link the two.....just like Clinton wasn't Bush. Only the self Deluted believe that one.

Considering that you have 183 post and have been a member since 2002, I would have to assume that you normally don't have much to say. I presume you will resume that status soon.

I'm done with you....and will allow you the last word, in where you can post some more propaganda. :eyes:

[mojowork_n]

127. The only fact that mattered to me ...

...was the fragmentation munitions thing. It happened. I watched it on CNN. I saw the holes in the walls and in the cars, on video tape, and I couldn't believe it. And then I read more about the conflict, and tried to understand what the heck was going on.

However inconvenient it may be now for everyone (myself included) to have to deal with, the horrible mistakes that were made then shouldn't be allowed to go down the memory hole. (They would only re-surface at the worst possible time.) And there is (at least to me), some semblance of foreshadowing, to what's been happening more recently, in other parts of the world.

I'm really sorry if you feel like I was just trying to pee on your medal parade. I'm sorry that I disappointed, you, personally, because you are as patriotic and loyal to Democrats in general -- and your candidate, specifically -- as anyone on this board. But, of course, I don't know if I should be saying that, since I have only been popping in, now and then, for a few years, and (as you rightfully point out), haven't been contributing that much.

[FrenchieCat]

114. I'M gonna kick this thread till I get a reply......

I'm sure there are more "smears" that you can throw in here! :rofl:

[FrenchieCat]

109. and here's some of Clark's leadership on the Darfur genocide that

goes on as I post this!

General Wes Clark has been talking about this issue for a long time. He also has made sure that headlines on Darfur didn't disappear from our pages, and from our conversation.

As Clark did about Rwanda and Kosovo, he has been advocating that we should intervene in Darfur, but for a long time, his cries landed on deaf ears. I will say that Kosovo was acted upon BEFORE a Genocide could actually take place, and that's the same swiftness that we should have tried to make things better in Darfur. Hundreds of thousands have already died there, and that is what is so tragic. We are waking up finally, but for many, it will be too late. :cry:

Martin Luther King said, "Man's inhumanity to man is not only perpetuated by the vitriolic action of those who are bad, it is also perpetuated by the vitiating inaction of those who are good."

June 11, 2006
ClarkCast 014 - The Crisis In Darfur
http://securingamerica.com/clarkcasts

Join the Darfur Campaign at WesPAC Securing America
http://ga4.org/campaign/darfur

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=53 ...
Interviews
Wesley Clark: Why We Should Care About Darfur
April 20,2006

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/04/10/a_us_plan_for_darfur/
US plan for Darfur
By Wesley Clark and John Prendergast | April 10, 2006

http://www.dems.us/clark_wes /
November 07, 2005
Clark Steps Up For Darfur, Sudan

http://savedarfur.org/index.php?q=news/newsarchives/200 ...
Deja vu in Darfur - 9/01/2005
Sudan Tribune
Former NATO Commander Wesley Clark is urging the U.N. Security Council to dispatch about 12,000 NATO troops to Darfur to protect civilians and humanitarian operations until a large contingent of African troops is deployed there next year.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=48 ...
Commentary
Wesley Clark: NATO Forces Needed in Darfur
August 22, 2005

http://www.keepmedia.com/pubs/USATODAY/2004/07/06/501055?extID=10026
Out of time in Darfur
By Wesley Clark and John Prendergast | Jul 06 '04

For the past year, the international community has shamefully acquiesced to the crimes against humanity occurring daily in the Sudanese province of Darfur.

"Janjaweed" militias, Arabs backed by the Sudanese government, are continuing to conduct mop-up operations against non-Arab villagers in a massive ethnic-cleansing campaign in the region. The current conflict flared early last year when two rebel groups in Darfur attacked government forces. The swelling crisis could leave hundreds of thousands dead in the coming months.
-------------------------
Also, Clark is a board member of this group here:
http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=3060&l=1
as a Vice Chair -- of which George Soros is a chairman...
http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?id=1139&l=1

And here's some information on the Rwanda-Time line, and some comments about Wes Clark's involvement in attempting to get something done about it.
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/4018.html

[ThomWV]

103. No, but he also earned the Purple Heart and others

that aren't shown in the picture.

[FrenchieCat]

104. I just watched the video where Clark was given that last medal last month,

and the audience would not stop applauding....he had to say his thank yous while the applause where still going on.....and then he got a standing ovation! That was very neat to see one of ours getting recognition overseas....something I haven't seen since seeing the video ealier this month when Clark was honored and had a second street named after him in Kosovo. :patriot:

Does my International heart good!

[Cameron27]

115. Thanks FrenchieCat, for posting all the facts about Clark.

I cannot believe the things I've read in this thread. Damnation.

[FrenchieCat]

117. Welcome!

Hell, here we have an actual full blown most decorated Democrat on our side, and a few folks standing in line calling themselves progressives but really just trying to piss on what we've got.

Shame on them. Shame on them!

[dogman]

118. It's really ironic.

If he were the cold, calculating, MIC advocate that these people portray him as, he could be a leading GOP contender. As he has pointed out, his belief system makes him a Democrat. It truly is a shame.

[Blue_Tires]

112. that's a lot of brass

[FrenchieCat]

116. Like I was sayin'......

:kick:

[Totally Committed]

122. He will be an hostoric POTUS,

if our Party ever finds the balls to nominate him.

I am proud to support Wes.

TC