Democrats are so delirious about finding a general who is a pacifist scaredy-cat that no one seems to have bothered to investigate whether Wesley Clark is sane.
On "Meet the Press" back in November, Clark described intelligence as "a sort of gray goo as you look at it. You can't see through it, exactly, and if you try to touch it, it gets real sticky and you might actually interfere with the information that you're getting back. So you have to draw inferences from it."
No, wait. I'm sorry. I think that was Clark talking about Monica Lewinsky's dress, not national security intelligence.
Meanwhile, Clark recently said that the "two greatest lies that have been told in the last three years" are: "You couldn't have prevented 9/11 and there's another one that's bound to happen." If he were President, Clark says, there would be no more terrorist attacks.
The adversarial watchdog press did not ask Clark to explain how he could guarantee an end to terrorist attacks, but recited Clark's prior statements calling for better intelligence. Apparently, if we could just refine the gray goo of intelligence to a magical terrorist-prediction machine, Clark could put an end to this terrorism nonsense once and for all.
Yes, I suppose if our intelligence agencies knew who the terrorists were and when they were going to strike, we could stop them. And if we knew who all the raving lunatics were, we could prevent these infernal Democratic presidential primary debates. Which reminds me, I think I know how we can win the lottery every week, too.
Liberals scoff at a system to shoot down incoming missiles, but believe that all random suicide bombers can be located and stopped before they strike. Hitting a bullet with a bullet just isn't feasible, so let's concentrate on something doable like predicting the future.
Democrats are utterly unfazed by the fact that Clark is crazier than a March hare. They are so happy to have a pacifist in uniform, they ignore his Norman Bates moments. When this peacenik criticizes the war in Iraq, he can puff up his puny chest and cite his own glorious experience with blood, sweat and tears in the Balkans.
Asked on "Meet the Press" what advice he would give Bush, Clark said: "I'd say, 'Mr. President, the first thing you've got to do is you've got to surrender'?stop right there and the Kucinich crowd is yours?'exclusive U.S. control over this mission. ... Build an international organization like we did in the Balkans.'" Because, as everyone knows, Wesley Clark "built" NATO. This guy sounds more like Al Gore every day.
Asked what countries he proposed to bring into Iraq that weren't there already, Clark said, "I think you ask NATO ... just as I did in Kosovo, because this brings NATO into the problem." NATO is the logical choice for this job because of Iraq's extremely close proximity to the North Atlantic.
Evidently, Clark is sublimely confident that no one remembers anything about his misadventures in the Balkans.
Yugoslavia posed absolutely no threat to the United States?not imminent, not latent, not burgeoning, not now, not then, not ever. Unless, of course, you count all the U.S. highway deaths caused by Yugos. The president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, never tried to assassinate a U.S. President. He never shook his fist at the Great Satan. He didn't shelter and fund Muslim terrorists?though the people we were fighting for did.
In humanitarian terms, Milosevic didn't hold a candle to Saddam Hussein. Milosevic killed a few thousand Albanians in a ground war. Hussein killed well over a million Iranians, Kurds, Kuwaitis and Shias, among others. Milosevic had no rape rooms, no torture rooms, no Odai or Qusai. He didn't even use a wood chipper to dispose of his enemies, the piker.
And yet NATO, led by Gen. Wesley Clark, staged a pre-emptive attack on Yugoslavia.
Under Clark's command, the U.S. bombed the Chinese embassy by mistake, killing three Chinese journalists. Other NATO air strikes under Clark mistakenly damaged the Swiss, Spanish, Swedish, Norwegian and Hungarian ambassadors' residences. Despite the absence of ground troops, Yugoslavia took three American POWs, whose release was eventually brokered by Jesse Jackson. America was standing tall.
Clark's forces bombed a civilian convoy by mistake, killing more than 70 ethnic Albanians, and then Clark openly lied about it to the press. First he denied NATO had done it, and, when forced to retract that, Clark pinned the blame on an innocent U.S. pilot. As New York Newsday reported on April 18, 1999: "American officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the staff of Army Gen. Wesley Clark, the NATO commander, pointed to an innocent F-16 Falcon pilot who was castigated by the media for blasting a refugee convoy." Eventually, even a model of probity like Bill Clinton was shocked by Clark's mendacity and fired him.
At the end of major combat operations led by NATO Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Wesley Clark, arch-villain Slobodan Milosevic was still in power. (At least Clark won't have to worry about any embarrassing "mission accomplished" photo-ops coming back to haunt him.) Today, almost a decade and $15 billion later, U.S. troops are still bogged down in the Balkans. No quagmire there!
That's the Democrats' idea of a general.
