Clark versus Clark
RETIRED GENERAL Wesley Clark parachuted into the presidential race last week -- and promptly commenced a debate with himself about whether he would have voted for the congressional resolution authorizing force in Iraq. Yes, he probably would have, the newly minted candidate said on Thursday.
No, he would never have voted for this war, the retreating general declared on Friday.
Add to that confusion an AP story from last October that indirectly quotes Clark saying he supported the resolution. Plus an April 10 column in The Times of London, after Baghdad had fallen, in which Clark wrote: "President Bush and Tony Blair should be proud of their resolve in the face of so much doubt."
So where, really, did Clark stand? I heard the former supreme allied commander in Europe speak at the University of Massachusetts at Boston on Oct. 10, the day Congress passed the resolution, then interviewed him afterward.
The issue of Clark's stand on the resolution never came up (fie on this columnist!), but a review of his comments suggests the general's initial assessment that he would have supported it was more on point than his subsequent claim to the contrary.
To be sure, Clark was hardly a hawk. In his UMass-Boston speech, he bemoaned the Bush administration's disdain for multilateralism, saying it had clearly hurt US standing in the world.
But like many others at the time, he thought that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction -- and that the Iraqi dictator was seeking a nuclear bomb. Still, Clark insisted that the United States had time to explore its options carefully before acting. "I don't think there is an immediacy about this," he said. And he underscored the military view: "Do everything else you can before you use force."
Yet when an audience member asked Clark what could be done when the United States was led by an administration "hellbent for war," Clark had this to say: "In some places diplomacy doesn't work unless it is backed by the threat of force. It just doesn't. You can't make the laws stick unless you are willing to enforce them."
Further, he said, the only hope of getting action from Saddam "is by threatening the use of force." He added: "If international law is going to mean anything, they have to deal with Saddam Hussein's defiance of international law."
When I interviewed him, Clark drew a parallel between Saddam and former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic. "What we found in the case of Slobodan Milosevic was that he wasn't going to admit that there was a problem in Kosovo or cease repression . . . unless we threatened him," he said. "I know because I delivered the threat." Threats alone, of course, didn't deter Milosevic. But asked if it would take a similar threat to get a satisfactory response from Saddam, Clark had a one-word answer: "Absolutely."
However, the general also wanted wide involvement from other countries in confronting Saddam. Praising President Bush for his decision to go to the United Nations, Clark said he was "relatively sanguine" about reaching a unified UN stand on Iraq, but stipulated, in response to a question, that the United States could never give the UN a veto over American foreign policy.
Asked what the United States should do if the UN wouldn't take a tough approach with Saddam, Clark struck a hawkish note: "You're going to do what you have to do. And it won't be an inspection."
Still, though clearly skeptical of past UN inspections, the general did back them as the first step. If Iraq agreed to renewed inspections, would that negate the need for regime change? "I would have to look at how the inspections worked," Clark replied. "I wouldn't outright say, `OK, you have agreed to inspections, therefore no regime change.'. . . Let's see how unfettered the inspections were . . . let's see whether Saddam really wants to give up his weapons. This is about the disarmament of Iraq."
Asked to sum up his (not always consistent) message, Clark did it this way: "Use force only as a last resort. When you use it, use it decisively against a very clear objective. Limit your objective as much as possible to obtain your strategic aim."
That was the general's thinking on the day Congress passed the resolution.
It's hardly the picture of the epauletted resolution opponent of Democratic daydreams. But neither was Clark the sort of unilateralist the Democrats abhor.
Rather, he was a career military man ready to countenance the threat of force but cautious about its use. And perhaps, even then, a potential candidate carefully keeping his options open.
Scot Lehigh's e-mail address is lehigh@globe.com. 