Capture doesn't sway Clark

Shortly after testifying at the war crimes trial of former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, retired Army General Wesley K. Clark called for a similar trial for Saddam Hussein, but still said he opposes the US intervention that led to Hussein's capture.

"The success of the mission in Iraq, it wouldn't of itself justify that it was . . . a wise decision to undertake at the time," the Democratic presidential candidate said by telephone from the Hague.

"There are any number of things we could do that [would have been] successful that weren't done," Clark added, pointing out that the United States chose not to intervene against dictators in Liberia and Sierra Leone. "It just so happened that this administration chose to go into Iraq when there was apparently still no evidence of weapons of mass destruction."

Clark, who has staked his candidacy on opposition to the war, has tried in recent days to balance between cheering the capture of Hussein and opposing the US intervention in Iraq.

Senator John F. Kerry has walked a similar tightrope, saying on Sunday that he thinks Hussein might have been caught sooner with a globalized effort. And former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who has praised Hussein's capture, has also been saying that America is not necessarily safer with Hussein in custody.

Those statements might satisfy activist Democratic primary voters who haven't wavered in their opposition to the war, said Marc Landy, a political science professor at Boston College. But they could pose a dilemma in the general election, when voters aren't as likely to make such distinctions.

Clark, Dean, and Kerry are "locked in. And they probably didn't have room to alter that," Landy said. "But I think it's a great difficulty for them. The public generally does think that the world is a safer place because Saddam has been captured."

Indeed, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll of 512 adults, conducted Sunday night, showed that 60 percent of Americans would consider the war worthwhile even if weapons of mass destruction were never found, and 57 percent think Hussein's capture will make it easier to win the war on terror.

Those numbers come after a period when Clark has been railing against the war in increasingly emphatic terms. At a fund-raiser in New York recently, he called the war "ambiguous and ridiculous." In a CNN interview on Nov. 30, he questioned whether the United States would be better off with Hussein out of power, saying the Iraq mission has been "a distraction from the war on terror."

Yesterday, Clark said Hussein's capture was good for American soldiers and necessary for an eventual US exit from Iraq. "I think anything that moves us toward more success in Iraq is helpful, but the principal threat to America remains Al Qaeda," he said. "We've always been concerned about Iraq. At the time I started talking about it publicly in August 2002, I accepted the fact that Saddam was a challenge. He just wasn't an imminent" threat to US interests.

Yet Clark also said Hussein seemed "straightforward in his brutality," and called for the death penalty to be considered as a punishment. And he compared Hussein's case to that of Milosevic, who is also accused of atrocities against his own people.

Testifying against Milosevic provides some closure for Clark, who negotiated with him during the Dayton accords and led NATO forces against him in Kosovo in 1999. Yesterday, Clark recounted being in the same room with his old adversary, who is defending himself and cross-examined Clark.

"It was vintage Milosevic," Clark said. "He was at various times obstreperous, difficult, petulant, challenging, irrational -- or, let's put it this way, illogical."

Clark has long cited his experiences with Milosevic to suggest his foreign policy experience makes him more qualified than other Democratic contenders.