General Dismay

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General Dismay
by James Hall, Senior Associate Editor

October 6, 2003

"Leaning Left"

James Hall After General Wesley Clark's speech in Little Rock last week, the Republican smear machine revved into high gear. But the best dirt the talk radio honchos could find to throw at the general was a hat-switching incident in Prestina during the lead-up to the Kosovo War. General Clark might be guilty of swapping hats with a Serbian general, bit I suspect that Clark's detractors worry more about him wanting to try on another hat-that of President of the United States. And against an increasingly vulnerable George W. Bush, he's looking mighty good.

In public conservative political operatives play it cool-Clark is just one of ten Democrats in the race, they say-but the reality is that Republicans fear the comparisons of Mr. Clark to Mr. Bush. Consider resumes: Clark finished first in his class at West Point, while legacy George W. Bush was fraternity president and a "C" student at Yale. Bush went on to get an MBA at Harvard after being turned down by the University of Texas' Law School, while Clark became a Rhodes scholar.

Clark left Oxford for the jungles of Vietnam, led soldiers and was wounded in combat and won the Bronze and Silver Stars. Meanwhile, Bush served out his duty as a partying weekend warrior stationed in Texas. While Clark advanced steadily in the Army, becoming Supreme Allied Commander of NATO and four-star general, Bush was striking out in the oil business in Texas and getting baled out by rich relatives and friends of his father.

Silver Star versus Sliver Spoon? Whatever they say, that's not the contest that the Bush folks want to face in 2004. Clark's 34 years of military service trumps Bush's made-for-TV appearance in a flight suit on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln. If Clark is indeed the Democrat's nominee, the president's image-makers will have to throw that footage out.

Worse still for the Bush people are the nuances of General Clark's opposition to the war in Iraq. Clark opposed the president's decision to go to war in Iraq without getting the kind of international support that Bush's father got from the UN in Gulf War I or President Clinton received from NATO in Bosnia and Kosovo. This president put the US armed forces on a timetable to invade Iraq before he really began to lobby NATO and the UN Security Council for support and then tried futilely to pressure or bribe other nations to join in

The result of Mr. Bush's precipitous decision has been US armed forces doing the lion's share of the fighting and US taxpayers paying the lion's share of the rebuilding costs in Saddam's bankrupt former fief. This is in sharp contrast to the Gulf War and Balkans conflict where the Japanese, Europeans, and others stepped in both with forces and funds. The president's belated attempt to put the occupation of Iraq back under UN auspices and to pass the hat to cover the occupation costs has proven to be a costly error that we're now paying for in both in soldiers' lives and in taxes--four billion dollars a month. Most Democrats would have a difficult time making that point in a presidential debate, but General Clark is tailor-made for it.

Despite taking a leading position in recent public opinion polls among the Democrats running for office and head to head with President Bush, Wesley Clark still has a lot of work to do filling in the blanks of his public policy. What are his opinions on fixing the "jobless recovery" and slowing the growing national debt engineering by the Bush administration? How will he respond to traditional Democratic kitchen table issues? The answers to these questions will determine his viability as a candidate.

But right now just his presence gives Democrats standing on national security issues that Republicans thought they owned. That in itself should be enough to create a feeling of general dismay in the White House. ***

James Hall
Orlando, FL USA

Photo of the author courtesy of staff files