To Sir With Love - A Wesley Clark Blog

New video - David Letterman 11/20/03 Complete

Wesley Clark on David Letterman Part 1
Wesley Clark on David Letterman Part 2
Wesley Clark on David Letterman Part 3

Clark TV spot rates rave from Slate

Well, not totally. In their recurring column "Damned spot: Political ads dissected and explained," Slate's William Saletan and Jacob Weisberg agree on the spot's aesthetic effectiveness and disagree on its political correctness.

Saletan leads with, "How do I love this ad? Let me count the ways."

I love it because it's a story. It doesn't simply characterize the candidate or organize his merits in the form of an argument. . . Sometimes the best way to catch people's ears is to whisper. And sometimes the best way to catch their eyes is to show them something still, simple, and powerful, a reprieve from the chaos of the medium.

. . . The risk most people associate with electing a general to the presidency is authoritarianism. The ad does a nice job of dissolving that concern, too. As the narrator says, "Now, when we need a leader," the screen shows Clark smiling with his hand on the shoulder of a soldier, looking more collegial than bossy. Later, as the narrator says Clark "liberated a people," the screen shows Clark swept up in a joyous crowd of what appear to be Kosovar Albanians. He isn't standing before them or above them. He's one of them. As the setting shifts from battlefields to classrooms and town halls, the pictures continue to show the friendly general on a level with, or even slightly below, those whom he seeks to lead. The message is: Real leadership doesn't need trappings.

As an ancient Chinese proverb has it, "If you want to lead the people march behind them."

Jacob Weisberg in reply detects hypocrisy:

". . . What really bothers me about this ad is the conflict it points to in Clark's views about military intervention. . . . Why did his determination to fight on humanitarian grounds in Kosovo not extend to Iraq? In the scale of his despotism, Saddam Hussein was Stalin to Milosevic's Mussolini. Saddam's efforts at ethnic cleansing and repression were bigger and more vicious than anything Milosevic was capable of. Clark objects to the way Bush went about making war on Iraq, and so do I. But everything Clark says now is calculated to leave the impression, true or not, that he wouldn't have used the military to end the humanitarian and human rights catastrophe in Iraq.

What distinguishes these two instances of humanitarian intervention isn't principle, but politics. Kosovo was Clark's war. Iraq is Bush's. The general's self-serving use of one war to flay his enemy for the other is hardly shocking. Yet I resent this ad for trying to wash the contradiction away with swelling violins.

True, the ad leverages the "Saving Pvt. Ryan" emotionalism of Clark's military service rather than the geo-political implications of his Kosovo mission. But WKC's pragmatic approach to "elective" wars need not be written off as merely expedient or arbitrary. In response to Weisberg's objections, I'm sure he would contend that the US's commitment to stability in the Balkans, as well as the imminent threat of ethnic cleansing, distinguishes the Kosovo campaign from the invasion of Iraq.

Certainly Clark's background gives him great credibility when he states as he did to Dan Rather, "[The plan for Iraq] didn’t work through to the political considerations that were what the war was all about." Clark is consistently clear in his position that winning a war is far different from winning the peace.

So what distinctions might he draw between Kosovo and Iraq? Firstly, he did believe (incorrectly) that the threat of both heavy bombing and a land invasion would force Milosevic to back off his oppression of the Kosovars and return to the negotiating table. There was never the serious intention to commit up to 200,000 infantry to the mission; Clark knew as well as anybody, we simply didn't have that many forces available, then or now. Agree with him or not, his determination to use a fully committed ground invasion plan as a threat to Milosevic is consistent with his ideal resolution on the Iraq war: show the UN and Hussein that we were deadly serious but continue to build consensus for our plan of last resort both at home and abroad.

Secondly, from a practical standpoint, the wrong kind of war on Iraq would clearly destabilize a region already prone to an epidemic of internal civil conflicts. Iraq is many times the size of Kosovo and would necessarily require a commitment of resources that would not only distract from the effort to eliminate al Qaeda but jeopardize our military commitments in regions as yet unrelated to the war on terror. Clark's insistence on the option of ground forces in Kosovo, his reluctance to commit them in Iraq, and his belief that military intervention is "always, always" a last resort are not in the least inconsistent with each other. The common thread is that America's irresistible military might provides the most security when it is used as leverage for strengthening an ever-evolving panoply of coalitions and as a measured, stabilizing response to ad hoc threats such as 9/11. Humanitarian ideals must always be balanced against a realistic assessment of our odds for success, militarily, politically, culturally, and internationally.