Clark - All Wrong -

Clark - All Wrong - David Frum on all - or at least many - of reasons Wesley Clark is not only a bad choice, the but a spectacularly bad one

Democrats think they can inoculate themselves from the charge of being weak on national security by hiring a general to express their weakness for them. It’s an old antiwar fantasy. Back in the 1930s, the U.S. Communist Party recruited a former Marine Corps general, Smedley Butler, to give speeches on the eve of World War II denouncing military preparedness as a capitalist racket. The idea was that by persuading an individual man of valor to propound shameful views , those views would somehow become less shameful. It didn’t work then. I doubt it will work now.

Especially since Wesley Clark is an odd person on whom to hang an argument against the Iraq war.

If any one figure sums up the illusions and errors of the 1990s, it is Clark. Clark was the general who led the U.S. into a purely humanitarian war in Kosovo – at exactly the moment that the Clinton administration was disregarding the gathering threat to the United States from Middle Eastern terrorism. Clark has criticized the supposed and alleged errors of U.S. planning in Iraq – notwithstanding that his campaign in Kosovo was based on an unending series of errors, above all his claim that his air campaigns could destroy Serbian military capabilities without harming the Serbian civilian population.