|
Dear
Mike,
I've
long appreciated your work, your politics and your
writings. And precisely because of that, I'm surprised
by and disappointed in your
solicitation of Wesley Clark's candidacy for the Democrat
nomination for President.
Wesley
Clark is a war criminal. He commanded the U.S. forces
and the whole NATO mission in the Kosovo war, which
from the allies' perspective, was a stunning bombing
campaign. Toward the end of the conflict, he very
nearly touched off a major global confrontation when
he ordered NATO forces to attack an airfield where
a Russian force had landed with the intention of injecting
themselves on the side of the Serbs to halt the butchery.
Had Clark's order been followed, it would have touched
off the most dangerous 'Russian-U.S' military confrontation
since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Fortunately,
the British officer who had actual on-the-ground control
of the NATO troops explicitly refused to attack the
Russians, thus avoiding a catastrophic military confrontation
with a politically unstable nuclear weapons state
(holding the second largest arsenal in the world).
Clark
is getting his poltical advice from Bill Clinton,
his commander-in-chief when Wesley attacked Kosovo.
That, alone, should be a major clue to Clark's politics.
Though the U.S. suffered no casualties in the Kosovo
"war", hundreds of civilians were killed,
most of them in obvious circumstances (on strategic
bridges and highway stretches, in the Chinese embassy
and in office buildings that were being bombed). Worse,
Clinton authorized Wes to "try out" depleted
uranium in the Kosovo conflict - and so together they
have left a 4,500,000,000-year-long legacy that will
surely produce an epidemic of health effects on many
Croats and Serbs and others for generations to come.
All
this - and I haven't even touched on the wrong-headed
injustice of the U.S. joining the Balkan war anyway.
It surely couldn't have been because the human rights
record of the Croats was more "humane."
In
those days, the Pentagon encouraged and assisted al-Qaeda
to move its operatives into the Kosovo region to become
part of the "Kosovo Liberation Army," a
collection of ethnic cleanser-murderers, brigands
and drug traffickers who were, then and now, important
guarantors of the continued flow of Aghanistan's #1
cash crop - heroin - into the West.
It
was Wesley Clark who touted the doggedness of those
KLA "freedom fighters" - but then before
September 2001, al-Qaeda operatives, despite the organization's
suspected role in the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa,
were still a source of useful CIA assets.
I
suggest you review the writings cited below and consider
whether a reconstituted Wesley Clark, with his ho-hum
stereotypical New Democrat viewpoints, is really the
great savior of our damaged political dialogue that
you've held him up to be.
Wesley
Clark - A War Criminal?
KLA
rebels train in terrorist camps
Michael,
I've admired you for years, from "TV Nation"
to "Bowling," but you're way off base about
Wes Clark.
Terry
Lodge is an attorney in Toledo, Ohio.
Index: Current Articles + Latest News and Views + Book Reviews +
Letters + Archives
|
