More Baloney from Clark
Sometime in November 2001, Gen. Wesley Clark, former NATO supreme commander and future Democratic candidate for president, visited the Pentagon. Whereupon, in conversation with "a man with three stars who used to work for me," Clark stumbled across the Bush administration's secret "five-year plan" to remake the Middle East, Central Asia, and northern Africa. The administration's radical vision in the wake of the September 11 attacks, Clark was told, would include taking military action not only against Afghanistan and Iraq, but also "Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan." Clark's source told him, "We're not that good at fighting terrorists, so we're going after states." What's more, "There's a list of countries."
Or not. Clark, who tells this story in his new book, "Winning Modern Wars," as well as in a September 2003 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, has no proof of any of this. And how does THE SCRAPBOOK know Clark has no proof? Easy. He admits it.
Last week, when a reporter for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette asked the general whether he had ever seen the target list himself, Clark replied that no, he had not. And, what's more, he wasn't even interested in seeing it. So aghast at the administration's plans for unending war was he, Clark told his friend to be quiet. "I said, 'Stop, I don't want to see anything more,'" Clark explained to the Democrat-Gazette. "I just didn't want to get into it."
The lack of evidence, Clark hastened to point out, doesn't mean the list
was imaginary. Or that there was no "five-year plan." Because, after all, "they told me there was something, some kind of memo or something." And really, the general noted, "You only have to listen to the gossip around Washington and to hear what the neoconservatives are saying, and you will get the flavor of this."
THE SCRAPBOOK gets the flavor of what Clark is saying. It tastes like baloney. Which, come to think of it, is the flavor of a lot of his gossipy innuendo about the Bush administration.
A couple of weeks ago, after USA Today published Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's leaked memo on the war on terror, Clark said that Rumsfeld "had to leak his own memo," because otherwise "no one would have believed him" that the Bush administration doesn't "know how to measure success" in the war on terror. How, the reporters trailing Clark wanted to know, did the general learn that the memo was leaked by the secretary of defense himself? "Well," Clark answered, "that's what the rumor is, and it's been talked about on the Sunday talk shows."
Q.E.D. (Not that we have anything against the Sunday talk shows.)
You may be wondering why Clark's charges haven't received more attention from the press and the other Democratic presidential candidates. Well, we hear that the general has already been written off as a serious contender for the Democratic nomination.
That's what the rumor is, anyway.
They Finally Found a General to Admire
In late October, the New York Review of Books published the first chapter in Gen. Wesley Clark's campaign biography, an attack on the Bush foreign policy entitled "Iraq: What Went Wrong." It was replete with photos of Clark in uniform--steely-eyed, meditative, determined. The cover of its latest issue (November 20) is given over to Elizabeth Drew's adverbially effusive paean to the general, which praises him as "exceptionally intelligent," "highly ambitious," and "exceptionally independent."
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