Not Your Sweetie

Clark's humanitarian record

Samantha Power's meticulously researched and notated 600+ page Pulitzer
prizewinning tome, "A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of
Genocide." .

General Clark is one of the "heroes" of Samantha Power's book. She
introduces him on the second page of her chapter on Rwanda and describes
his distress on learning about the genocide there and not being able to
contact anyone in the Pentagon who really knew anything about it and/or
about the Hutu and Tutsi. She writes, "He frantically telephoned around
the Pentagon for insight into the ethnic dimension of events in Rwanda.
Unfortunately, Rwanda had never been of more than marginal concern to
Washington's most influential planners" (p. 330) . He advocated
multinational action of some kind to stop the genocide. "Lieutenant
General Wesley Clark looked to the White House for leadership. 'The
Pentagon is always going to be the last to want to intervene,' he says.
'It is up to the civilians to tell us they want to do something and
we'll figure out how to do it.' But with no powerful personalities or
high-ranking officials arguing forcefully for meaningful action,
midlevel Pentagon officials held sway, vetoing or stalling on hesitant
proposals put forward by midlevel State Department and NSC officials"
(p. 373).

According to Power, General Clark was already passionate about
humanitarian concerns, especially genocide, before his appointment as
Supreme Allied Commander of NATO forces in Europe. When genocide began
to occur in the Balkans, he was determined to stop it. She details his
efforts in behalf of the Dayton Peace Accords and his brilliant command
of NATO forces in Kosovo. Her chapter on Kosovo ends, "The man who
probably contributed more than any other individual to Milosvevic's
battlefield defeat was General Wesley Clark. The NATO bombing campaign
succeeded in removing brutal Serb police units from Kosovo, in ensuring
the return on 1.3 million Kosovo Albanians, and in securing for
Albanians the right of self-governance. Yet in Washington Clark was a
pariah. In July 1999 he was curtly informed that he would be replaced as
supreme allied commander for Europe. This forced his retirement and
ended thirty-four years of distinguished service. Favoring humanitarian
intervention had never been a great career move."