{"id":151,"date":"2003-09-24T17:44:31","date_gmt":"2003-09-24T21:44:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/wordpress\/?p=151"},"modified":"2003-09-24T17:44:31","modified_gmt":"2003-09-24T21:44:31","slug":"reporting-for-duty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/?p=151","title":{"rendered":"Reporting for Duty"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Reporting for Duty: Wesley Clark<\/i><\/a> Col. David Hackworth makes a stunning reversal from his widely referenced take down of Clark in 1999<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Then:<\/p>\n

The man is not a field soldier; he’s more a CEO in uniform. Perhaps an efficient manager, but not a Patton-like leader. The troops call his sort “Perfumed Princes,” brass known for their micromanagement bias and slavish focus on “show over go” and covering their tails with fancy footwork. Unfortunately, today’s senior Army ranks are filled with such managers — and these kind of dweebs are why the U.S. Army is in trouble.<\/i><\/p>\n

Now:<\/p>\n

Lt. Gen. James Hollingsworth, one of our Army’s most distinguished war heroes, says: “Clark took a burst of AK fire, but didn’t stop fighting. He stayed on the field ’til his mission was accomplished and his boys were safe. He was awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart. And he earned ’em.” <\/p>\n

It took months for Clark to get back in shape. He had the perfect excuse, but he didn’t quit the Army to scale the corporate peaks as so many of our best and brightest did back then. Instead, he took a demoralized company of short-timers at Fort Knox who were suffering from a Vietnam hangover and made them the best on post ? a major challenge in 1970 when our Army was teetering on the edge of anarchy. Then he stuck around to become one of the young Turks who forged the Green Machine into the magnificent sword Norman Schwarzkopf swung so skillfully during Round One of the Gulf War. <\/p>\n

I asked Clark why he didn’t turn in his bloody soldier suit for Armani and the big civvy dough that was definitely his for the asking. <\/p>\n

His response: “I wanted to serve my country.” <\/p>\n

He says he now wants to lead America out of the darkness, shorten what promises to be the longest and nastiest war in our history and restore our eroding prestige around the world.<\/i><\/p>\n

But does Clark want to ‘shorten what promises to be the longest and nastiest war in our history’….according to Hackworth’s recent article “No doubt he’s made his share of enemies. He doesn’t suffer fools easily and wouldn’t have allowed the dilettantes who convinced Dubya to do Iraq to even cut the White House lawn. So he should prepare for a fair amount of dart-throwing from detractors he’s ripped into during the past three decades.” <\/i><\/p>\n

In Wayne Madsen’s article Wesley Clark for President?<\/i><\/a> he wrote this:<\/p>\n

More interestingly is how General Clark’s Bosnia strategy ultimately goes full circle. According to Washington K Street sources, the law firm that established the Bosnia Defense Fund was none other than Feith and Zell, the firm of current Pentagon official and leading neo-con Douglas Feith. Feith’s operation at Feith and Zell was assisted by his one-time boss and current member of Rumsfeld’s Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle. Both Feith and Perle advised the Bosnian delegation during the 1995 Dayton Peace talks. The chief U.S. military negotiator in Dayton was Wesley Clark.<\/i><\/p>\n

In the March 23, 2003 article Gen. Wesley Clark, unplugged<\/i><\/a> by Jake Tapper is this exchange:<\/p>\n

Of the people who are running this war, from Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and Powell on down, in terms of the political appointees, are there are any who you particularly like who you would work with again, hypothetically, in some …<\/b><\/p>\n

I like all the people who are there. I’ve worked with them before. I was a White House Fellow in the Ford administration when Secretary Rumsfeld was White House chief of staff and later Secretary of Defense, and Dick Cheney was the deputy chief of staff at the White House and later the chief. <\/p>\n

[Deputy Secretary of Defense<\/a>] Paul Wolfowitz I’ve known for many, many years. [Deputy National Security Advisor] Steve Hadley at the White House is an old friend. [Under Secretary of Defense for Policy<\/a>] Doug Feith I worked with very intensively during the time we negotiated the Dayton Peace Agreement; he was representing the Bosnian Muslims then, along with [Pentagon advisor<\/a>] Richard Perle. So I like these people a lot. They’re not strangers. They’re old colleagues. <\/p>\n

Do you disagree with them on their worldview?<\/b><\/p>\n

I disagreed with them on some specific aspects. I would not have gone after the war on terror exactly as [they] did and I laid that out in the [new foreword to the paperback edition of “Waging Modern War”]. But I also know there’s no single best plan. You have to pick a plan that might work and make it work. That means you’ve got to avoid the plans with the fatal flaws. This administration came into office predisposed to use American troops for war fighting and to realign American foreign policy so it focused on a more robust, more realistic view of the world than the supposedly idealistic view of the previous administration. <\/p>\n

But the views that President Bush espoused recently at the American Enterprise Institute, if his predecessor had espoused that view he’d have been hooted off the stage, laughed at, accused of being incredibly idealistic about the hard-nosed practical politics of the Middle East. So this is an administration that’s moving in a certain direction, and now that that’s the direction they’ve picked they’ve got to make it work. Like everybody else, I hope they’ll be successful. It’s too important; we can’t afford to fail.<\/i><\/p>\n

Addendum: If you’d care to reference another source other than the Defense Dept. linked in Jake Tapper’s Salon article, these are from Disinfopedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Douglas Jay Feith<\/a><\/p>\n

Richard N. Perle<\/a><\/p>\n

No personal pages there for Wolfowitz or Steve Hadley, but this person warrants closer scrutiny, I think:<\/p>\n

Madeleine K. Albright<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Reporting for Duty: Wesley Clark Col. David Hackworth makes a stunning reversal from his widely referenced take down of Clark in 1999. Then: The man is not a field soldier; he’s more a CEO in uniform. Perhaps an efficient … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pdXTf-2r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=151"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/karmalised.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}