That Vision Thing
Wesley Clark says that without allies, there is no vision

I have written before of my deep unease over the possibility that retired Gen. NATO Wesley Clark is a potential president of the United States. (I also wrote of the time I worked briefly with Clark at the Pentagon when he was a two-star general.)

In a Newsweek article about Clark's presidential potential, the general is quoted as saying of the Iraq campaign and aftermath,

"You can't win without a vision, and that means working with allies."

Why? I would like to read Gen. Clark's explanation of why without allies, there is no vision.

History is replete with failed alliances as well as successful ones, and with successful unilateralists as well as failed ones. The Union in 1861-1865 had no allies. The United States entered World War I on 1917 with two principal allies, England and France, but from the first day it was America's unilateral vision that dominated the employment of American forces. The main task General John. J. Pershing faced in France was making sure that the Anglo-Francais "vision" of four years of unmitigated trench warfare horror was never adopted by Americans. Both the English and French high command were adamant that American units be used as replacements for their own units that had been decimated by years of grinding combat. Some French generals even wanted American infantrymen to be assigned to French units as individual replacements, which would have been their death warrant. Pershing refused so steadfastly that he prevailed.

On Aug. 30, 1918, Pershing took command of the St. Mihiel sector. French Marshal Foch, the overall allied military commander, visited him that day and a fierce argument ensued as Pershing flatly said "No," under any circumstances, to Foch's demand that Pershing relinquish several American divisions to be assigned to the French field army in the Meuse-Argonne sector.



General of the Armies of the United States John J. Pershing, famous unilateralist

What Gen. Clark is really implying, even if he does not intend, is that the Bush administration is in a fog when it comes to "that vision thing" and that the Old Europeans should really be given the dominant voice. He apparently discounts the enormous contributions of Britain to the war on terror, which is not surprising to me: Clark seems to have been more attracted to continental Europeanism, with its webs of entangling alliances and transnational obligations than British bulldoggery. (The Brits still have a stiff-necked, go-it-alone-if-necessary nature that staunch multilateralists find alarming.)

Make no mistake. When Clark complains that America has not enlisted allies in the terror war, he means certain Europeans, not the brown people of the world. Clark isn't racist, he's just a Euro-phile. In his view, the US should not have acted decisively against Iraq because the French, Germans and Belgians opposed doing so. But there is no diplomacy that would have garnered even their background military participation. Hence, Clark's concept of alliance really means American paralysis in the face of allied intransigence. They get to veto American policy and security requirements.

Heaven save us from such alliances.

Allies are useful only if they really are allied. Clark seems to think that Old Europe's countries are actual allies because they are still signatories to formal treaties of alliance, NATO being primary. Yet NATO is gasping its last with the disappearance of the Cold War. What events since 9/11 show is that absent a clearly understood common threat, Europe and America will not make common cause.

Remember that France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg announced last spring that they are forming a new, combined military force with its own non-NATO command structure and headquarters.

All four countries of the new alliance together cannot hope to match American military spending or manning, even if they had the will to do so (which they don't). Together they have exactly one aircraft carrier, very little airlift (none of it strategic quality), no heavy bombers and land forces much less resourced and poorly trained compared to the US. Technologically their militaries are at least a generation behind the United States with no hope of catching up.

Sad to say, but the more of Clark's politics I read, the more it appears that his vision reminds me of an American Gulliver tied down by European Lilliputians.

Update: Michael Williams writes about Clark's call-in radio interview with Alan Colmes. It ain't pretty.

by Donald Sensing, 9/1/2003 01:15:14 PM. Permalink |