BOOK REVIEW
Gen. Clark: Kosovo war was 'coercive diplomacy'
By John
Catalinotto
What can we learn from reading the words of the class enemy?
Only with that question in mind is it worthwhile to open up
Gen. Wesley K. Clark's "Waging Modern Warfare."
Gen. Clark commanded NATO's war against the people of
Yugoslavia in 1999. Serious opponents of this aggression
consider Gen. Clark a war criminal for his role both in
planning the war and in aggressively pushing for bombing
targets that led to civilian casualties.
Within months after NATO troops occupied Kosovo, however,
Washington dumped Clark from his command. Now retired, he
finished writing his version of the Balkans war in 2001. In his
book he analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of the U.S.
military in the 21st century.
As might be expected from someone the Pentagon "retired"
before his time was up, the general uses the book to defend his
own decisions. The book is also self-serving in the broader
sense of justifying NATO's war against Yugoslavia. Here Clark
never gets beyond the same propaganda U.S. politicians and
spokespeople used against Slobodan Milosevic and the Serb
government during the 1999 war.
This heavy-handed treatment of the events makes the first
415 pages of the 461-page book less than enlightening. These
pages contain repeated references to his frustrated attempts to
use Apache helicopters inside Kosovo, a desire that kept
getting shot down by mysterious forces in the Pentagon who
apparently were fearful the Apaches would also get shot
down.
While Gen. Clark openly pushed for wider bombing targets in
Serbia and preparation for a ground war in Kosovo, he was not
the stereotypical right-wing militarist. He fit right in with
the Clinton administration's foreign policy.
He also claims a close relationship with Javier Solana, a
Spanish social democrat and one-time NATO opponent who became
NATO's civilian head during the war. He is aware of the
problems once-communist Italian Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema
and the German Greens leader Joshka Fischer had keeping the
rank-and-file of their parties lined up behind the imperialist
war effort.
Gen. Clark frequently met Milosevic in negotiations. Indeed,
he threatened the Belgrade leader that NATO would bomb Serbia
"good" if Milosevic refused to submit. Clark complains that
Milosevic prevaricated in an attempt to "stall" the NATO
bombing attack without surrendering Yugoslavia to the West.
Hardly a war crime.
Imperialist character
of NATO's war
In the most useful and only interesting section of the
book--the final 46 pages of "Conclusions"--he gets down to an
admission, only slightly veiled, of the colonialist or
imperialist character of the war.
The Kosovo war, he writes, "was coercive diplomacy, the use
of armed forces to impose the political will of the NATO
nations on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, or more
specifically, on Serbia. The NATO nations voluntarily undertook
this war." In that regard, he says, it "was much more like the
interventions of an earlier era," before World War II. By this
Clark means the period of open colonial rule by the Western
European powers, the U.S. and Japan.
Trying to bully the world this way, however, has its own
risks. "Events proceed from diplomacy backed by discussions of
threat, to diplomacy backed by threat, to diplomacy backed by
force, and finally to force backed by diplomacy."
Can the war makers be stopped?
With the eventuality of this war in mind, Gen. Clark
discusses U.S. and NATO weak nesses. The Pentagon, he writes,
is well prepared with different scenarios of war in the Persian
Gulf or Korea.
Clark doesn't explain that U.S. imperialist interests are
greatest in these areas--oil in the Middle East and a strategic
land base in Asia--and that a ruling-class consensus backs
these war plans. He complains that Pentagon reluctance to move
troops and materiel from these two areas made it harder for him
to wage war in Europe.
The greatest weakness of the U.S. military, however, is the
reluctance to accept casualties, a legacy of the U.S. defeat by
a people's army in Vietnam. It was considered a triumph of the
war against Yugoslavia, Clark writes, that no U.S. combat
casualties were reported.
Politicians and generals alike feared that a political
revolt and mass demonstrations would follow any news of U.S.
casualties--even of planes being shot down. This fear prevented
NATO from threatening a land war from the beginning, it delayed
planning for that war and it apparently stopped the deployment
of Apache gunships in Kosovo, according to Clark.
The NATO command was pushing the Big Lie that this was a
"humanitarian" war to help ethnic Albanians. Yet the only
military action was to bomb mainly civilian targets in Serbia,
a strategy that met growing resistance in Europe.
For future wars, Gen. Clark wants more "precision" weapons,
but he also insists it will be necessary to send troops in on
the ground and that there must be some tolerance of
casualties.
According to Clark, despite NATO's overwhelming force it was
unprepared to take the required steps once the Yugoslav people
and leadership surprised the Western powers by holding out. He
had his own doubts that NATO--and especially the
Pentagon--would have dared a land war.
There is a lesson here for the anti-war movement, which in
Western Europe and the U.S. fell short of what would have been
possible had more forces seen through the anti-Serb and
anti-Milosevic propaganda. All-out support for Yugoslavia
against imperialist attack would have encouraged the people's
continued resistance and tested NATO's weaknesses.
That the U.S. is "the only superpower" does not mean its
ability to repress a people's war is unlimited. Perhaps that's
the only important lesson of "Waging Modern Warfare."
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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