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Gen. Ralston, a talented, hard-working and honorable
officer, had emphasized that he would only remain in
uniform when his current assignment ends early next
year if he received the NATO appointment (technically,
the appointment is to the post of Commander in Chief
of United States Forces in Europe, or USCINCEUR, which
carries with it the SACEUR billet as well). Gen. Ralston
is well-liked on Capitol Hill, and many there and in
the administration presumably felt that his previous
decision to forgo a proffered nomination as Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs due to publicity he received over
an earlier affair when separated from his wife was an
unnecessary sacrifice to political correctness.
So much for the People magazine view of Washington
personnel decision-making. The real story, of course,
is that Gen. Clark was not reappointed because he had
ruffled too much senior Washington plumage in achieving
NATO's victory. The administration expected that a brief
and light NATO bombing campaign would bring Mr. Milosevic
to heel, put a lid on the violence in Kosovo, and enable
the United States to restore the frayed credibility
of its European leadership role and the viability of
the alliance itself. All at little price and minimal
risk.
Belgrade's decision to intensify the ethnic cleansing
of Kosovo that it had begun the previous year, when
over 500,000 Kosovo Albanians were displaced from their
homes and 500 villages destroyed, challenged these comfortable
assumptions. The alliance could either make peace with
Mr. Milosevic on his terms, or adapt its strategy and
tactics to the new Belgrade-driven realities. Washington
hesitated, Gen. Clark did not. By exercising his option
as field commander, forcefully advocating escalation
of the air war to defeat Serbia and pressing for all
necessary resources to achieve that objective, he left
little room for the administration to follow its preferred
course of action whenever Mr. Milosevic called its bluff.
This was a decisive break with the policy that Ambassador
Richard Holbrooke had brokered of coming to terms with
Mr. Milosevic and giving him a major "peacemaker"
role. As a key participant in the Dayton peace negotiations
with Mr. Holbrooke, Gen. Clark believed that such coddling
of the Serbian leader had only tempted Belgrade to believe
that Washington had an almost inexhaustible patience
for Serb-inspired destabilization of the region. When
negotiating the crucial written details of the October
1998 Kosovo cease-fire after Mr. Holbrooke had obtained
oral commitments from Mr. Milosevic, Gen. Clark concluded
that Belgrade would not abide by it for long, that the
cease-fire would break down, and that this would present
Washington with a national crisis. Anticipating war,
he sought to prepare the administration and the allies
for the looming conflict.
Any conflict produces inevitable tensions between field
commanders and headquarters. Those tensions are multiplied
when the alliance is as disparate as the 19 member nations
of NATO. Gen. Clark's achievement was to provide the
NATO alliance with the will, vision and strategy to
win and not let tactical obstacles overwhelm his strategic
objectives. His bombing campaign, moreover, set the
stage for the resurgence of democratic activism in Serbia
aimed at displacing Mr. Milosevic.
That Gen. Ralston differed with Gen. Clark over many
of the key war-fighting recommendations made by SACEUR
does not augur well for the firmness of future alliance
policy in the Balkans. That the Army was prepared to
let the NATO command go to an Air Force officer for
only the second time in alliance history suggests that
the Pentagon's senior Army leaders have yet to digest
the lesson that their inclination to field the best-equipped
force that does not fight-witness the Apache helicopter
non-deployment fiasco-is impelling the service toward
strategic irrelevance in Europe. That Secretary of
Defense William Cohen would undercut Gen. Clark as he
begins the enormously complicated and difficult task
of implementing the KFOR security mandate raises questions
about the secretary's military judgment (though not,
of course, his right to remove Gen. Clark).
That the president would assent to the removal of Gen.
Clark for, in effect, being right projects political
small-mindedness and lack of vision.
Gen. Wesley Clark has earned the nation's gratitude.
He learned well the lesson of using force to prevail
in the Balkan snake pit and emerged as a genuine allied
commander of stature. In so doing, however, even a leader
of his talents and professionalism was unable to survive
the more harsh and unforgiving Washington snake pit.
He will depart NATO next April as the shortest-tenured
SACEUR since Dwight Eisenhower. That's not bad company
to be in.
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