Fawkin'Injun
Off da Reservation!
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2003
- Posts
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Why was Clark at odds with the Clinton Administration?
We hear a lot about the Bush Administration pressuring the CIA to back it’s assertions. The CIA says, it ain’t true. Clark says:
Some top Clinton administration officials wanted to end the Kosovo war abruptly in the summer of 1999, at almost any cost, because the presidential campaign of then-Vice President Al Gore was about to begin, former NATO commander Gen. Wesley K. Clark says in his official papers.
"There were those in the White House who said, 'Hey, look, you gotta finish the bombing before the Fourth of July weekend. That's the start of the next presidential campaign season, so stop it. It doesn't matter what you do, just turn it off. You don't have to win this thing, let it lie,' " Clark said in a January 2000 interview with NATO's official historian, four months before leaving the post of supreme allied commander Europe.
…
Clark told the historian that he chafed during the war at having to submit individual bombing targets to the White House and the French government for approval. He said Clinton reviewed them directly, apparently because of embarrassment over the U.S. military's 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. He also quoted a deputy French defense minister as acknowledging that Paris rejected some of his target choices simply for the sake of "saying no."
…
He was scathing in his papers, as he was in a book he wrote in 2001 about the Pentagon's refusal toward the end of the war to endorse his use of Apache helicopters to attack Serbian ground forces. "The Army didn't want to be involved because they were afraid of being embarrassed or afraid of taking risks or whatever," Clark said. "The Navy didn't have a dog in the fight but [wasn't] too interested. And the Air Force, well, they would support me, but then they sent their henchmen down to make sure the [Apaches] would never fly."
Clark denigrated criticism of his plan as "all hype and [expletive]" and told the historian that even Clinton was unwilling to listen to his advice. During the president's visit to Brussels on May 5, 1999, "he's sitting next to me, and he says, 'Well, I guess the Apaches are too high-risk to use.' I said, 'No, Mr. President, they aren't.' Boy, he didn't want to hear that! He turned his head away . . . and that was the end of the discussion."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20226-2004Feb6?language=printer
Why getting tough works and a warning about our next global enemy.
Adm. Moorer’s Last Warning
Christopher Ruddy
Saturday, Feb. 7, 2004
It is a sad day for America when a national giant passes. Adm. Thomas Moorer, of Eufaula, Ala., was such a giant. His passing this week is especially sad for me. Adm. Moorer was a friend, adviser and member of the board of directors of NewsMax.com's parent company, NewsMax Media, Inc. Adm. Moorer was a man "in the arena," as Theodore Roosevelt would have described him. Even at the age of 91, the admiral had kept quite active in public affairs.
…
I remember speaking to him in the hours after the events of Sept. 11. He told me that the American people would soon forget about the tragedy and would not learn from it. He said he had seen this time and again. We don't learn from these things, he told me. I was flabbergasted, but he was right: The complacency is here today.
…
Adm. Moorer was chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the divisive days of the Vietnam War. The war was vexing for him, as it was for many Americans. He was even more anxious because he believed the conflict could have been ended quickly, with fewer casualties and more favorably to U.S. interests.
But the politicians were not letting the military do their job. The days of FDR deferring to Gen. Marshall and the military were over.
Adm. Moorer's advice to President Richard Nixon was simple: Bomb North Vietnam's infrastructure in and around Hanoi and mine North Vietnam's key ports. This would effectively cut them off and force them to end the war.
Despite all of Lyndon Johnson's carpet-bombing, the Pentagon had always been limited to secondary targets that had little effect in undermining North Vietnam's war effort.
Nixon told Adm. Moorer that he would not agree. Nixon was worried that if the U.S. were too bold, the Chinese would join the war and perhaps ignite a global conflagration.
Also, Nixon was concerned about the American POWs held by the North. The State Department warned that if the U.S. stepped up the war, the POWs would suffer more.
Adm. Moorer told Nixon that China would not enter the war and that once the North Vietnamese understood our new resolve, the treatment of the POWs would actually improve.
By 1972, however, the war had been in progress for seven years and American policies had failed. Hanoi had agreed to peace talks in Paris, but the communists were intransigent.
As Adm. Moorer recounted to me, a frustrated Nixon suddenly summoned Moorer. At the time, the admiral was on a military jet heading to Europe for a NATO meeting. The plane made an immediate U-turn over the Atlantic and returned to Washington.
Moorer told me that Nixon was at Camp David, in one of the retreat's rooms, with a longtime friend. Nixon asked what Moorer thought they should do.
He told them bluntly: Bomb North Vietnam as they had never done before.
Nixon, nervously, gave Moorer the OK.
Beginning on Dec. 18, 1972, the U.S. unleashed the largest, most concentrated bombing campaign in its history. For nearly two weeks U.S. pilots flew almost 4,000 sorties. B-52s were brought in and flew more than 700 bombing runs over key North Vietnam targets.
Within days the Vietnamese were suing for peace. And as Moorer recalled, the POWs later reported that their Vietnam captors, frightened by American power, began treating them more benignly. [Think Afghanistan, Iraq, Lybia, Syrian, Iran, N. Korea.]
Adm. Moorer's plan, heeded belatedly, brought an end to the nightmare of Vietnam.
…
In his closing years, Moorer's singular worry was China. He believed that Red China was using front companies like Hutchison to set up strategic bases near key "choke points" for control over shipping lanes. He was also quite disturbed that China's Hutchison had taken control of the port in Freeport, the Bahamas – just 60 miles from Florida.
Moorer saw China's demand for Taiwan as just one reason the Chinese may go to war sometime in the future with the U.S. There was also a struggle for hegemony over Asia. And he never bought the notion that Beijing's ideological Maoists had any intention of remaking China into a democracy.
Inevitably, he argued, China would be in a conflict with the United States.
China's enormous population made this likely and worrisome. Adm. Moorer's concern was that Chinese leaders might some day believe they could absorb a nuclear attack, lose 200 million people and still have 800 million left. The U.S. could not withstand such a loss. China's population made naught the concept of mutually assured destruction – which had helped maintain lukewarm peace with Russia for decades.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/2/7/24328.shtml
We hear a lot about the Bush Administration pressuring the CIA to back it’s assertions. The CIA says, it ain’t true. Clark says:
Some top Clinton administration officials wanted to end the Kosovo war abruptly in the summer of 1999, at almost any cost, because the presidential campaign of then-Vice President Al Gore was about to begin, former NATO commander Gen. Wesley K. Clark says in his official papers.
"There were those in the White House who said, 'Hey, look, you gotta finish the bombing before the Fourth of July weekend. That's the start of the next presidential campaign season, so stop it. It doesn't matter what you do, just turn it off. You don't have to win this thing, let it lie,' " Clark said in a January 2000 interview with NATO's official historian, four months before leaving the post of supreme allied commander Europe.
…
Clark told the historian that he chafed during the war at having to submit individual bombing targets to the White House and the French government for approval. He said Clinton reviewed them directly, apparently because of embarrassment over the U.S. military's 1998 bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. He also quoted a deputy French defense minister as acknowledging that Paris rejected some of his target choices simply for the sake of "saying no."
…
He was scathing in his papers, as he was in a book he wrote in 2001 about the Pentagon's refusal toward the end of the war to endorse his use of Apache helicopters to attack Serbian ground forces. "The Army didn't want to be involved because they were afraid of being embarrassed or afraid of taking risks or whatever," Clark said. "The Navy didn't have a dog in the fight but [wasn't] too interested. And the Air Force, well, they would support me, but then they sent their henchmen down to make sure the [Apaches] would never fly."
Clark denigrated criticism of his plan as "all hype and [expletive]" and told the historian that even Clinton was unwilling to listen to his advice. During the president's visit to Brussels on May 5, 1999, "he's sitting next to me, and he says, 'Well, I guess the Apaches are too high-risk to use.' I said, 'No, Mr. President, they aren't.' Boy, he didn't want to hear that! He turned his head away . . . and that was the end of the discussion."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A20226-2004Feb6?language=printer
Why getting tough works and a warning about our next global enemy.
Adm. Moorer’s Last Warning
Christopher Ruddy
Saturday, Feb. 7, 2004
It is a sad day for America when a national giant passes. Adm. Thomas Moorer, of Eufaula, Ala., was such a giant. His passing this week is especially sad for me. Adm. Moorer was a friend, adviser and member of the board of directors of NewsMax.com's parent company, NewsMax Media, Inc. Adm. Moorer was a man "in the arena," as Theodore Roosevelt would have described him. Even at the age of 91, the admiral had kept quite active in public affairs.
…
I remember speaking to him in the hours after the events of Sept. 11. He told me that the American people would soon forget about the tragedy and would not learn from it. He said he had seen this time and again. We don't learn from these things, he told me. I was flabbergasted, but he was right: The complacency is here today.
…
Adm. Moorer was chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the divisive days of the Vietnam War. The war was vexing for him, as it was for many Americans. He was even more anxious because he believed the conflict could have been ended quickly, with fewer casualties and more favorably to U.S. interests.
But the politicians were not letting the military do their job. The days of FDR deferring to Gen. Marshall and the military were over.
Adm. Moorer's advice to President Richard Nixon was simple: Bomb North Vietnam's infrastructure in and around Hanoi and mine North Vietnam's key ports. This would effectively cut them off and force them to end the war.
Despite all of Lyndon Johnson's carpet-bombing, the Pentagon had always been limited to secondary targets that had little effect in undermining North Vietnam's war effort.
Nixon told Adm. Moorer that he would not agree. Nixon was worried that if the U.S. were too bold, the Chinese would join the war and perhaps ignite a global conflagration.
Also, Nixon was concerned about the American POWs held by the North. The State Department warned that if the U.S. stepped up the war, the POWs would suffer more.
Adm. Moorer told Nixon that China would not enter the war and that once the North Vietnamese understood our new resolve, the treatment of the POWs would actually improve.
By 1972, however, the war had been in progress for seven years and American policies had failed. Hanoi had agreed to peace talks in Paris, but the communists were intransigent.
As Adm. Moorer recounted to me, a frustrated Nixon suddenly summoned Moorer. At the time, the admiral was on a military jet heading to Europe for a NATO meeting. The plane made an immediate U-turn over the Atlantic and returned to Washington.
Moorer told me that Nixon was at Camp David, in one of the retreat's rooms, with a longtime friend. Nixon asked what Moorer thought they should do.
He told them bluntly: Bomb North Vietnam as they had never done before.
Nixon, nervously, gave Moorer the OK.
Beginning on Dec. 18, 1972, the U.S. unleashed the largest, most concentrated bombing campaign in its history. For nearly two weeks U.S. pilots flew almost 4,000 sorties. B-52s were brought in and flew more than 700 bombing runs over key North Vietnam targets.
Within days the Vietnamese were suing for peace. And as Moorer recalled, the POWs later reported that their Vietnam captors, frightened by American power, began treating them more benignly. [Think Afghanistan, Iraq, Lybia, Syrian, Iran, N. Korea.]
Adm. Moorer's plan, heeded belatedly, brought an end to the nightmare of Vietnam.
…
In his closing years, Moorer's singular worry was China. He believed that Red China was using front companies like Hutchison to set up strategic bases near key "choke points" for control over shipping lanes. He was also quite disturbed that China's Hutchison had taken control of the port in Freeport, the Bahamas – just 60 miles from Florida.
Moorer saw China's demand for Taiwan as just one reason the Chinese may go to war sometime in the future with the U.S. There was also a struggle for hegemony over Asia. And he never bought the notion that Beijing's ideological Maoists had any intention of remaking China into a democracy.
Inevitably, he argued, China would be in a conflict with the United States.
China's enormous population made this likely and worrisome. Adm. Moorer's concern was that Chinese leaders might some day believe they could absorb a nuclear attack, lose 200 million people and still have 800 million left. The U.S. could not withstand such a loss. China's population made naught the concept of mutually assured destruction – which had helped maintain lukewarm peace with Russia for decades.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/2/7/24328.shtml
's advocate!
