Clark's True Colors (Page 5)

Clark elicited a similar response at the same press conference when he made one of the more cryptic--and in retrospect, one of the more meaningful--statements of his campaign. "The legacy of Vietnam," he said, "will be put to rest by the legacy of Iraq."

A few reporters asked Clark to explain himself, but the general basically just repeated the statement before leaving the podium. As it turned out, only one journalist wrote it up in the post-mortems. Afterward, I went up to Clark spokesman Bill Buck and found out what he meant.

"What he means," Buck said, "is that the legacy of Vietnam was that it was a war that we went into without a clear strategy for a successful conclusion."

"Really?" I said. "Because I thought the legacy of Vietnam was that we senselessly murdered 2 million people in an illegal, criminal colonial invasion."

Buck rolled his eyes. "Oh, come on," he said. Then he elaborated. In Vietnam, Buck said, we had no strategy for going in and winning. In Iraq, we have the opportunity to "be successful."

"And success means winning, not withdrawing?" I said.

"Success means winning," he said. "He's made no secret about that."

I asked Buck if this was not exactly the same position that Richard Nixon ran on, vis-à-vis Vietnam, in 1968--peace with honor. A far from unreasonable question, given that Clark, back in those very days, during his studies at Oxford, had given speeches abroad in support of the Vietnam war effort. Also not unreasonable because Clark voted for Nixon. But Buck shook his head.

"Give me a break," he said.

A nondenial denial. I laughed. A neo-Ziegler for a neo-Nixon.

The legacy of Vietnam will be put to rest. Maybe Roman history isn't the only kind of history on the mind of General Clark. Certainly, in his statements about Iraq, he echoes the sentiments of the old Vietnam War boosters. "[The Iraq war] has been a huge strategic mistake for this country," he says. "But now that we're in, we have no choice but to succeed." Between all the anti-Bush bluster, and the talk of the Iraq war being a "national tragedy," the position of the antiwar candidate really boils down to that: Let's finish the job like we didn't last time. Underneath it all, he seems to be a man yearning to scratch a very old itch.

It had always troubled me that people opposed to the war could have seen something in Wesley Clark. Because it seemed to me that no person who found the Iraq war morally repugnant could have gone on television and talked sunnily about how this or that weapon was ravaging Iraqi defenses. I remember watching Clark on CNN, and at one point he was actually playing with a model of an A-10 tank-killer airplane, whooshing it back and forth over a map of Iraq, like a child playing with a new toy on Christmas morning. A person who was genuinely opposed to the war as wrongful killing would be sick even thinking about such a thing.

Clark's new book, Winning Modern Wars, is 200 pages long, all about the Iraq war. Yet there is only one instance in the entire book in which he gives a physical description of the death of a human being, that being a mention of some Marines in Nasiriyah who were found with bullet holes in their heads. Everywhere else, human beings are described as "targets" or "objectives" or even "high-value targets," and their deaths are rendered with sports/ football metaphors ("going 'downtown' with air power," "Red Zone" attacks, "the Big Win," etc.) and bloodless euphemisms for words like "kill" or "assassination" ("destroy," "decapitating strike"). Moreover, he never mentions civilian casualties without qualifying his statements--the "alleged mistakes of the bombing campaign," the "hapless women and children reported to be victims of the bombing."

If this kind of talk sounds familiar, that's because it is. Clark doesn't hide it. "I'm a product of that military-industrial complex General Eisenhower warned you about," he said with a smile a few weeks ago, during a speech at the UNH campus in Manchester. The general assumed--correctly--that the term no longer inspired revulsion in young audiences.

He says it's something else, but maybe this is what Clark means by the New American Patriotism. New faces, no memories. Fresh recruits to replace the defeatists. A new base for Big Win thinking.

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