Quote:
Originally posted by bilmore
Wasn't most of that simply an internecine war between General Clarke and all the rest of the military? I thought that the refusal, and delay, were all related to Clarke's seeming coup of that whole theater, and the rest of the military saying "screw you" to Clarke for it, and Clinton's ratification was merely an unknowing following of what his most vocal and frequent military conversationalists were telling him was the proper and agreed-upon thing to do.
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Clinton had the information available to make a reasoned judgment about the problem -- day after day, the press was raising this. Whether his unwillingness to use more force stemmed from his desire to listen to Wes Clark(e?), or from his own sense of what was best for p.r., it was, IMHO, still a very bad decision that stemmed from a view that is fundamentally at odds with the Powell "overwhelming force" doctrine.
The results in Kosovo were still extraordinary -- genocide stopped with minimal loss of life, especially American life (did any US servicemen die in action in Kosovo?). The results of using more force where that was called for could have been more extraordinary still, in the sense that more lives could have been saved.
I used this as an example that I thought illustrated the point. While I recognize the constraints on Clinton that Ty cited (no public support for removing the Taliban from power, no practical means of getting necessary cooperation from Pakistan, etc.), I do believe that, barring an historic, watershed event like 9/11, Clinton's approach to using military force was to use less than he should have.
