.... or at least that is the message in this week's New Yorker profile. And I think it's a pretty strong one. Previously, I had been disposed to consider Clark to be too great a risk as the Democratic nominee and too much the creature of the establishment. I thought, before today, that he had done well in Kosovo, had excellent foreign policy instincts, and would be a valuable member of any Democratic administration.
Wow was I wrong. Clark needs to be kept as far away as possible from the levers of power. No cabinet appointment, no Vice Presidency, no nothing.
The New Yorker portrays Clark as an extremely self-absorbed, like beyond Clinton self-absorbed, overconfident buffoon, not unlike the current President who sees every failing of his policy as proof that it needs to be pursued further. In Kosovo, he insisted that the mere threat of airstrikes would cow Milosevic, and then when that didn't work he had no conception of how to actually launch successful airstrikes. A disdainful general in the piece calls Clark's strategy 'tank plinking'--ie not a way to put real pressure on a rogue dictator. Then, Clark decided that ground forces were the only way, and he concentrated entirely on forming a plan with that basis, when there was never a possibility of that working.
The real theme of the piece is that Clark gives really bad advice because once he gets an idea in his head, he's absolutely convinced of his own brilliance. He convinced NSA Sandy Berger that Milosevic could be beaten easily, even without war, and thus committed the US to a war that other policy-makers, especially those in the Defense Department, had mixed feelings about.
It reminded me of a teacher I had in high school. Since I write on Dailykos under my own name, and being a good liberal though a mysterious person, he probably lurks here under a pseudonym, he's probably reading this right now. Anyway, I thought he was the most intelligent teacher on the faculty; he had the kind of natural self-assured brilliance I wished I did. But he was utterly and invariably wrong, all the time. I remember one instance when a student's mother had died, and this teacher told the students. He suggested that we NOT send condolence cards because that would be too overwhelming or something. Despite being quite liberal, he was also the school's censor-in-chief, and I was the editor of the newspaper. I was ambitious about it, and during my first few months in the job he would excoriate me on a regular basis for pushing the envelope. It began to demoralize me and my writers, who saw their work ground through the administrative sieve.
In any case, enough ranting about that. Clark just comes across as an ineffective manager, the sort of person who subtly poisons everything he touches. Maybe my reading of the piece is too harsh, but I think it sounds the end of his campaign.
I can't wait to see what comes of this.