Go Back   I-Mockery Forum > I-Mockery Discussion Forums > Philosophy, Politics, and News
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
VinceZeb VinceZeb is offline
Senior Member
 
Join Date: Mar 2003
VinceZeb is probably a spambot
Old Sep 25th, 2003, 12:53 PM        Interesting enough....
http://news.pacificnews.org/news/vie...a7b50e8dbbb330

How a Notorious Serb General Outfoxed Wesley Clark
Commentary, Terence Sheridan,
Pacific News Service, Sep 23, 2003

Editor's Note: Republicans recently released a 1994 photo of Democratic presidential candidate Wesley Clark swapping hats with Serb general Ratko Mladic, who was indicted a year later for war crimes and is now a fugitive. Mladic got the best of Clark, but the talented and driven former NATO commander may get the last laugh.

Only a Republican who fears Wesley Clark could love Banja Luka, a drab town in the northwest corner of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a bankrupt nation of wary Muslims, Serbs and Croats.

In August 1994, during the height of the Bosnian civil war, Clark came to Banja Luka, met a Serb general and ended up looking like a perfect chump.

The Serb, Ratko Mladic, suckered Clark into exchanging hats and posing for pictures. At the time, Clark was a three-star general and head of operations at the Pentagon.

It seemed like a harmless lark at the time, two generals exchanging snappy covers and smiling for the camera. A few jokes, a few laughs, and then off to a lunch hosted by the Serb.

But now Clark is running for president of the United States and Mladic, indicted for war crimes in 1995, is a fugitive with a $5 million U.S. price on his head, the Osama of the Balkans.

He's wanted for crimes against humanity and genocide, dating from the siege of Sarajevo, beginning in April 1992, to the massacre of more than 7,000 Muslims in eastern Bosnia in July 1995. In between there were grotesque concentration camps.

And since the Bush White House doesn't play nice, it seems likely that sooner or later the embarrassing pictures will surface prominently: the Democratic candidate cavorting with a barbarian, as opposed to pictures of the Republican president landing on a U.S. warship in a flight suit.

The meeting between Mladic and Clark was arranged by General Michael Rose, the British commander of the United Nations Protection Force in Bosnia in 1994, at Clark's request.

In his book, "Fighting For Peace," Rose wrote that Mladic first tongue-lashed Clark, then placated him with the hat exchange and that Clark "was clearly delighted to be offered some sort of olive branch."

In addition, according to Rose, former commander of Britain's Special Forces and hero of the Falklands War, Mladic gave Clark a pistol with the engraved words, "From General Mladic."

"We were appalled," Rose wrote.

In his own book, "Waging Modern War," Clark makes no mention of either hats or a pistol while describing Mladic as "the blustering military leader of the Bosnian Serbs," and as being "coarse and boastful."

So how did this vulgar piece of work manage to con a West Point graduate (first in his class) and Rhodes Scholar?

Clark doesn't give a clue, but Rose does. Rose said he warned Clark, a man with a reputation for being headstrong and ego-driven, about the manipulative Mladic, but to no avail.

"Sadly for Wes, Bosnia was not the Gulf War," Rose wrote. "The rules of the game were subtler, and he turned out to be ill-equipped to deal with the brutal cunning of a man like Mladic."

But in 1999 Clark was a four-star general with a new hat and a new title, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, when NATO, an alliance of 19 nations led by the United States, bombed defiant Serbs into resentful submission.

Kosovo will doubtlessly be portrayed by the candidate as a foreign policy triumph.

If you're inclined to ignore certain facts and Balkan subtleties, Clark, as Bill Clinton's general, saved Kosovo's blameless Albanians, punished Serbian forces, and brought peace to the valley.

However, prior to the 78-day bombing campaign against decrepit Yugoslavia, a vicious but low-grade guerrilla war had ebbed and flowed for a year between Serbian security forces and separatist rebels in Kosovo, a Serbian province dominated by ethnic Albanians.

Every time it ebbed, rebels would knock off a Serbian policeman and the security forces would go scorched-earth ballistic -- classic, clever guerrilla warfare with predictable international news coverage of the smoking aftermath.

But, by far, the worst of the ruthless mass purges of the Albanian populace, the sea the rebels swam in, came after NATO launched Operation Allied Force in March 1999.

NATO occupied the province that June and since then Serbs, Gypsies and other non-Albanian minorities have been killed, kidnapped and assaulted by Albanian nationalists, the former rebels, who systematically dynamite historic Serbian churches and monasteries in Kosovo while aiding and abetting armed ethnic mischief in neighboring Macedonia.

There's simply no telling what can happen when waging modern war in crumbling countries with different values, and even morally superior ventures are rough on civilians.

NATO aircraft mistakenly struck refugee convoys, hospitals, a passenger train, and the Chinese Embassy, but when the high-altitude "humanitarian" campaign ended, Serbian forces left Kosovo with their flags flying and nearly all their tanks intact.

For the record, Clark got back his famous hat. Slobodan Milosevic, the supreme Serbian leader, returned it during the Bosnian peace negotiations in Dayton, Ohio, in November 1995, saying it was a gift from General Mladic.

Headstrong and egocentric, Clark is also ambitious, bright, talented and tireless. He was often in hot water at the Pentagon and was forced into retirement only a month after the Serbs caved in. But look at him now.

Milosevic is on trial for war crimes, Mladic is on the run, the Bush administration is bogged down in Iraq, and Clark is a decorated Vietnam veteran eager to take on a tough-talking war leader who never wore a flight suit into battle.

PNS contributor Terence Sheridan is a free-lance writer based in Belgrade.
Reply With Quote
  #2  
Zhukov Zhukov is offline
Supa Soviet Missil Mastar
Zhukov's Avatar
Join Date: May 2003
Location: Tasmania
Zhukov has joined BAPE's armyZhukov has joined BAPE's armyZhukov has joined BAPE's armyZhukov has joined BAPE's armyZhukov has joined BAPE's armyZhukov has joined BAPE's armyZhukov has joined BAPE's armyZhukov has joined BAPE's army
Old Sep 25th, 2003, 01:05 PM       
Clark is a war crimminal himself, and for some reason Michael Moore likes him.


I notice you put a source for that one
__________________
Reply With Quote
  #3  
ranxer ranxer is offline
Member
ranxer's Avatar
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: U$
ranxer is probably a spambot
Old Sep 25th, 2003, 01:21 PM       
I'm with those that want to see a warcrimes trial for
wesley clark and those involved with him including clinton.

The Members of the Independent Commission of Inquiry to Investigate U.S./NATO War Crimes Against the People of Yugoslavia, meeting in New York, having considered the Initial Charges and Complaint of the Commission dated July 31, 1999, against President William J. Clinton, Gen. Wesley Clark, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Prime Minister Tony Blair, Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, President Jacques Chirac, Prime Minister Massimo D'Alema, Prime Minister Jose Maria Azmar, the Governments of the United States and the other NATO member states, former Secretary General Javier Solana and other NATO leaders, and Others with nineteen separate Crimes Against Peace, War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity in violation of the Charter of the United Nations, the 1949 Geneva Conventions, other international agreements and customary international law;

"The Members of the International War Crimes Tribunal find the accused Guilty on the basis of the evidence against them and that each of the nineteen separate crimes alleged in the Initial Complaint has been established to have been committed beyond a reasonable doubt."


http://www.vcp.nu/english/guilty.htm


It’s a new form of colonialism. Countries that are thriving, that have the potential to be regional powers, like Yugoslavia and Iraq, are consciously being un-developed—taken backwards—by U.S. imperialism. The military establishment is carrying out a war against people abroad, against human beings, who dare to defy the dictates of the IMF and the World Bank. This war was carried out in our name, but we say here before the whole world that the young people and the working people of Yugoslavia are not our enemies. Our enemy, the enemy of working people, isn’t in Novi Sad or Belgrade or Nic or Pristina, it’s those who carry out the most vicious war crimes and crimes against humanity in the pursuit of corporate profit. Clinton, Cohen, Albright, Wesley Clark should be arrested and stand trial for their crimes, and with them we should and will indict the bankers and robber barons on Wall Street, whose lust for profit and exploitation drives them to ever new military adventures.

http://www.iacenter.org/warcrime/ssloan.htm

i wouldnt mind us granting some kind of amnesty for these folks in order to get to the facts.. and to work toward a more sustainable foriegn policy that doesnt create blowback against our citizens
__________________
the neo-capitalists believe in privatizing profits and socializing losses
Reply With Quote
  #4  
mburbank mburbank is offline
The Moxie Nerve Food Tonic
mburbank's Avatar
Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: right behind you
mburbank has disabled reputation
Old Sep 25th, 2003, 01:31 PM       
Say, Vinth, bark up the wrong tree much?
Reply With Quote
  #5  
KevinTheOmnivore KevinTheOmnivore is offline
Mocker
KevinTheOmnivore's Avatar
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Brooklyn, NY
KevinTheOmnivore is probably a spambot
Old Sep 25th, 2003, 11:47 PM       
Hey, ain't this the same war crimes tribunal that wanted to go after Tommy Franks...?
Reply With Quote
Reply


Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump

   


All times are GMT -4. The time now is 06:42 AM.


© 2008 I-Mockery.com
Powered by: vBulletin
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.