Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism And The American Empire

by Wesley K. Clark

General Wesley K. Clark's Waging Modern War, a Washington Post bestseller, examined his experience directing the NATO-led war in Kosovo. As Clark saw it, the Kosovo war—limited in scope, measured in effect, extraordinarily complex in execution, waged with an uneven coalition, with instantaneous media coverage, and with a duration measured in days and not years—would serve as a model for contemporary war. He has been proven right.

In Winning Modern Wars, he writes about how the issues and principles discussed in his earlier book were evident in Afghanistan and Iraq, and will apply wherever the war on terrorism may take us next, providing a frank and revealing analysis of the gains, risks, and shortfalls of America's current approach and offering informed alternatives. What Clark, an admired military analyst on CNN and one of the most decorated and influential officers of his generation, has to say on our national plans and tactics—and the lessons of empire—is invaluable, reminding us that as we celebrate our successes, we must also tend to their consequences.

Genres: Politics, History, Military Fiction, War, Military History, Nonfiction

220 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Wesley Kanne Clark, Sr., KBE is a retired general of the United States Army. Graduating as valedictorian of his class at West Point, he was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford where he obtained a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and later graduated from the Command and General Staff College with a master's degree in military science. He spent 34 years in the Army and the Department of Defense, receiving many military decorations, several honorary knighthoods, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Clark commanded Operation Allied Force in the Kosovo War during his term as the Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO from 1997 to 2000.

Clark joined the 2004 race for the Democratic Party presidential nomination as a candidate on September 17, 2003, but withdrew from the primary race on February 11, 2004, after winning the Oklahoma state primary, endorsing and campaigning for the eventual Democratic nominee, John Kerry. Clark currently leads a political action committee—"WesPAC"—which was formed after the 2004 primaries, and used it to support numerous Democratic Party candidates in the 2006 midterm elections. Clark was considered a potential candidate for the Democratic nomination in 2008, but, on September 15, 2007, endorsed Senator Hillary Clinton. After Clinton dropped out of the Presidential race, Clark endorsed the then-presumptive Democratic nominee, Barack Obama. Clark currently serves as the co-chairman of Growth Energy, an ethanol lobbying group.

Reviews

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pages 1-90: A humdrum rehash of Gulf War II. Do not be misled by the breathless you-are-there opener: “March 20, 2003, early morning, somewhere over Iraq. The F-117 pilots checked their systems …” There’s nothing remotely insiderish about the chronicle to come. If you watched the war on CNN and read a handful of postmortems in the newsweeklies, you’ll learn little new here.

Page 91: The first sign of light flickers. Clark tells of returning to his Pentagon haunts in September 2002, a few months before the Gulf War would begin, and learning to his disappointment that little thought was being given to postwar matters. Clark writes: ” ‘Not a popular subject on the third floor [where Defense Department policy is decided by civilian leaders],’ I was informed.” The use of brackets is horribly inelegant; it would be nice to know who—or at least what rank of person—”informed” him. Still, it is intriguing that the fatal flaws in postwar planning—or, the lack thereof—were recognized so early on by at least some people in the Pentagon.

Page 92: Clark recites the now-standard critique that Bush’s postwar reconstruction had “no program legitimized by international authority.” By the next page, he takes the administration to task for “jettisoning” more than “fifty years of post-World War II experience,” which “pointed toward the advantages of operating within the framework of alliances and multinational institutions.” As a capper, he notes that even Donald Rumsfeld’s vision of military “transformation”—the precision-strike weapons and air-ground coordination that led to such a rapid battlefield victory—”was not a new vision” but rather “the product of five U.S. presidents” and a “process that actually accelerated after the 1991 Gulf War,” i.e., (though Clark doesn’t say so explicitly) after the Democrats swept Bush’s father out of the White House. This supports Al Franken’s description of the victorious U.S. armed forces as “Clinton’s military.”

Page 113, 124: Going after Saddam Hussein was “a hobby-horse” for Bush’s security team that drew attention away from the more vital task of going after terrorists. Letting Osama Bin Laden slip across the mountains of Tora Bora was one of “many missed chances.”

Page 130: A revelation:

As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan. … He said it with reproach—with disbelief, almost—at the breadth of the vision. I moved the conversation away, for this was not something I wanted to hear. And it was not something I wanted to see moving forward, either.

Pages 131, 148: Clark goes after Bush’s doctrine of “preventive war.” It was “an idea that the United States had consistently rejected for itself and condemned in others,” and it was “likely to make us the enemy” in the eyes of much of the world.

Pages 175, 178: The neocon concept of a “New American Empire,” Clark goes on, is not only impractical, given the size and training of the U.S. military, but also contrary to “the principles of national self-determination.” The idea also ignores the fact that American power and prosperity since World War II have been “sustained not by classical empire but rather by an interlocking web of international institutions and arrangements that protected and promoted American interests and shared the benefits, costs, and risks with others.”

By Page 183: The general is in carpet-bombing mode. The end of the Cold War, he writes, created an opportunity for the United States to resolve some nasty contradictions in its foreign policy, to strengthen alliances without having to prop up dictators for anti-communism’s sake. “But 2001,” he intones, clearly referring to the election of W., “marked a profound departure in U.S. foreign policy.” Then he blasts Bush’s “aggressive unilateralism,” which would “hamper counterterror efforts,” turn an effective alliance system “upside down,” prompt “an outburst of worldwide anti-American sentiment,” and leave our country “poorer, more isolated, and less secure.”

Page 183-200: The final 17 pages are an unbridled campaign manifesto, a call for “a more collaborative, collegial American strategy … based on the great American virtues of tolerance, freedom and fairness.” Some of this rah-rah stems no doubt from Clark’s recent hat-toss into the presidential ring (the book was finished up just last month). One wonders whether the general, would, say, a year ago, have so vigorously opposed Bush’s tax cuts or advocated higher spending on education, health care, the infrastructure, the environment, and “retirement security.”

Slate picking the interesting bits out

[Dennis Littrell · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Winning" requires more than military might

The first part of this most interesting book written by the former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe describes the buildup and conduct of the war in Iraq. General Clark provides a map and recalls operations and gives a detailed strategic look at how the war was won. Then on page 83 he begins his critique and analysis of the "victory" in Operation Iraqi Freedom. It is here that the book becomes most interesting and most enlightening.

Clark finished this book sometime early in the fall of 2003 before the full extent of the Bush administration's failure in postwar Iraq became clear. Nonetheless Clark anticipated the failures, and his critique is devastating. When one adds it to some of the other criticisms that have come from distinguished military experts--the latest of which was General Anthony Zinni's appearance on Sixty Minutes (May 23, 2004) in which he said that had he made the mistakes in planning that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld had made, he would be compelled to resign--one is forced to recognize not only failure but premeditated and deliberate ignorance and incompetence.

While the old saw that "war is too important to be left to the generals" is still viable, it is equally true that to ignore or to go against the advice of those most experienced in such matters is foolhardy. Imagine yourself as President of the United States being told by your most experienced and senior generals such as Wesley K. Clark and Colin Powell--just to mention the two most prominent--that an invasion of Iraq would be unwise, counterproductive, and very expensive both in terms of monies spent and lives lost. What would you do?

What Bush did was to ignore the experts and to go with the neoconservative ideologues in and around the White House and people like Rumsfeld, and to do it without thinking the consequences completely through. As Gen. Clark so calmly and convincingly points out, the invasion of Iraq was a military success and a reconstruction failure of the most obvious and predictable sort. He writes, "Destruction of enemy forces on the battlefield creates a necessary--but not sufficient--condition for victory." (p. 88) More specifically, the planners failed to anticipate "various contingencies...including the possibility of postwar Iraqi resistance." (pp. 86-87) It is amazing to realize that the Bush White House apparently thought that the scattered Baathist elements and the Shia faithful would turn into flower children and hand out daises to the occupying soldiers.

Perhaps the simplest and most telling criticism is that "decisive operations (how to defeat Iraqi forces) had taken priority over the postwar plan (how to achieve the real objectives in Iraq)." (p. 89) However Clark's most important criticism is this: "the Administration raised the costs and risks of the mission by preventing our use of the full array of tools available to win modern war" by being "unwilling to exploit the international legitimacy and support from international institutions like the United Nations and NATO." (p. 92)

Now in May 2004 as I write this, Bush is practically begging the UN and anybody else who will listen to help us extract ourselves from the quagmire.

As to Bush's motive for invading Iraq, Clark asks, "if a primary but unspoken purpose of the campaign was to demonstrate the skills and courage of the American armed forces, then surely... [the military invasion] was a success." (p. 101) What he is suggesting (in a larger and less sanitized sense) is that we showed the world not only the awesome power of our weapons but our willingness to use them. I think that this was one of the real purposes of the invasion of Iraq. An easy victory against an overmatched (and evil) opponent in which the "shock and awe" of our military might could be displayed for all the world to see was what Bush had in mind. One cannot help but observe that such a scenario (successfully constructed) would work toward his becoming a two-term president and would fit well the mind set of a mediocre man whose personal advantages had allowed him many easy victories in his personal life.

Another "unspoken" reason for invading Iraq was to draw attention away from the fact that we had not caught Osama bin Laden and that the Bush administration really did not (and does not) know how to go about doing that. Let me make a suggestion: use the $200-billion plus that we have squandered in Iraq (so far) to persuade the tribesmen and warlords of Afghanistan and the government of Pakistan to help us find bin Laden. What Bush has accomplished in Iraq amounts to a giant recruiting poster for terrorists. Indeed the boots on the ground in Iraq serve as training targets for a mushrooming terrorist population.

Clark also addresses the larger theoretical issues, that of preemptive wars (he's in favor of them but only as self-defense on a multilateral basis) and the delusion of an American Empire. He points out that the word "empire" no longer has any real military or economic meaning. The US in fact, through globalization, has in effect created an economic empire, the maintenance of which requires a lot more than military might. Clark calls this the "virtual" American empire, and I think that is insightfully apt terminology.

There's a lot more to this book than I can discuss here, but let me add one more thing. Clark makes the astute observation that one of the tactics of terrorism is to entice governments into instituting "repressive security measures...and so lose the support of its citizens" (p. 106) We can see the beginnings of such measures in the United States with the Patriot Act. One hopes that we do not fall into this trap, the ancient one of allowing the ends to justify the means on our way to becoming our enemy.

--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”

[April · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a perspective of war like it is a game of chess. This piece moves here in order to attack/stop this piece, etc. Human lives are treated as units of force instead of as individuals with families and desires of their own. But that is a fact of war. The generals move the pieces, the pieces are very much human, but have signed up to be part of a larger mechanism that disrobes them of their humanity.

I know this book is not intended to talk about the human loss of life during war, but after reading an essay by Paul Fussell called "The Real War 1939-1945," I could only imagine while reading about the various "moves," "strikes," and other military successes in the approach to Iraq, the following: "You would expect front line soldiers to be struck and hurt by bullets and shell fragments, but such is the popular insulation from the facts that you would not expect them to be hurt, sometimes killed, by being struck by parts of their friends' bodies violently detached. If you asked a wounded soldier or marine what hit him, you'd hardly be ready for the answer, 'My buddy's head," or his sergeant's heel or his hand, or a Japanese leg, complete with shoe and puttees, or the West Point ring on his captain's severed hand."

Near the end, Clark becomes very idealistic and states what the U.S. needs to do to improve its way of life for all Americans. I agree with what he says, but he is almost preaching to the choir. What steps and actions are being realistically taken to accomplish these ideals? The people who are responsible for this are likely not reading his book.

"Surprisingly, most of the discussions about American Empire--about terrorist threats abroad and our actions to address them--have little to say about America itself. Yet in the wake of 9/11 Americans are seeing themselves in a new way. For the first time in more than a decade, we are aware of the importance of the world beyond our borders, as well as the power of political forces and ideas that aren't our own. And we are looking at each other differently, too, seeking a community with greater trust and security. And we shouldn't believe that we can meet this challenge without ourselves changing the in the process." p. 199

I read this book because I received it as a gift from an annual investor meeting back in the early 2000's.

[Michel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in the summer of 03 (thus before the insurgency in Iraq), this visionnary book shows how the military, albeit in his mind the very best in the world, cannot alone win a modern war, any more than the brass section alone can execute a symphony.
The letter-perfect conjunction of intelligence, air and ground forces in Iraq has delivered "victory without success" because the rest (diplomacy, consensus, administration, reconstruction and other 'civilian' needs: educators, police, judges, doctors, engineers, managers) simply was not implemented, as it was in Bosnia.
A lucid but not disinterested writer (he would the next year run for President), Wes Clark nevertheless puts the finger on the main question which faces the American Empire at the dawn of its next century: "If leadership is defined as persuading the other fellow to want to do what you want him to do, as Eisenhower put it, then American leadership [is:] failing…regardless of the number of stealth bombers we [deploy:] or the number of countries we [access:]. If this path [leads:] to American Empire in the sense of more countries occupied by US troops, it [will:] lead to a poorer, more isolated, and less secure America."
Note: I changed the tense in all the verbs [between brackets:], and that 'leads' me to the reason why I gave the book only 3-stars: there is hardly a sentence you don't feel like rewriting.

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Winning Modern Wars by General Wesley Clark was written at the nadir of his political run for office and despite being an attempt to outlay a political platform provides useful insight into the war in Iraq. While remaining very complimentary to the dedication and professionalism of the American Armed Forces; it is evident that great armies alone do not win modern wars. This book outlines the various military strategies used to win the initial ground war in Iraq but showed the flaw when American military might is turned to jingoistic imperial purposes such as nation building for which we are ill equipped. Part military history, part policy analysis, this book covers the Iraq war (prior to the insurgency and the surge under Patreaus) and analyzes the impact of each. A respected general with clear thoughts on the subject it is an interesting read for those interested in foreign policy and military history.

[Tom Darrow · Rating 3 out of 5]

I respect Gen. Clark and wanted this book to be better than what it was. He makes some relevant points, but they are not completely proven. Sadly, a great general (even with help) can't make a great pilicy book.

[Josh · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book during the 2004 elections. Wes Clark all the way!

[Cimuchowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit dry but it has some sound principles in it.

[Kirk Bower · Rating 4 out of 5]

Military detail. Suggest you just read the last section.

[ZezagPolla · Rating 5 out of 5]

wonderful book , so interesting .