Some Officials Dismayed at Treatment of Clark

The general who defeated Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in Kosovo has met his match--in the bureaucratic wars of Washington.

Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who as commander of NATO forces in Europe directed the allied bombing campaign against Yugoslavia, was ordered Tuesday to empty his desk in April, two months ahead of schedule.

The Defense Department wants to make room for Air Force Gen. Joseph Ralston, now vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Officials insisted that they intended no slight against Clark. Rather, they said, they were forced to ask Clark to make way because of a statutory requirement that Ralston either move into a new four-star job or retire no more than 60 days after next Feb. 28, the end of his current job.

Instead, it appears likely that Clark will retire from the military.

But Clark’s friends were surprised, and some members of Congress were dismayed.

“I’m as surprised as you are,” said Gen. Klaus Naumann of Germany, who worked closely with Clark as head of the NATO military committee.

Several U.S. military officers and others attributed the abrupt move to lingering tensions between Clark, the aggressive supreme allied commander in Europe, and Pentagon leaders with whom he often clashed in the course of the 11-week war. And even friends and observers who accepted the official explanation said the departure order was poorly handled.

Clinton administration officials were seemingly taken aback at public reaction to the early departure of the first officer to lead U.S. troops in a European war since Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“He did a superb job in the prosecution of the campaign in Kosovo,” Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger, the president’s national security advisor, said at a White House briefing. “The president has the highest degree of confidence in him. Witness the fact that we won.”

And Pentagon officials said Defense Secretary William S. Cohen would recommend to the White House that Clark be considered for an ambassadorship.

But on Capitol Hill, Rep. Ellen O. Tauscher (D-Pleasanton), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said the order could disrupt the complex U.S. efforts in Kosovo by making Clark a lame duck and shows disrespect to a “bona fide war hero.”

Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), also a member of the armed services panel, said the administration was trying to make Clark the “fall guy” for the shortcomings of its Balkan policy.

“This is not the way to treat somebody who did a job for you,” he said.

He accused the administration of timing the arrival of a new NATO commander so that if the next president is a Republican, he or she will be saddled with a Clinton appointee for two years.

For his part, Clark, on an official visit to Vilnius, Lithuania, insisted that he took no offense and intends to concentrate on his nine remaining months in the post.

“When a soldier’s journey is over, it’s over,” Clark said. “I am very proud of wearing this uniform. I love my job.”

But one military source said Clark was angered by the news, which was conveyed in a call from Army Gen. Henry H. Shelton, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The departure means Clark will serve less time in the post than all but three of his 11 predecessors. When he retires, Clark will be two months short of serving three years in the office.

Administration officials acknowledged that the Pentagon could have allowed Ralston to retire for a few months and then recalled him when Clark’s term was done. That step has been taken on occasion, they said.

But such a deal would have been inconvenient for Ralston, who is a favorite of Cohen’s, and already was laying plans to retire to Alaska.

Clark simultaneously wears two hats--as chief of the U.S. European Command and the top Europe-based commander of the 19-member North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

At NATO headquarters in Brussels, some observers said the Pentagon announcement signals the end of Clark’s brilliant 33-year career in uniform and that the West Pointer who graduated first in the class of 1966 will not be promoted to the ultimate job in the U.S. armed forces--chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“If a lot of folks are rotating, then I suppose that’s one reason why they have to take early decisions,” one NATO diplomat said, speaking on condition he not be identified. “But for Wes Clark, circumstances do suggest this is the end of his Army career.”

During the 11 weeks of Operation Allied Force, NATO’s bombing raids to halt the “ethnic cleansing” of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, Clark pushed the Pentagon and White House to commit more warplanes and to dispatch Apache helicopters.

At NATO, the four-star general also was said to have vigorously urged that the alliance retain the option of using ground troops to invade Kosovo--a province of Serbia, Yugoslavia’s main republic--though Cohen and Clinton were staunchly opposing the idea in public.

Some alliance member nations also questioned Clark’s strategy, which relied on an escalating series of attacks rather than massive, immediate use of force, while others found him overly keen to bomb bridges, power plants and other targets that could not be considered purely military.

“Clark has no friends in the Army,” one former high-ranking Pentagon official said in an interview. “It wasn’t the Army that wanted him to get the NATO job but Sandy Berger.”

Clark, who was wounded in Vietnam and received the Purple Heart, is the Army’s preeminent example of a scholar-soldier. Like President Clinton, he is an Arkansas native and Rhodes scholar, though he and Clinton did not meet until both were well advanced in their careers.

U.S. Army and NATO officials describe Clark as a brilliant intellect, tireless worker and control freak who is as reluctant to delegate as he is to share credit. A White House Fellow in 1975-76, Clark is labeled by fellow officers as “political,” a soldier who works to stay in the good graces of political leaders.

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Dahlburg reported from Paris and Richter from Washington. Times staff writer Tyler Marshall in Washington also contributed to this report.