Bombs away?

• Position: Letters

The hawks in Washington should pay more attention to Gen. Wesley Clark's understanding of the reality of America's position in the world--and to his practical experience waging war in the Balkans--before they decide to "bomb Saddam." As an American who has lived in Germany for the past 25 years, I believe Gen. Clark did a great job in holding the coalition together, giving moral legitimacy to the Allies' military effort to restore order in that part of Europe. We must engage our friends around the world in the peace-keeping process, not shut them out.

MARYAN HERR via email

As a Republican, I am grateful that dissenting voices of reason, such as those of Gen. Wesley Clark and Brent Scowcroft, are being heard. But is President Bush listening? Somehow I don't believe he will reverse himself, as politicians' egos seem to be more important to them than reason. I will note that the elder President Bush would have never isolated the United States from NATO as his son has. In this respect our current president has truly let all Americans down.

PETER S. GRIMM Bloomfield, N.J.

Having endured a hard slog through Gen. Wesley Clark's Waging Modern War and having relied quite heavily on it in forming my own thinking about fighting wars through coalitions, I was a bit taken aback by Clark's article ("An Army of One," September) for two reasons. First, I thought the lesson taught by his book was that conducting a war through a coalition is so difficult that it should not be done unless there is strong agreement among the coalition members as to why and how the war was to be fought. Therefore, I was surprised to see Clark take the position that the lesson of the Kosovo campaign was not that NATO was an obstacle to victory but that it was the reason for the victory--and to conclude that action in Iraq should be done through NATO.

But I was most taken aback by the inaccuracy of Clark's assertion that U.N. Security Council Resolution 1199 authorized the use of force in Kosovo and therefore gave the military intervention "international legal and moral authority." In fact, it was the absence in Res. 1199 of the magic words authorizing "all necessary means" found in other Security Council resolutions authorizing the use of force, such as 678 (Iraq) and 940 (Haiti), that sent international lawyers scampering for an international legal justification for the use of force in Kosovo. The US. State Department's legal adviser never rendered an opinion on the legal...