The general jumps in.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth
• Position: The Word from Washington

What do we know about Wesley Clark? He voted for Nixon and Reagan and effusively praised Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice.

First in his class at West Point, a Rhodes scholar, and a decorated Vietnam vet, he was head of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama, over-seeing U.S. forces in Latin America and the Caribbean at a time when the drug war and the massive build-up of U.S.-supplied weapons in Colombia were raising serious human rights concerns.

As NATO's supreme allied commander, he was relieved of his duties early by superiors who called him trigger-happy and not a team player. Clark ordered NATO forces to strike Russian troops approaching an airfield in Kosovo at the end of that war, threatening to "start World War III," according to British General Michael Jackson, who defied the order.

A photo of a grinning Clark now circulating in newspapers and magazines and on the web shows him shaking hands with Ratko Mladic, a Serbian army commander who was the subject of multiple U.S. war crimes charges at the time and who is still wanted as an international war criminal. Clark visited Mladic, flouting a U.S. State Department directive not to meet with Serbian army leaders accused of ethnic cleansing.

His latest career, as a consultant to military contractors, places him squarely in the middle of the military-industrial complex--just what General Eisenhower, to whom Clark is often compared, warned us about.

His position on Iraq has changed dramatically over time, as documented by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). Despite his recent criticisms of the war, on April 10, Clark wrote in a London Times column: "Liberation is at hand. Liberation--the powerful balm that justifies painful sacrifice, erases lingering doubt, and reinforces bold actions. Already the scent of victory is in the air." FAIR also points out that "Clark made bold predictions about the effect the war would have on the region: 'Many Gulf states will hustle to praise their liberation from a sense of insecurity they were previously loath even to express. Egypt and Saudi Arabia will move slightly but perceptibly towards Western standards of human rights.' George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair 'should be proud of their resolve in the face of so much doubt.' "

Clark is hardly a progressive dream candidate--in fact, he's barely a Democrat. So why are Democrats so enthusiastic? Clark has little in the way of a domestic policy agenda, except for the...