Here’s a good rule of thumb: never read a book by a politician running for office. Whether it is George W. Bush’s folksy evangelism in A Charge to Keep or the then Opposition Leader Tony Blair’s toe-curdlingly awful New Britain: My Vision of a Young Country, they are all the same. Safe, saccharine, ghost-written by some aide, full of ‘let me tell you about the wonderful lady I met helping inner city kids’, they are little more than political manifestos with a dust jacket.
However, every rule has its exception. General Wesley Clark’s Winning Modern Wars is just such an exception. Perhaps that is because Clark says he wrote the book this summer, before he finally decided last month to run for the presidency. Thankfully, it shows. Challenging, concise, intelligent and in many ways courageous, this book is certainly worth reading by anyone interested in where American foreign policy next goes after Iraq. I just don’t happen to agree with it.
Clark’s argument is simple. The Iraq war was a brilliant military achievement that demonstrated the awesome superiority of the US armed forces, but it has been what he calls ‘a policy blunder of significant proportions’. By going after Saddam Hussein, he argues, the US squandered the global sympathy and goodwill felt towards Americans after 9/11, diverted resources and attention from the real fight against Al Qaeda, and undermined the international institutions like the UN and Nato — an organisation which, as its former Supreme Commander, Clark unsurprisingly feels a particular affection for.
So why did the Bush administration do it? Clark believes that in the aftermath of 9/11 two currents have come together. The first is an outdated Cold War logic that behind every terrorist is a state sponsoring them.
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