Obviously, having a U.S. general testify at a war crimes tribunal for an evil murderer he helped capture is an important development and Wesley Clark’s testimony against Slobodan Milosevic will help put a very bad guy away for good.
But looking at this from a purely political perspective, this also looks like a win for Clark’s campaign.
When the campaign initially announced that Clark would travel to The Hague for Milosevic’s trial, I thought it might be bad timing. Dean had a major foreign policy address scheduled for Monday and the race was reaching a critical stage in advance of Iowa and New Hampshire. Wouldn’t Clark be better off in Nashua than the Netherlands?
It seemed having Clark take a few days off the campaign trail might be incredibly worthwhile in helping convict Milosevic, but it might not help politically, especially since footage of Clark’s testimony is being censored by the Bush administration.
It turns out the opposite is true. Clark’s appearance at The Hague is turning into a golden political opportunity for his campaign. In fact, with the arrest of Saddam Hussein coinciding with Clark’s arrival in the Netherlands, the timing couldn’t be better.
To my surprise, the media has offered fairly extensive coverage of Clark’s tribunal appearance, despite not having actual footage to use. And while many campaign reporters are covering the increasingly-annoying bickering between Dean, Lieberman, Gephardt, and Kerry, these stories are juxtaposed nicely against Clark seizing the spotlight as he relates his experiences in bringing a genocidal maniac to justice.
With news of Hussein’s arrest still very much on the public’s mind, Clark is also using his testimony as a way to argue that Hussein and Milosevic should meet a similar fate at an international war crimes tribunal.
“This is the rule of law, it’s closure,” Clark said after his initial round of testimony. “It’s a very important precedent for what may be happening later with another dictator from another part of the world.”
The media also appears to be picking up on the benefits of Clark’s fortuitous timing regarding Hussein. The Chicago Tribune, for example, reported: “Although Clark’s appearance was scheduled long ago, it enabled him to capitalize on a key moment in the race for the Democratic bid for president.”
The New York Times picked up on a similar point. “[T]he timing of [Clark’s] testimony…allowed General Clark to draw attention to his own tough treatment of a dictator who was forced to back down by NATO’s first military campaign in its history and without a single United States combat casualty.”
Clark’s campaign couldn’t have asked for a better summary of the political implications of his testimony.
Ironically, if Clark hadn’t been called to testify against Milosevic and had spent the day in New Hampshire campaigning, it probably would have generated very little national attention. Clark’s campaign doesn’t appear to be doing anything intentional to exploit his appearance at The Hague, but the benefits are nevertheless obvious.