It’s way too soon to know what to make of Wesley Clark, but that’s not stopping Mark Steyn from having a go. Here’s an extract from a piece in today’s Sunday Telegraph:

“All his military background does is keep military matters at the forefront of the campaign.

He will be asked why he got fired from the Nato job, why his buddy Bill Clinton declined to save him, why neither his civilian nor uniformed bosses – Bill Cohen, the Defence Secretary, and General Shelton, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs – attended his retirement ceremony, a huge public snub for a four-star general.

It is hard to argue that Iraq was a disaster when, in the crappy little war you, General Clark, presided over, the most powerful military on the planet took 78 days of aerial bombardment to destroy just over a dozen tanks; hard to argue that our boys shouldn’t be getting picked off on the ground in Iraq when in your war they stayed up at 15,000 feet, nights only, bombing hospitals, commuter trains, refugee convoys, the Chinese embassy, etc; hard to argue that Iraq wasn’t worth it when, by most accounts, there’s more ethnic cleansing (Muslims against Christians) going on in “liberated” Kosovo than there was in Slobo’s day.

If General Clark’s the candidate, he’ll be the embodiment of ineffectual Clintonian warmongering.”

It’s possible to disagree with much of what Steyn has to say, but the underlying point is right. General Clark has gotten an entry ticket into this election on the basis of an impressive military career. That’s fair enough (and I wouldn’t be calling anyone with his record of wartime heroism ‘General Jello’), but that does not mean that that his record of command should not come under scrutiny.