Karadzic and Mladic were indicted in 1995 by the UN war-crimes tribunal, but their barbarity was common knowledge well before that. As far back as 1992 they were publicly identified by then-Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger as war-crimes suspects. So how did Clark, who claims he would have "had Osama bin Laden dead or alive two years ago," collar the two Serb butchers?

Well, actually -- he didn't. Karadzic and Mladic are still at large.

And yet it probably is fair to say that Clark knows more about dealing with war criminals than the rest of the Democratic field. After all, none of the other candidates has ever horsed around with a mass murderer. Clark has.

On Aug. 27, 1994, when he was a three-star general working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Clark paid a visit to Mladic in Bosnia. In so doing, The Washington Post reported, he "ignored State Department warnings not to meet with Serb officials suspected of ordering deaths of civilians." Clark says he wanted to get Mladic's views for a policy paper he was writing and thought he had permission to do so.

Either way, Clark did more than take notes. The two men drank wine and posed for jovial pictures that showed them merrily wearing each other's caps. Mladic plied Clark with other gifts, too -- a bottle of brandy and a pistol inscribed "From General Mladic." It was like "Ike going to Berlin while the Germans were besieging Leningrad," one disgusted commentator wrote, "and having schnapps with Hermann Goering."

Whatever the French may or may not have done, the failure to catch Mladic and Karadzic underscores the drawbacks to internationalizing US foreign policy. Clark experienced similar frustration during the Kosovo war, when bombing targets had to be approved in advance by the 19 NATO governments. Yet Clark, bowing to the Democratic fetish for multilateralism, insists that the conduct of the war in Iraq be taken out of US hands and turned over to an international organization.

"I would go to NATO," Clark says, "and I would tell John Abizaid, the [US] commander, `You're now working for NATO.' " And what would that change, exactly? Not much, Clark admits. "When you do NATO, it's the United States, anyway, that's doing it. I mean, NATO doesn't have an intelligence system. It relies almost exclusively on the United States." It is an incoherent position, and the more he tries to clarify it, the more he retreats into windy platitudes. "I think if the United States works in efficient multilateralism through NATO, we can move the world."

Before he became a presidential candidate, Clark strongly supported the Iraq war resolution; since entering the race, he has tied himself into knots insisting that he actually opposed it. Before becoming a candidate, he described Saddam as a menace requiring urgent action -- "the clock is ticking," he said last year. Now Clark labors to explain why Saddam wasn't a burning issue -- "there was no ticking clock," he said last week.

Moments after praising his opponents in the Democratic presidential race as worthy running mates, Wesley Clark said, in no uncertain terms, how he would respond if they or anyone else criticized his patriotism or military record.

"I'll beat the . . . out of them," Clark told a questioner as he walked through the crowd after a town hall meeting yesterday. "I hope that's not on television," he added.

It was, live, on C-Span...