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General Wesley Clark joins Al Franken on Air America
September 11, 2006
transcript by Reg NYC
Al Franken:On Friday, I prerecorded an interview with General Wesley Clark. General Clark, as you remember, was NATO Commander from 1997 to 2000, and was in the, at hand to what was going on in the Balkans there. So, since NATO now is in Southern, operating in Southern Afghanistan, I started by asking General Clark about the status of Afghanistan. Let's listen in.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: First of all, this was a very difficult mission. When you go into another country and it doesn't have a political culture and you think you can impose or prescribe a political culture for it, like a democracy with voting and so forth, It's always a big leap. And, and then we tried to do it on the cheap.
Al Franken: That is, I mean, that, that's a, that, that's the problem. The NATO Commander, Jim Jones, who had your job, who has your, the job you had. A- and by the way, you and I first met in Kosovo.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK:: Yes, we did.
Al Franken: I was doing a USO show there, and I did that joke about the- Colin Powell proved to me the first Jew to be elected President will have to be a Four-Star General.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: (laughs)
Al Franken: And you came up to me and said, "I'm half Jew."
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: What are you do-, I said, "What are you doing to me?"
Al Franken: Well, I, I said that I, I did some research and the, the only, you know, the highest ranking Jew in the military is, is the Comptroller of the Coast Guard. And it turned out that you're half Jewish. So, that counts. Is that your mom?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: No, my, it's my father.
Al Franken: Okay, then you don't count.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: (laughs)
Al Franken: According to Jewish law.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I have the Right of Return. That's what, what my Israeli friends told me.
Al Franken: Okay, okay. But, but NATO's down there in, in Kandahar, is in the Southern part. Now the poppy harvest is the biggest ever that they had. Right?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Exactly. Now, you see, when you're going into something like this, the military piece a small part of it.
Al Franken: Well, boy, do we know that.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: When we started out in Afghanistan, we had run most of the Taliban out of the area around Kabul. We never put enough troops in, and we never really work the country. Afghanistan's a big country. It's much bigger than an American state, for example. And so, you can't just put a few thousand troops in one, in the capital city and think you're controlling the country. It doesn't work that way. And in the meantime, people were standing back kind of in awe of what, what America stood for and the fact that we were there. That was the moment when we could have gone in with a significant program for economic aid and the developmental assistance and really made a difference in people's lives. They're going to have to pick their own political culture, but the important thing is to make a difference in their lives. We didn't do it.
Al Franken: And because we are distracted. We took-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Totally distracted by the preparation to go to war with Iraq.
Al Franken: And of course, Afghanistan was, w- was the country that, that housed or, or fostered the, the people who attacked us on 9/11, Al Qaeda, and that's, that's who attacked us. And we could have, you know, this idea of making some kind of, of model democracy that the rest of the Middle East could see, we could have done that maybe in Afghanistan, but we haven't.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, it would've been difficult, but I tell you what we could have done. We could've finished the job on Osama Bin Laden. We, we, we missed a strategic opportunity in December of 2001 in the mountains of Tora Bora when Tommy Franks didn't have a plan, and the President didn't insist on it because they weren't that interested. They were actually at that time all of the discussion at the Pentagon wasn't about Afghanistan. It was all about getting ready to go to war with Iraq. There were people thinking they were going to go to war with Iraq in the next six months.
Al Franken: So, l-let's talk about are we safer now than we were after 9/11. I think in, in some ways we have to be, because at least now they're paying attention. You have to admit, that between January 20, 2001 and September 11, 2001 they really, really took their eye off the-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Listen, it was lights off in the White House. They were warned. The- President Clinton told them. Sandy Berger told them. Richard Clarke told them. And I would go back to Washington - and I was living in Washington for part of that time - and, and talk to my friends who had been in the previous administration. And of course, you're always going to talk about how the new guys are doing, and people were telling me at the time, "They won't listen. They won't listen. They won't listen."
Al Franken: Well, they, it was like, 'Don't- Let's not do anything Clinton did.'
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Exactly. 'If Clinton says terrorism is a big problem, it's not going to be a problem, big problem for us.' And I, I remember talking to a former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry in Aspen, Colorado in August of 2001, and he was telling me that he'd tried to talk to people in the administration about the threat of nuclear proliferation. And what they were saying was, 'That's why we've got to get the Anti-Ballistc-
Al Franken: Right.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: -Missile Treaty, we got to get that thing thrown out. We've got to put our ballistic missile interceptors in place.' And he was saying, "No, no. You have to think about the problem of terrorism. That's where our real risk is.' And they wouldn't listen to him.
Al Franken: They were actually trying-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And he's the former Secretary of Defense.
Al Franken: They were trying to gut Nunn-Lugar-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Right.
Al Franken:: -to secure the, the nuclear material-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Right.
Al Franken: -in, in the-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: It was a whole-
Al Franken: -former Soviet Union.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And I'll tell you the- the worst part about it, Al, when you think back on it is that when you're the President of the United States, you have real leadership responsibilities. You may not be able to create jobs in America. You may not be able to order healthcare to be done. But what you can do when you get strategic intelligence that somebody's wanting to attack the United States, you can call the relevant Cabinet members together and tell them to work and prevent this from happening.
Al Franken: And of course, that didn't happen.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: It never happened.
Al Franken: After the August 6th PDB, which I-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: There was no leadership. It was power off in the White House.
Al Franken: I believe he never read that, by the way. Because after the first plane hit, if he had read that, he would have had the same reaction Tenet had, which is: It's Bin Laden. But instead, he went into the school.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Exactly.
Al Franken: Let's talk about, I mean, just the safety of this country-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I don't think we're safer, Al, and I think we need to just face the facts. You can't be safer if more people have joined the terrorist cause, because you're dealing with a certain probability of difficulty. The, The truth is that since 2000- So, those factors don't make us safer. They've put us more at risk in the near-term and in the long term. There was a mythology out there a year or two ago that, well, we've taken out the key people in Al Qaeda. We've, we can't find Bin Laden. We've never seen him on film. On the one hand, you say, 'That's good. That shows that the intelligence is working.' But on the other hand-
Al Franken: You have the feeling-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: So, the President shouldn't be taking too much credit for the threat, because we're not operating against a group like like the Japanese. And so, you have to have strong defenses at home.
Al Franken: Well, let's talk about that. Well, let's take a break. When we come back, I want to talk about the Homeland Security, also want to talk about the damage to our Armed Forces.
(Station break)
Al Franken: Welcome back to the Al Franken Show. We're going to continue my interview with General Wesley Clark. General Clark, I have tremendous admiration for the General. I, I've talked to people in the military, says he's one of the, really one of the smartest guys they've, they've ever met. He's a Rhodes, Rhodes Scholar and all that, but just a tremendous admiration. I, I talked to a guy named Guy Phillippie, who was an intelligence officer who worked for - and I met him in Afghanistan, in Bagram - who said that Clark had, his briefings were unusual, which is that he would take all the questions first and then weave them into sort of a seamless answer. And, and I actually think General Clark would make a great President. And he, you know, hadn't been a politician before. When we started the, when he started the race in, in 2004, he was a novice, but his learning curve was very quick and, and by the time the convention rolled around and, and then through the rest of the campaign, he was fabulous. So anyway, here's my, here's the rest of my interview with General Wesley Clark.
Al Franken:We're back with General Wesley Clark. General Clark, I want to ask you what is, what, what has happened to our Armed Forces because of, of this war in Iraq?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I think we're stretched to very near the breaking point. We're fully committed with the ground forces - the Army and the Marine Corps - and we're not sustainable, given the current resourcing. And my heart goes out to the people. The families are incredibly strong, but they're losing their loved ones every year, turning around and going back to Iraq In some cases in the Marine Corps, where they're going on six and seven month tours, They're going every eighteen months. In the Army, they're there for a year or so, back for eleven months in some cases and heading back again. The first time, it's different and interesting, and you're hopeful. The second time, you hope to do better. It's a little tougher. The third time is really grim. And we've got people going back the third and even the fourth time now, and there's not only the family separation, but there's the real possibility of, of the, the danger and the real possibility of, of something tragic occurring. So, it puts a tremendous stress and toll on the men and women in uniform.
Al Franken: Right.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And you see it in terms of, of, of divorce rates. You see it in terms of just family stress. You see it in terms of, of difficulties in recruiting, because people aren't bringing their friends in at the same level.
Al Franken: Are, are we supporting our, our veterans the way we should be?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Actually, we're not, Al. I know this is probably hard for the American people to believe. But we, we're- this administration, wearing the American flag on its lapel, proudly getting the plaudits of the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars and taking credit, is actually not living up to its responsibilities to take care of our veterans. First of all, they haven't fully funded the VA system, but secondly, the VA system is inadequate as it's currently designed. What we need to be doing really is we need to be looking, not only at physical injuries, but at, at the mental difficulties that emerge from this. This is a very brutal war, and it's not just infantrymen who are exposed to combat. It's truck drivers and medics and, and, and-
Al Franken: Well, there's no front line.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: There's no front line, and there are improvised explosive devices going off. It's, it's bloody. It's shocking, and those images and the guilt, the fear, and the anger associated with it have long-lasting consequences for many people. You know, in the Israeli military, when they come back from combat, they're debriefed by a professional psychologist, someone who can diagnose the severity of the, of the circumstances and whether there's likely to be a mental reaction later on. We're not doing that for our soldiers. We're basically just sending them home. We had a young National Guardsmen who was sent back to Iowa right out of an MP unit where his best friend had been killed, and when he got home he, he, he had real emotional difficulties. And unfortunately he, he ended his own life a few weeks after he got home. It was a real tragedy. It was preventable. Had we has the right programs in place, that family would still be together.
Al Franken: What, what are the lost opportunities that, that are the consequences of Iraq in terms of maybe a nu-, a number of areas - ta- talking to North Korea, dealing with Iran? I mean, Iran knows that we can't really launch a real-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I think-
Al Franken: -attack on them.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: You know, first of all, we've lost, we've lost a lot of what made America powerful in the world. That was the impression that American didn't act on self-interest. America didn't act on fear, America didn't act on greed, America acted nobly in accordance with higher principles and that America stood for international law, not the rule of force. This administration has junked a lot of those principles, and they are seen by the world - not America, but this administration - is seen by the world as, as being reckless and not attending to international law and being very self-interested. And that hurts our ability to harness support on a whole range of issues - everything from improving trade arrangements around the world, to reform in the United Nations, to dealing with North Korea.
Al Franken: Yeah.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: More importantly, this administration had pursued a policy of not talking to people it disagrees with, because it wants to change the regimes. Now, you could understand if we were attacked by a country, why we might want to go back, but we were not attacked by Iraq. We've not been attacked by Iran, and we've not been attacked by North Korea. But what we have done is we've created a poisonous atmosphere between the United States and North Korea at the Head of State level and between the United States and Iran at the Head of State level.
Al Franken: Well, you know, we have-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: (inaudible) with the ability to work with-
Al Franken: We have changed the, the regime in, in Iran. We've made it worse.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: (laughs) Exactly. Well, you know the President intervened and, and as I recall, so did Condeleeza Rice, before their elections and called for them to have a different government. Well, no, no group of people want another country to tell them who they should elect. And whether we agree that those elections were democratic by our standards or not in Iran, there were people over there who believed they were, and they didn't like the United States pointing its finger and trying to meddle, even in an open way. And there's a suspicion, of course, that there's a lot going on that not so open. But this has made it much more difficult to deal with the problems of North Korean and Iranian nuclear aspirations.
Al Franken: General Clark, I, I, I want to thank you and encourage you to, to seriously consider looking at a race in, in 2008. I am a big admirer of yours.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Al, thank you very much.
Al Franken: Okay, that was, obviously, General Wesley Clark and, and I, I kind of actually do want him to run. I do. I like, I like him and man, oh man, oh man, oh man, oh man....
