General Wesley Clark on The Young Turks and Air America

August 1, 2007
transcript by Reg NYC

Cenk Uygur: Young Turks, Cenk and Ben with you. Now joining us former Supreme Allied Commander and Presidential candidate, General Wesley Clark, former Presidential candidate (laughs), General Wesley Clark. General Clark, thanks for joining us again on The Young Turks.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: It's good to be with you.

Cenk Uygur: General Clark, we have breaking news that we'd like to share with you and get your reaction on. We just found out that the main Sunni block has quit the Iraqi government, and we know yesterday that Michael Mullen, the new Joint Chiefs of Staff nominee said that if there is no political progress - and so far that there is no political progress - that no amount of troops and no amount of time will make much of a difference. Is this Sunni block withdrawing a big blow to our efforts in Iraq?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I think it's a tactical blow. This is all part of the game of each side gaining what it can from the current position. That's why I believe it's important that the United States take strong measures to initiate a pullback of troops, that we deal with the countries in the region, and then that we slowly proceed to withdraw these forces. Because as long as we're there, we're supporting these kinds of antics.

Cenk Uygur: S-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: We're enabling them to pull back, wrestle with their, with themselves underneath the protection of the American soldiers that are on the ground.

Cenk Uygur: General Clark, I see that we have a conundrum - that we have many conundrums, of course, in Iraq - but the one I'm talking about here is you give the Sunnis weapons to fight Al Qaeda in the Anbar Province. That actually seems like a good idea to me, but at the same time you're now giving that side weapons. And then you're training the Iraqi Army, which is largely a Shi'ite army. So, you're giving them weapons. So, the longer we stay, aren't we weaponizing both sides so that when we leave it isn't better but worse?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Yeah, you're right. That's conundrum 4013.

(laughter all around)

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I mean, we are in the middle, on top of a civil war that's emerged and gotten stronger, but it's also part of a regional quest for power by Iran. There's no telling how many Iranian agents of influence are present inside Iraq today. Something like a million Iraqis fled to Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. You have to believe that many of these people have come back. They've still got connections. They're- The Iranian intelligence agencies are, much like other intelligence agencies, they're organized into separate compartments and cells and competing organizations, and all of these have elements of influence inside Iraq. After all, Iraq's their closest neighbor. They want to make sure that they control what happens in there. The Saudis are busy working, and it wouldn't surprise me that the Saudis have influenced these Sunni tribes to cooperate with U.S. Forces. But of course, as you say, the cooperation has a double meaning, because not only can they go after Al Qaeda, but they can prepare themselves to guard against a Shi'ite takeover of all of Iraq, which makes Iraq a civil war.

Cenk Uygur: So, is there a possibility that us, not necessarily funding, but actually giving weapons to the Sunni insurgents that we're theoretically fighting and certainly in reality fighting - in fact that we've been mainly fighting them for a long, long time - that it's actually part of a larger geopolitical decision that, hey, we're going to help the Saudis and we're going to help the Sunnis here, and we're going to work against the Shi'ites that are in control of the Iraqi government, because they might one day, they are likely one day to team up with Iran?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I think it, it will eventually emerge that way, and in the sense that unless we open up diplomatic relations with Iran, we're going to take sides in the region in a way that puts us against Iran. That of course, taking sides against Iran encourages them to develop a nuclear weapon, which then sets off the nuclear race in the, in the region, which makes everyone less secure.

Cenk Uygur: So, if you were in charge, General Clark - and we're talking to General Wesley Clark here - how would you handle Iran now, because yes Iran is a threat, yes they're in there, but yes also the Saudis have been funding a Sunni insurgency that was a much greater threat. And I feel that the Iran influence has been overblown to some degree, and certainly attacking it we know is not the right way to go, and the of course the preferred course for Vice President Cheney. But how would you deal with it, even if it's just 10% of the problem, how do you w- talk to them, do diplomacy, work with them and at the same time deal with the, the nefarious forces that they've unleashed in Iraq.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, what I learned from working with Ambassador Richard Holbrooke was that as long as people are talking and not killing, that's okay because diplomats like a good quarrel. And you don't have to agree with Iran to talk with them, but if you can talk with them and work with various factions in Iran, remember the, the Iranian people are the most pro-American of any group in the Middle East. 80% of the Iranians (chuckle) so far have something like a favorable opinion of the United States. It's the government that doesn't. So, the last thing we want to do is bomb the Iranian people and have them side with their government. 61% of the Iranian people in the poll I saw believe that their government should go. So, it's not that they're, that they're anti-American. What they are is in a state which has pursued some expansionary policies, some revolutionary policies that the United States has opposed. So, we have to work around the government. We did that in Eastern Europe. It's the way we brought down the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. We opened up relations at many different levels. We let the people themselves make the decisions, and eventually they did. It wasn't just the Reagan Defense buildup of the 1980s. It was a culmination of five Presidential- Presidencies who worked to have a broad front of engagement with communism at the same time holding it in check. That same kind of policy has to be applied with Iran.

Ben Mankiewicz: I-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And Iran will eventually come our way, because human nature's human nature. People are more concerned about their families, their circumstances of life, the hopes for their children and other things than they are about the larger more idealistic issues.

Ben Mankiewicz: We're talking to General Wesley Clark here on The Young Turks. General, let's talk politics and American politics and how it relates to Iraq. There was a story earlier this week. The House Majority Whip, Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, he was saying that he was hearing that that Petraeus-Crocker report in September is likely to be more positive than initially thought, and he said that those 47 conservative Democrats in the House, the Blue Dog Caucus, he thought that the Petraeus report, a positive report in his words would carry significant weight with them and that there would be enough support in that group to want to stay the course if the Republicans stay united, and that would be a big problem for us, and then followed that up by saying so we should just wait for the Petraeus report. That sounds like a strategy designed to lose that battle in September and once again be ineffective in attempting to get a reasonable timetable for withdrawing forces.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I think we're fighting on the wrong playing field in the Democratic Party on this issue, and I've said this from the beginning. It was the Republican strategy, political strategy to direct the discussion to troops and tactics, to make Petraeus the point man and to make anyone who opposes Petraeus, it's like opposing, I don't know, the, the, the, the, the, the Good Witch of the West or something. I mean, you can't quite get your hands around it.

Ben Mankiewicz: Right.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: It's this mystical character who somehow knows everything. And I mean, it's, it's the Great Bogeyman for Democrats, because Democrats can't oppose Generals. And so, it's the perfect weapon to use against the Blue Dogs. It's the wrong playing field. Look, Petraeus is a fine officer, and we've always needed more troops in Iraq. And when you put troops out on the street, they do have a positive impact. That's not the issue. The issue is: how does the presence of the troops connect to resolving the political problems in the region - conundrum number whatever it was, 4013.

Ben Mankiewicz:: (chuckles)

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And the answer is that if you don't connect the troops presence to the right political strategy in Iraq and the right diplomatic strategy in the recent, region, you lose. The right line of argumentation for the Democrats is to go after the strategies and policies of the Bush administration.

Cenk Uygur: And so, you would say if you were leading the Democratic Caucus, 'Hey, ignore the Petraeus report. No matter what it says, it doesn't address the real issue here, which is that the Iraq politicians won't make a deal, and without that deal, our presence there, no matter how lovely, is irrelevant.'

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: It doesn't address the real issue in that if the, the administration won't talk seriously to Iran and Syria, we'll never move forward to addressing the problems in the region, including our mission in Iraq.

Cenk Uygur: General Clark-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: So, what I said in my Congressional testimony three weeks ago is two brigades out by Christmas, the administration gets 60 days to revise its strategy and policy, otherwise consequences will follow, and that revised strategy has to include dialog with Iran and Syria - serious dialog, not, not going in and accusing Iran of, of arming and giving improvised explosive device warheads to the, to the militias, but actual dialog about what are your aims and purposes in the region, what would you like to see, where do you see it in ten years, and going at a mul- on it, on it on multiple fronts.

Cenk Uygur: Gen-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: To crack through the facade of the hardline anti-Israeli rhetoric of Ahmadinejad, which doesn't have the support of the majority of the Iranian people.

Cenk Uygur: General Clark, I want to talk to you one last time on the Petreaus report though. Do you put much stock in it? For whatever it's worth in relevance or or not relevant, do you take a look at the Petraeus report and say this is a rough semblance of the truth or do you think that there is heavy pressure to spin that report favorably for the administration?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I think there's both. Look, (clears throat) the presence of those troops is going to do some good, and it's inevitable that if you put great American soldiers out on the ground, they will intimidate the enemy. They will drive him away. They will in, if they've got the intelligence, take action and run them out. It's also inevitable that the enemy will duck away from these forces and hold it's strength elsewhere, try to wait them out, try to be strong where, where we're weak and so forth, and go after collaborators. That's also happening. So, I take the Petraeus report at face value. It's a military report in a situation where every military man has said the military's not the answer.

Ben Mankiewicz: We're talking to General Wesley Clark. The Army has disciplined one General in regard to the investigation of, into the death of Pat Tillman. Otherwise, they said, 'Hey, report's done. We cleaned it up. Sorry we lied in the beginning, but it's all straightened out now.' Do you believe the authenticity, the correctness of that Army report, or do we need more investigation?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I think the Army believes it, but I, I think the real question is: Does the American public believe it, and have we have we satisfied the Tillman's family? I, I, I don't think so. I think the Tillman family believes that it needs to be followed down through the end. The American public believes that. Had Tillman not been used as a political symbol by the administration, perhaps the standard of investigation would not've needed to be so rigorous, but the fact that there's already been evidence of, of some misinformation put out casts further doubt on the adequacy of the proceedings.

Ben Mankiewicz: How can you-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And I think you have to bend over backwards in a case like this to get every 'i' dotted and 't' crossed, and we didn't know about the doctor's saying that it looked like a murder because there were three rounds in his forehead at close range and so forth. It could've happened on a firing range at 5000 meters, a guy could be hit three times. It's a matter of probabilities, but the, the point is that you can't cover something like that up. It needs to have been looked at and ruled out.

Ben Mankiewicz: So, after the first coverup, you're saying, it would be worth it just for the American people to have maybe an outside investigation, not conducted by-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I think that's what they're asking for.

Ben Mankiewicz: -the people who covered it up in the first place. Right.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: That's right. If there's nothing to hide, the Army should welcome this. I-I- Look, We've got the greatest men and women in the Armed Forces, some of the greatest men and women in America and in American history. It's a wonderful institution. It could not've held up in Iraq and Afghanistan as it has unless it were a great institution, BUT it's got to protect its integrity. It's got to protect the adequacy of its reporting, the, the honor of it's leaders, the character of its soldiers. And so, these kinds of charges have to be fully investigated.

Cenk Uygur: General Clark, I-I'm going to ask one last question in that regard and then we're of course as always running out of time here. But you know, the report says, 'Oh, we're not going to punish anybody except this one, you know, commanding officer, the Lieutenant General involved, and we're going to knock maybe one star off of his, you know, off of him and, and, and knock off 900 dollars from his retirement package a month when it's 9000 dollars.' And they say, 'Oh, it was all an accident.' The three bullets in his forehead at close range, they ignore. I mean, I just, I flat out don't believe it at all. Why am I wrong to, when I look at that report and see and say 'This doesn't make any sense. I don't believe it for a second'?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I looked at some of the investigatory reports and what I saw was that this- you had these guys in this Humvee opening fire, but they finished firing. They were pretty close - I think the report said 67 yards or 67 meters, which is like the distance from one side of a football field to another. But they were actually maybe even a little closer than that, and, and, and so I don't quite understand how it happened. I think the unit was poorly disciplined. But I will tell you that in terms of the Three-Star General who's been censured, we're talking about taking him down a rank. That's, that's pretty significant punishment.

Ben Mankiewicz: Yeah. Alright well, General Wesley Clark, as always it's a great conversation. Thank you for joining us on The Young Turks. We appreciate your time.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Thank you.