General Wesley Clark on CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer
September 16, 2007
transcript by Reg NYC
Wolf Blitzer: When General David Petraeus was getting grilled on Capitol Hill this week, my next guest must've known how he felt. After all, he's been there as well. Wesley Clark is a retired Four-Star General. He was the NATO Supreme Allied Commander during the Kosovo crisis. He ran for the Democratic Presidential nomination back in 2004. He's just published a new book entitled A Time To Lead. General Clark, welcome back to Late Edition.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Thank you, Wolf. And yes I did know how he felt, because I would sit there and I'd look up at the Senators. And of course, the roles were reversed, because I was serving during a Democratic administration and there were the Republicans, very skeptical, very cynical about the Balkans and Kosova and Bosnia.
Wolf Blitzer: But, but no one ever said to you something like "General Betray Us"-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Absolutely not.
Wolf Blitzer: -that MoveOn.org ad that caused so much-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: No, and I wish, I wish they hadn't.
Wolf Blitzer: Nobody questioned your patriotism, or, or, or, or what your motives were.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I wish-
Wolf Blitzer: None of the Republican- Correct me if I'm wrong.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I wish that the MoveOn people had talked to me in advance. You know when a General's put there, he serves under the Commander in Chief. He's like you put the quarterback in in the, halfway through the fourth period and you say, 'Kid, get in there and pass the ball and win this game for us.' The quarterback's not going to come out after the first series of downs and say, 'Coach, they're too big. The ball's too slippery, and take me out.' I mean, his job is to produce success It's the responsibility of the President to have the right strategy. And so, this is President Bush's war. It is not General Petreaus' war.
Wolf Blitzer: But you know General Petraeus.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I do know him.
Wolf Blitzer: Do you believe he, he's, he tailored his comments to please the Commander in Chief, the President, the Secretary of Defense, or do you believe he's an honest man who ac-actually believed what he told the Senate and the House?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I don't think General Petraeus is going to say anything he didn't believe, but I think that any time you're in a position of command and your responsibility is to produce a success, what you see is colored by what your mission is. And so, it's up to others to bring out all those facts and to have the reasoned debate. That's why this dialogue in Congress is so important. If we'd had this kind of dialogue before we went into Iraq, maybe we'd have made better decisions.
Wolf Blitzer: So, you could disagree with General Petraeus without hurling, calling him names.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Wolf Blitzer: -or questioning his integrity.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Look, he's a guy with tremendous responsibilities. He's got 170,000 troops there. He's responsible for the lives and welfare of all those troops. He's worried about the families, the army, and, of course-\
Wolf Blitzer: So, you admire-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: -he's worried about working for his boss.
Wolf Blitzer: You admire him and you respect him, you just disagree with him?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I'm not even sure I disagree with him.
Wolf Blitzer:: Well, he says this
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: He doesn't have his hand-
Wolf Blitzer: -this operation-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: -on the-
Wolf Blitzer: He says this operation in Iraq can succeed.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: It could succeed depending on how you define success and depending on what else you bring to the mission. In other words, I don't think you're going to convert Iraq into a constitutional democracy with a picture of George Washington on the wall, no matter what Dave Petraeus does. But I do think that if the administration went through the pattern of regional dialogue that I've been advocating for four years and actually sat down and talked with people- I'm not talking about calling a guy in a room and saying, 'Hey, we're going to knock your block off if you don't stop sending the weapons in.' That, that's not diplomacy. I'm talking about real diplomacy-
Wolf Blitzer: I'm going to-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: -based on a set of principles.
Wolf Blitzer: I'm going get-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: If we did that-
Wolf Blitzer: I want to get-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: -maybe we could pull something out.
Wolf Blitzer: I want to get to that in a moment, but you made some news over this weekend by endorsing Hillary Clinton-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Yeah.
Wolf Blitzer: -for the Democratic presidential-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I did.
Wolf Blitzer: -nomination. Why do you think she would be the best president?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I think the next president of the United States is inheriting a crisis right at the get go. And if you look at the record of the American presidency over the last 50 years, almost every president confronts an immediate foreign policy crisis as soon as they're in office. You need someone with experience. You need someone with character. You need someone who does their homework, who doesn't just operate on slogans. And I think Hillary Clinton is the right person.
Wolf Blitzer: So, I assume you looked at Barack Obama, John Edwards-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Certainly.
Wolf Blitzer: -Bill Richardson - all the other-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I know them all.
Wolf Blitzer: -Demo- And, and what did you like about her more than about the others? What did she bring that they didn't bring?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: She brings character. Boy, she's solid. She is-
Wolf Blitzer: Barack Obama doesn't have character?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: She has been through it, not only in the politics of the American political cauldron, but she's been through it inside the White House. She knows about how decisions are made. She knows about the kinds of pressures. And she knows what it's like to get up the next day, after you've had to make some really tough decisions. She was there. She came to the, to the Balkans in the mid '90s. She was there right after we won the war In Kosovo. I mean, she's very, very experienced and I think she's very courageous personally and very solid. I think she's the kind of president we need at this time in this country.
Wolf Blitzer: You, you were talking about dialogue with the regional players out there. Here's what you write in your new book, A Time to Lead: "We must find a way out that preserves and protects those in the region that have relied on and supported us, that minimizes the likelihood of a widened conflict in the aftermath and that undercuts the possibility of a terrorist haven arising in parts of Iraq. This will require a broadened and sustained dialogue with nations in the nation, including Iran and Syria." At what level should that dialogue with Iran and Syria take place?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, you can't go over there as President and Commander in Chief and knock on Ahmadinejad's door and say, 'Come out and talk to me.' But you can reach them. There are sporadic, low-level contacts now through former members of government with former members of the Iranian government. You've got to find a network of contacts, and I'd like to see it done the way we did shuttle diplomacy in the Balkans . You put someone in charge like Richard Holbrooke was in charge. He had the President's authority. You bring an interagency team from Defense and the military and State over there, and you work the region until you've sorted out the issues.
Wolf Blitzer: You worked with Ambassador Holbrooke on that mission.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Right, we were on that mission. We started with a statement of principles and with some blandishments and threats. If you do this, you could get this. If you don't do this, this is going to happen.
Wolf Blitzer: Because you were, I believe, a Three-Star General at the time, is that right?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: That's right. That's right. I was the J-5 in the Joint Staff.
Wolf Blitzer: I, I remember. Now, here's what Hillary Clinton- she, she and Barack Obama got into a dispute when, at that CNN-YouTube debate, they were asked whether in the first year of a new presidency they would meet personally at the highest levels with the leaders of Syria and, and Iran. And Senator Clinton disagreed with Senator Obama. Here's what she said:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON, D-N.Y.: I think it is not that you promise a meeting at that high a level before you know what the intentions are. I don't want to be used for propaganda purposes.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Wolf Blitzer: She was responding to Senator Obama-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: She's exactly right.
Wolf Blitzer: -who said he would meet at the highest levels with the leaders in that first year to try to get that dialogue going, which is what you want, a dialogue with the neighbors.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Right, but I think, I think that, that Senator Clinton is exactly right. You don't go to these summit meetings at the head of state level without knowing what's going to happen there. You always have some deliverables when you have a meeting like that. You don't run out as President of the United States and start shaking hands with people and say, 'Gee, what can we talk about?' These things are worked intensively behind the scenes because each one of these meetings carries consequences. And you want to make sure you get the right consequences.
Wolf Blitzer: A lot of people say there's nothing to talk about with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and that was sort of reinforced by words he, he told the ITN in Britain this week. He said this about Israel: "We think Israel is an invader and is cruel and it hasn't gotten the united public. All other countries, neighboring countries, are against it. It cannot continue its life." Now, a country like that, a leader that says Israel shouldn't even exist, what are you going to talk to him about?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, there's a lot to talk about, and I think he's certainly willing to talk. If he's not, other people are. Iran is in a deep hole economically. They don't have their oil industry in order. Their finances are being constrained. Their neighbors are opposed to them. They're surrounded on four sides by either American troops, American forces or the potential of American military intervention. They have regional ambitions but they have a limited time.
Wolf Blitzer: So you're saying that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is only one voice there.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Right.
Wolf Blitzer: There are other voices-
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: That's right.
Wolf Blitzer: -in Iran. Now, General Petraeus testified, Ambassador Crocker testified that Iranians were helping to kill American soldiers and Marines in Iraq. And others are now saying that Iranians are doing the same thing in Afghanistan, trying to send in their improvised explosive devices, et cetera. Does that affect your thinking about having a dialogue with Iraq?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Absolutely. It makes it much more imperative that we talk because there's no question Iran is fighting back. From the time we went into Iraq, the Iranians' understanding was they were, they were somewhere two or three or four down the hit list. So as soon as we could digest the problem of Iraq, we'd knock off Syria, take over Lebanon and come, come after Iran. That was the sort of loose talk around Washington and, of course, they understood that. So their first line of defense has been to- and it's not just military aid inside Iraq, by the way. It's political engagement. It's economic support. It's medical support. It's education support. It's a continuous dialogue of people. This is their nearest neighbor, and they have a vital interest in Iraq. And so, yes, they're engaged, and we need to talk to them. That doesn't mean negotiating anything away. What it means is some real, hard-headed dialogue about what their aims are, what our interest and aims are, and see if there's any common interest at all.
Wolf Blitzer: Here's a, here's a quote from the book, your new book, A Time to Lead. And you write this: " 'Here's the paper from the Office of the Secretary of Defense outlining the strategy. We're going to take out seven countries in five years!' And he named them, starting with Iraq and Syria and ending with Iran. It was straight out of Paul Wolfowitz's 1991 play book, dressed up as the search for weapons of mass destruction and the global war on terror." Now, that jumped out at me. Explain to our viewers what you're referring to when you make a very serious charge like that, that this whole war in Iraq was basically built on a lie.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, not exactly a lie, but a theory about how to deal with terrorism. It was the "drain the swamp" theory that emerged after 9/11 and people talked about it. But before that, in 1991, I remember being in Secretary Wolfowitz's office when he was the number three guy in the Pentagon. And he said, "Yeah, the Gulf war, well, we didn't get rid of Saddam, but what we did learn is we can use military power to clean up these old client states. We've got maybe five or ten years to clean them up, Syria, Iran, the rest of them, before the next superpower comes along." I said, "Five or ten years? You mean, China and-?" the, the discussion sort of wandered off. But it was one of those nuggets you remember. And then I'm in the office with this senior general in the Pentagon, and he says, "well," he says, "Sir, I just," this is after I'm retired, "Sir, I just got this memo down from the, from the office upstairs." He's pointing upstairs. And they're on the second floor, and the civilians are on the third floor. And he says, "seven countries." I said, "Is that classified?" And he read the countries. I said, he, I said, "Is that classified? Stop." He was going to show it to me. I said, "Don't show that to me. I don't want to see that." And so, it wasn't a plan. Maybe it was a think piece. Maybe it was a sort of notional concept, but what it was was the kind of indication of dialogue around this town in official circles, just like unofficial circles, that has poisoned the atmosphere and made it very difficult for this administration to achieve any success in the region.
Wolf Blitzer: The book is entitled A Time to Lead, for Duty, Honor, and Country. The author, retired U.S. Army General Wesley Clark. Thanks for coming in, General Clark.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Wolf, thank you very much. Great to be with you.