General Wesley Clark on the Allman in the Morning

September 17, 2007
transcript by Reg NYC

Allman: Some of us have, you know, bigger things to talk about, and for that of course we go directly to General Wesley Clark. He served in the U.S. Army for 34 years and rose to the rank of Four-Star General as NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Europe. He is the author of A Time To Lead: For Duty Honor And Courage (sic). And of course if you've seen some of his other books Waging Modern War and Winning Modern Wars. He is, lives in Little Rock right now, in Little Rock, Arkansas in Huckabee Country down there and Bill Clinton Country and, but, you know it's a lot of folks down there. General Wesley Clark, welcome to the show. How are you?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I'm doing great. Thanks a lot for having me on.

Allman: General Clark, thank you very much for your outstanding service to this country, and as you all know, we appreciate that. And I wanted to ask you about how you felt about the treatment of General Petreaus by the Democrats in Congress on Capitol Hill when he spoke about the surge and the update on that.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Listen, General Petreaus i-is an officer in the United States Army. He's never going to say anything he doesn't believe to be true. And so, I'm very much a Petreaus supporter. But having said that, when you're a commander in a theater of war and you go in front of the United States Congress - and I've been there, and I've done it - you're going to get some tough questions and you're going to get roughed up a little bit. It's part of the process. When you're a commander, you're working for the Commander In Chief. You're on his team. You're expected to produce a success. That's what General Petreaus is doing. that's his duty. He's loyal to the Commander In Chief, and God help us if we ever lose that in the United States Army.

Allman: But some of these guy really just-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: ...hand Congress is going to ask some tough questions, and that's their job too. You see, the way it works is most people, most people- the, the, the truth is a funny thing. And when you are in a position and your job's to win, you see it a certain way, and when you're not in that position, you may raise other issues and see other issues as being important. So, nobody has a monopoly on this. That's why we have these searching dialogs in Congress.

Allman: Yeah but it was weird to me that they actually, some of them though, it's one thing to ask questions of the Commander. It's another thing really to basically accuse him of being a liar, or like The New York Times did in the, well, well, actually the MoveOn.org folks did, even accused him of being a traitor. I'm sure that you had problems with that.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: That's outrageous, and frankly, they didn't call me. I wish they'd called me, but they didn't.

Allman: Who?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: The MoveOn.org people. Y-you can't say that. I mean Dave Petreaus is an outstanding officer. He's, he's risked his life. His family's given up business opportunities. He's laid it on the line at every stage in a military career that started at West Point when he entered in 1970. And, and he deserves the respect and admiration of the people in America.

Allman: Does that make you rethink your alliance or your sympathies to MoveOn.org?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, look, a lot of people don't understand what the military's like and what it's like to be a senior officer. I'll tell you when I was the Commander in Europe and I would come back and testify, I got some really hostile questions from a lot of Senators on the other side of the aisle. Now, some treated me with great deference and great respect, and I appreciated that - guys like John Warner of Virginia. But others considered me a, sort of a Clinton General, and I didn't respect that. I didn't like it. I mean, I didn't, I joined the Army before Bill Clinton graduated from high school.

Allman: (laughs)

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And, and I was just a guy who grew up in Arkansas and wanted to do his best for the country. And Dave Petreaus is too. Generals aren't partisan, but they are trying to produce a success under the guidance they've been given. The problem Petreaus has had is that he's not being given the support he needs from the White House, and I mean the diplomatic leadership in the region. I've talked to people in, in and out of government, including as recently as last night, people in this administration, and they all admit that the diplomacy in the region is flawed. You probably didn't see Henry Kissinger's article in yesterday's Washinton Post, but he, he scolds the administration for not doing real diplomacy in the region.

Allman: Ok-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: You can't just rely on military force.

Crane: Our guest is General Wesley Clark. His latest book A TIme To Lead: For Duty, Honor And Courage (sic). General Clark, here is what you said about the Iraq war during an ad. Go ahead please.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: (on Tape) Because of Iraq, America is less secure. So, if you see commercials telling you to be afraid of terrorism, remember, it's because of Iraq.

Crane: I want to t- I want to take two points to this question. One, you talk about a failing diplomacy. Do you think diplomacy is our problem with Iran? And two, why is fighting our enemy actually making us less safe? Go ahead, Sir.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, well, first, lets talk about the second. The war- there wasn't a reason to invade Iraq when we did. It's true we didn't like Saddam Hussein. There's a lot of people we don't like. It's true he might have had some chemical warheads. There are a lot of people who had chemical warheads, and he could not reach the United States. He was not a threat to the United States, and he was not threatening the United States in any direct way.

Crane: Well what about-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: He-

Crane: I mean, Sir-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Just let me, let me, let me finish.

Crane: Yes, Sir. Go ahead.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: -finish. So, what we did when we went in there is we distracted our national attention, took away resources where we should've pursued Osama Bin Laden and finished him off in Afghanistan and in that region next to Pakistan. But we didn't. Now that's- Instead, by getting us involved in Iraq, we got our Armed Forces bogged down. We've lost close to 4,000 troops. We've cause- cost about 100 billion dollars to reset the military. We've worn out the men and women in the, in the ground forces with repeated tours over there. And we've given Al Qaeda a recruiting cry, 'Let's fight the Americans in Iraq. They invaded us.' They've recruited thousands of people based on our invasion of Iraq. And so, no, I don't think we're safer. I think what we've done is we've put ourselves at risk. When you make a strategic blunder like the invasion of Iraq, you need to correct that. We haven't.

Crane: O-okay.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Can I go to diplomacy?

Crane: Yes, Sir. You may. Go ahead-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Okay.

Crane: -with Iran. Please, go ahead, Sir.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: The way you have to be safe in war- or in, in, in the world is you have to use all the elements of U.S. national power. You have to use our reputation, our legitimacy, our moral rectitude. You- We're a great nation. We believe in great things. People respect that . And one of the things we had going for us is international law. We're the ones that created international law. Another thing is we have our tremendous economy. A final thing of course, we have great military, but when you use the military, you usually are better off using it in conjunction with other elements of power. So, in other words, the way we beat Milosevic in the 1990's in the Balkans was we used diplomacy and we used force. It was just like, you know, it was talk, fight, talk, fight. We pushed him a little bit. We talked with him. Finally, we bombed him for 78 days. We drove his force out of Kosova. We saved a million and a half Albanians from ethnic cleansing. We did that with force, but we gave him a way out at the end through diplomacy, so we didn't have to invade on the ground. And I think if you can, if you can create a balance between force, force and diplomacy and use them both, you can be safer. So, when you're dealing with this region, it doesn't make sense to isolate countries like Syria and Iran. You got to talk to them. That way you get the most leverage out of the force that you can bring to bear.

Crane: How on earth is talking to Iran who has been slaughtering Americans since 1979 - we've tried the diplomat approach since 1979, and just led to the slaughter of more Americans through terrorist acts and the training of not only Hezbullah, obviously their arm, but also Al Qaeda, if we look at the 1998 bombings - how on earth is talking to Iran, a government that's dedicated to the destruction of Israel and the United States going to help us?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, first of all, you have to understand that it's not the talking to Iran that's led to the slaughter of Americans as you said. That, that, that's not quite right. We've tried only once to really approach Iran that I'm aware of and that was during the Reagan administration in which we had a swap of Iranian weapons to the Contras and a bunch of other stuff going on that was kind of crazy. In fact, the Iranians have approached us several times to engage a dialog with us. Now, just because we talk to people doesn't mean we like them. During the time of the Cold War, we had an embassy in Moscow. We had Presidents meeting with the Soviet leadership. And at the same time we had thousands of nuclear weapons aimed at each other and Soviet advisors were running that air defense system in North Vietnam that was shooting down our pilots, so, and, and supplying the South Vietnamese as well. So you know, it's talk, fight. You don't cut off talking just because you don't like people.

Crane: General Clark-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And that, that's the recipe for success. I mean, that's the way it works.

Allman: Back to Iraq just real briefly, you talked about 78 days of bombing in the Balkans. You know, would you consider it to be an impossibility, we could, there's no way in Iraq that we could do 78 days of bombing without destroying A) the country and killing so many thousands more civilians. And also, were you privy to President Clinton's regime change plan, and did you know what George Tenet claimed on CBS that Iraq was going to have nukes by 2007?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: First of all, in Iraq I don't think there was any reason for 78 days of bombing. So, it's not that I'm comparing the bombing in Kosova with the bombing in Iraq. I'm simply saying that you need diplomacy and force. There was a lot of effort made to try to get President Clinton to sign onto regime change, and he did sign on to regime change at a certain level of effort. But he never signed onto the idea that regime change was necessary at any cost. I've never seen any estimate that said Iraq would have nuclear weapons by 2007. There wasn't a shred of evidence for it in any of the intelligence I ever saw, and I was the guy running the bombing on Northern Iraq from the base in Turkey from 1997 through the summer of 2000. And I would've seen that information if it had been available.

Allman: Are you aware that-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: So, I'm not sure what George is talking about.

Allman: Yeah, he said that to Scott Pelley on CBS's 60 Minutes that they believe that Iraq was going to have nukes by 2007.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I'd have to go back and check the context of that, because nobody else believed that. And I can tell you when Condolezza Rice said that there was a, you know, that we don't want a mushroom cloud to be the smoking gun, that was an incredible and outrageous overstatement. And if George Tenet said that they'd have weapons by 2007, he was, he was not only wrong, but he was- there is absolutely no shred of evident to that. The trouble with nuclear proliferation is that once people get the education, you can't, sort of, suck the education out of their brains. And unless you can eliminate every scientist that's ever there, there's, there's certain people who are educated. But they didn't have any of the technology in place. They didn't have any of the equipment. They didn't have any access. The whole idea they were buying uranium in Africa was a fraud.

Crane: That's not true, Sir.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And- It is.

Crane: That's absolutely- No, Sir. With all due respect-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: So-

Crane: -that has backed up by three intelligence-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: No, sir, it has not.

Crane: Yes it has. Jack Straw-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: It's been refuted as a fraud.

Crane: that's-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: They did not buy uranium in Africa.

Crane: They were seeking uranium in Africa in 1999, Sir. That's the truth.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: They were going out in 1990, and they had a nuclear device that they were within six months of having when we did the first Gulf War. But in fact, the investigation on the ground has shown that there wasn't any, there wasn't a snowball's chance you-know-where that they'd have a nuclear device by 2007.

Allman: A Time To Lead:

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: So-

Allman: -For Duty, Honor, And Courage (sic), that's the name of the most recent book by General Wesley Clark, and Sir, we appreciate you being on the line with us.

Crane: Thank you, Sir.

Allman: And thank you for your service to our nation my friend.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Thank you. Great to be with you.

Allman: Alright, General Wesley Clark. Interesting stuff. Yeah.