General Wesley Clark on Voice of America

September 29, 2007
Transcription by Melange

Voiceover: Press Conference USA on VOA News Now. Newsmakers from American and around the world speak journalists in an unscripted and unrehearsed discussion about the critical issues facing the United States and the world. Here’s your host on this edition of Press Conference USA, Carol Castiel.

Judith Latham: Welcome to Press Conference USA on VOA News Now. I’m Judith Latham, sitting in for Carol Castiel. Joining me on the panel today is VOA Newsroom Correspondent Meredith Buel, former Bureau Chief in Islamabad and Jerusalem who is a specialist in the Middle East and South Asia. The United States today faces the challenge of two simultaneous wars – in Iraq and Afghanistan plus a constant terrorist threat. The results of last year’s congressional election indicated that the American public wants a change in the course set by the current administration. And recent polls suggest that about two-thirds of the US electorate is critical of the conduct of the war in Iraq. In a book published just this month: A Time to Lead: for Duty, Honor and Country, the 4-star general who formerly served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander – Europe, offers the reader his lessons in leadership that works at this critical juncture in his nation’s history.

General Wesley Clark is a graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and served in Vietnam where he lost many friends and comrades and was himself wounded. He rose quickly through the military ranks and he also gained diplomatic experience in the Middle East, Haiti, Latin America and the Balkans where he worked with Richard Holbrooke, arbitrating the final details on the map that would divide Bosnia. As Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, General Clark developed a successful strategy in Kosovo that saved the lives of one and a half million Albanians without losing the life of a single Allied or American service member in combat. In the year 2000, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Clinton who commended him on his expertise as a strategist, soldier and statesman. In retirement, General Clark ran for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination and he is now the author of three books. General Clark, Welcome to Press Conference USA, and Meredith Buel, welcome to you. General Clark, why did you write your book - A Time to Lead?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I wanted to talk about America. And the way I wanted to talk about America was by explaining to people who Americans are and what’s it like to grow up in America and what is it about America that’s especially noteworthy and, I believe, commendable and lovable.

Judith Latham: As a cadet at West Point in the 1960s, what major lessons did you learn that you would carry with you throughout your military career?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: That you have to follow orders before you can give them. That you have to be responsible. It’s really about duty. It’s about not letting people down. It’s about following through on your obligations. It’s about being on time, on message, having prepared yourself. At West Point, we had math every morning, six mornings a week for an hour and fifteen minutes and the math…you didn’t go in and listen to a professor talk – you went in, he took attendance, you stood at attention and then you faced your blackboard and he gave you a list of problems to do that reflected the last night’s homework that you had done on your own. If you couldn’t produce, then you were marked down for that day and they went over it, you learned what was wrong and then you were dismissed and told to go do the next day’s assignment on your own. It was the quintessential West Point method of education – you learn it and then you prove you learned it.

Meredith Buel: General, your book starts while you were on patrol in the jungle during the Vietnam War. Describe that situation and that story for us and tell us why a Specialist Mike McClintic will always be, as you put it, “my hero for all time.”

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: There are some times in life when you hit a go/no-go moment and this was almost a no-go moment for me. I was a Company Commander. I was out with a platoon. I had a couple of guys from the company headquarters with me so there were about twenty of us moving down a trail, looking for the enemy, trying to keep the enemy from massing forces and moving against Saigon. We were one of a number of companies doing this in February of 1970. And all of a sudden the trail ran out and the guy up front stopped and so I went up to him and said ‘what’s the matter’ and he said ‘sir, the trail’s lost’ and I looked at my compass and we hadn’t veered off direction and I turned to my left to go and look at the rest of the column that was behind me and I heard a buzzing sound, my rifle fell out of my hand, I looked down to pick up my rifle, I noticed a white speck on the back of my hand and a brown spot on my leg and the buzzing was continuing and I, from a different part of my brain, shouted “I’ve been shot” and Mike McClintic said “get down” and he knocked me off balance and knocked me down so I didn’t reach for my rifle and I scrambled back behind him and down a little hill and the bullets were zinging in and I was hollering to get the machine guns up.

The important point of the book is Mike McClintic saved my life and these draftee soldiers like Mike McClintic who were further back in the column when I hollered for him to come up into the line of fire and set up our base of fire and return fire, they did it. They did it at the risk of their life and when it was time to stand up and assault the base camp and I said “all of you on the right, stand up and assault in there,” they stood up and assaulted in there – draftees, men who didn’t want to be there…peace symbols on their helmets, talking about always how much they hated this place. They did it. That’s America.

Judith Latham: General Clark, you lost a number of friends and comrades in Vietnam and you yourself were wounded.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I did.

Judith Latham: What lessons in modern warfare did the US military learn that might have been applied later to the war in Iraq?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: We junked much of what we learned in Iraq and we’ve had to relearn it. We understood counterinsurgency when we went into Vietnam. We had studied it for years based on the British experience in Malaya and some work that had been done after World War II in the Philippines. The idea is you have to deprive the insurgents of their base among the population. That means that the population has to like you and support you more than they’re afraid of, and supporting the insurgents. That’s called winning the hearts and minds and yet it faded out of the lexicon and doctrine of the US Army. We focused on high technology in fighting the Soviets in western Europe and then after the end of the Cold War, we focused on fighting North Korea and Saddam Hussein and we lost the message of counterinsurgency. We’ve had to relearn it.

Meredith Buel: Well in your book you say you are appalled at the way that the Bush administration is trying to handle the war in Iraq and the regional threat that’s posed by Iran. What are the major mistakes you see the administration making and how should they be corrected?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well they fumbled away years. First of all, they shouldn’t have invaded Iraq in the first place. Having done so, they should have had a plan for what came next and put enough resources in to do it. They didn’t so we’ve lost 4,000 troops there in a mostly futile effort to impose a democracy on people who weren’t really ready for it in terms of their culture. I’m hopeful that maybe with General Petraeus there and some further work, maybe that the thing’s not going to disintegrate into a deeper, worse conflict. I don’t know, but meanwhile Iran is all over the country. They’re busy stretching their arms to embrace Iraq. They don’t ever want to have a threat from Iraq again. They want a friendly, pliable, amenable ally on their western frontier and as much domination over it as they can possibly have and they’re at the same time working to grab and pressure Israel. So, we have to deal with Iran. That’s what all of this is about. We’re not going to find a solution to Iraq without dealing with Iran.

Meredith Buel: We definitely want to talk to you about Iran, but let’s back up a little bit and…what were the major mistakes made during the US-led invasion of Iraq and the subsequent years?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well as I said in my book. Basically, it was the mistakes people recognize – going to war before it was absolutely necessary, going to war without a plan for what happens after you’ve finished taking the enemy’s capital, not putting enough troops in, trying to do it on the cheap, but most of all, neglecting the other elements of America’s power and in the book I explain how to use this power. Regional diplomacy – how to do regional diplomacy, how to work with other nations, how to protect America’s legitimacy which we have badly squandered in all of this.

Judith Latham: General Clark, in the 1990s, you were very much occupied in the Balkans – first in Bosnia where you were part of a negotiating team with Richard Holbrooke and then of course as Supreme Allied Commander-Europe during the war in Kosovo. How did your skills as strategist, soldier and statesman come together during your experience in the former Yugoslavia, and especially in dealing with Slobodan Milosevic?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well I had studied the lessons of Vietnam and even wrote a thesis on it while I was a student at the Army’s Command and Staff College in 1974-75 at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. And I had tried to understand all the lessons of how to combine military force and diplomacy and I realized then that Vietnam was just a larger case of this. There were some things that you had to do with the military, but the military never really solved problems. It was really up to diplomacy, ultimately. And so, having an understanding of the military, working with Richard Holbrooke and learning from him how he worked the relationships for diplomacy, it all came together for the United States with Richard’s leadership and with my work and many others during that 1995 period when we got the Dayton Agreement and then later when we put the pressure on Slobodan Milosevic. I personally went in and I tell about this in the book – I personally went in and at one point even called him aside and told him if he didn’t support and obey the UN Security Council resolution, he was going to be bombed and I would bomb him good. And it worked for a while, this idea of diplomacy backed by threat, but ultimately the diplomacy didn’t keep up with the threat. That is to say, when you get the opening, you’ve got to be ready with the diplomacy and we didn’t have enough national attention directed on the issue to prevent the war that subsequently occurred in the Balkans.

Judith Latham: To me the most moving part of the book is the trip over Mt. Igman, where you lost colleagues. Would you say a few words about that please?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, it was a Saturday morning and it was the end of our first week with out team in the region. We had met with Slobodan Milosevic a day before and we had been in southern Bosnia…we couldn’t figure out how to get into Sarajevo – Milosevic wasn’t prepared to give us a guarantee of safety of passage through Serb lines. And so we hopped a ride on a UN helicopter and it landed on the top of Mt. Igman and we had there to meet us an American Lieutenant Colonel with a humvee that would seat two of us and then a French wheeled armored vehicle where everyone else was going to ride. So Richard Holbrooke and I got in the American humvee and then behind us followed the French armored vehicle and we were driving down. We were trying to pass a column of trucks that were trying to come up this steep incline. This is a dangerous part of an exposed trail on Mt. Igman where the Serbs would occasionally use heavy caliber anti-aircraft guns to shoot at the UN vehicles and other vehicles that were exposed on this mountainside and…so people…there was a lot of tension on this and we were stalled as the columns inched past each other and suddenly one of the French truck drivers said that an APC had run off the road and we looked back and realized that it had been our wheeled armored vehicle that had slid off the road where the road bank had given way and it had bounded, bouncing over and over and over, rolling down this hillside and a number of people were killed in it. It was a real tragedy. I ran down to try to pull people out and I got there too late. It was awful.

Meredith Buel: You got to know Milosevic pretty well. How would you describe him from your personal knowledge and then how did that knowledge help you in making a decision as to what to do during the air war?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: He was a well-educated man. He spoke fluent English, although with a Serb accent. He fancied himself intelligent – he believed he was smart. He was a lawyer by training so he was very self-confident man, but he was also a rational man. He wasn’t irrational. He knew how to push and probe and manipulate and twist and turn Serbian diplomacy to get what he needed from the rest of Europe and I was able to watch him at close range for hundreds of hours in these dialogues…occasionally I spoke, he knew who I was certainly, I was the only one wearing a uniform there for most of the meetings, and he had…as he told me one time, he understood the military things, he said he’d been in the army as a major so he’d been to the staff college and so he really understood what was going on in military terms. He was a smart guy and he looked at me as one of those kinds of military guys who’s loyal, who’s you know, not terribly pushy, but just a good guy that you can trust. And that’s the way he looked at me and of course, I looked at him as a dictator who we couldn’t trust. I was able to use my knowledge of him over the course of the campaign in Kosovo to break his will and force his surrender by constantly ratcheting up the military pressure and then offering him a diplomatic means of escaping from his military dilemma, which he took. And that’s how we ended the fighting in Kosovo and forced the troops out…the Serb troops out.

Meredith Buel: I knew there was…you talk about some of the mistakes during that campaign, notably the bombing of the Chinese embassy. Tell us about what you thought when you heard that that had occurred and what impact did that have on the campaign?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well people were always saying things…bad things had happened and you always hoped it wasn’t true and this was another case of it and so I went to bed. At first…I heard the first rumor around midnight, I got up at about two o’clock in the morning and all my guys were protesting their innocence and we looked at the target list and we looked at the maps and we looked at the photos of Belgrade and it looked to us like it hadn’t been us and then on CNN there were pictures of the bombing and my wife came in and she said ‘I don’t know what you’re saying on the floor but you’re looking at these maps, but I’m looking at CNN and I can see Chinese faces in that building’ and that was pretty definitive. And, so yes we did it, but we didn’t have anything to do with picking that target – that came from the Central Intelligence Agency, it was ratified by the target planning cell back in the Pentagon and the Secretary of Defense William Cohen and George Tenet took responsibility for it. All we did was pass it on and then it was executed by a B-2 bomber flying out of Louisiana. So, my intelligence officer down in Stuttgart Germany, he said ‘Sir, I’m responsible for targeting, I’ll resign,’ I said, ‘you’re not going to resign, you’re not responsible, you had no way of knowing that the target we struck wasn’t what it was supposed to be – that came from Washington’ and they did take responsibility in Washington. And we staggered on with the campaign afterwards.

Judith Latham: You’re listening to Press Conference USA on VOA News Now. Our guest today is General Wesley Clark, author of A Time to Lead: for Duty, Honor and Country. I’m Judith Latham along with VOA correspondent Meredith Buel. This is a reminder that Press Conference USA is available online and on podcast. Please visit our website at VOAnews.com/english for details.

You wrote in your book there could be a high price to be paid for addressing policy matters even if you’re later proven to be right. Would you expand on that, please?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well you know, it’s an odd thing in our democracy in America. The people who study war are the people who wear uniforms, but the people who are in charge of war are the people who are elected or appointed to high office and it’s the American tradition that the civilian runs the military so in the military, you’re on the one hand, you’re responsible for giving your professional military advice, but on the other hand, you’re responsible for educating the people that you work for and sometimes the people you work for don’t like to be educated and sometimes they resist or resent military advice. I looked back in my experience on the generals during the Vietnam War period and I figured that we could have done better in Vietnam if we had had more forthright discussion between the generals and the civilian leadership. In other words, the civilian leadership wasn’t prepared to take the extraordinary measures that would have been required to succeed. They backed off and they left the troops floundering in Vietnam and the result was what we know. And I thought to myself…at the time I was a Captain and I thought, I’m going to study hard and in my military career, I’m never going to make that mistake, I’m going to stand up and when people don’t do the right thing, I’m going to fight for it. And so it turned out I was a 4-star general and we weren’t doing the right thing. Some people wanted to pause the bombing; I fought that off. Some people wanted to freeze it; I fought that off. We escalated our campaign almost everyday, putting more aircraft in, hitting more targets, getting closer to Belgrade, striking targets in Belgrade, taking more risks in striking those targets, moving from just night attacks to day attacks and ultimately threatening an invasion – all to achieve escalation dominance. And some of the political leaders probably didn’t understand the strategy – they hadn’t been educated in military strategy the way I had in looking at the use of force and diplomacy, but the strategy worked and we succeeded.

Judith Latham: I know that Meredith wants to ask you a question about your growing up.

Meredith Buel: Well yes, your book A Time to Lead: for Duty, Honor and Country, I don’t know that you’re calling it an autobiography, but there’s certainly a lot of interesting biographical information about your childhood and later and I wanted to ask you…you grew up in the southern US state of Arkansas during a very turbulent period. The local school board voted to close the local high schools, for example, instead of allowing them to be desegregated. What impact did the battle over segregation have on you and how did it mold your life and career?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well I saw that in Arkansas at the time, there were good people who just didn’t understand the law of the land and they couldn’t overcome their upbringing or their culture or their fear, to deal with other people who looked differently, to accept them with respect. And, it was a problem I wrestled with in my family and I was twelve years old when the desegregation crisis happened. I knew right from wrong, but I couldn’t quite understand why my parents who were right on everything else were wrong on this and I wrestled with it for years to try to understand this and I finally came to understand my parents would never get over this, but it helped me in dealing with others throughout my military career and certainly when I got into the Balkans and I looked at these terrible fears and prejudices that one group had against the other and I thought, ‘God, I’m so lucky to live in America, I mean, these people in the Balkans, they look like each other, they talk the same talk and yet they’re killing each other – thank God we haven’t done that in the United States.’ And I resolved to do everything I could to try to stop the fighting in the Balkans.

Meredith Buel: It’s rather extraordinary that somehow you could separate your own thinking from that of your parents, especially with such a difficult issue. How do you think that came about?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I don’t know – I think kids do that. I think most kids are sentient – they’re learning things and they’re thinking things and they’re making judgments earlier than parents want to give them credit for. But, I grew up in an alcoholic home and there was a lot of fighting and a lot of arguing in my home as my step-father went through a personal crisis and tried to salvage his reputation and find employment to support the family and other things and it was very difficult for him. And, I think maybe that caused me to be self-aware in a way that perhaps I wouldn’t have been if everything had been perfectly normal.

Meredith Buel: Even when you’re only twelve years old?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: At twelve. Young people know a lot at twelve. One of the lessons of the book is people form their values early and don’t underestimate young people. One of the things I hope the book will do would be to inspire people to seize a dream and live it – have the courage to go after a dream. I did that – I dreamed of public service, of leadership and I spent my life doing it. I’ve been fortunate; I was able to do it.

Meredith Buel: Well speaking of aiming high, in September of 2003, you announced that you would be a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. In fact, I covered some of your campaign events just before the New Hampshire primary, including a packed pancake breakfast in a rural firehouse that drew a standing-room only crowd.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I remember that.

Meredith Buel: In this effort, unsuccessful effort to run for president, you write in your book, you made many mistakes, but one proved fatal and that was the decision to skip the Iowa caucuses.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Right.

Meredith Buel: If you were to run again for president, what would you do differently?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I would do a lot of things differently. You can run the first time as a draft candidate, the way I ran, and basically all is forgiven. People did incredible things for me…you can’t imagine…there are people who…one woman said, ‘I sold my second home so I could give money to your campaign,’ another one said ‘I’ve taken a second job so I can give money,’ several people said ‘I’ve left my husband or my wife at home so I can live in New Hampshire and campaign for you’ and people were giving me money - $50, $100, $250, $500 a month out of their paychecks that they couldn’t afford. I mean, I had never seen anything quite like this. It’s one of the reasons I didn’t run this time is because I couldn’t meet the preconditions that would allow me in good conscience to accept the money from these people again. Because Joe Biden said to me before I ran…Senator Biden, he said ‘well you’ve got about a 30% chance to win the primary, I’d say. It’s going to be tough – it’s an uphill battle,’ and I wanted to believe he was wrong, but he turned out to be right in the sense that when you don’t have a team, you don’t have money, you don’t have a strategy, it’s a very hard thing no matter what your character and experience level is – it’s a very hard thing to translate that into the celebrity and brand image that you need for elected office at that level. So, as it worked out, not being in Iowa left an opening for John Kerry and then we hadn’t fully developed the brand image. The Democrats didn’t understand the differences between me and John Kerry – they thought of it as, one guy’s a military guy and he got out early and ran in the Senate, the other guy’s a military guy, he’s never run for office - well, in that case, it’s a pretty easy choice, but it’s not quite that choice, as history showed. So that was our fault – we didn’t develop the brand image the way we should have.

Meredith Buel: Now, in this most recent…this year’s presidential race for the election next year, you’ve endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton in her bid for president, saying that she’d be a great Commander in Chief. Now, as potentially the first woman in that role, why do you believe that she is the best candidate to both lead the nation and the military?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well I think she has tremendous experience. I think she’s got all of the native smarts that she could possibly need. She does her homework. She has wonderful character and she really works every issue. I think she’s a very strong person. I think she’ll be a fine Commander in Chief.

Meredith Buel: Would you consider an offer from Mrs. Clinton to be her vice presidential running mate?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well we’re way too far ahead on that. That’s months ahead and I haven’t considered anything and I’m sure she hasn’t and she’ll pick whoever she thinks can best help her get elected and then later help in office and that’s what she should do.

Judith Latham: General Clark, given where we are now in Iraq and Afghanistan as of late September 2007, if you were involved in formulating US policy or US strategy, what course of action would you recommend?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well I’d say that we need to pull brigades out right now to get the attention of the Iraqi leadership and then we need to embark on a full, robust diplomatic initiative in the region to sound out all the countries in the region and to look for common interests. I would start with a statement of principles and some blandishments and some threats perhaps, just as we did in the Balkans. I’d send a team over the represented the President and I’d give them a Gulf Stream jet and I’d say ‘don’t come home until you’ve sorted this out.’ That’s what Bill Clinton did to us and we were successful and I think the Middle East is a lot more complicated, the distances are greater, the passions are intense and long-standing, but I do believe there’s some way to proceed and move forward with this.

Meredith Buel: You indicated earlier in the interview that it’s pretty much all about Iran at this point and how do you think the United States should be approaching Iran especially given things the Iranian president has said about Israel and about the country’s nuclear program?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I think that when we approach Iran, we have to do so understanding both what Ahmedinejad said with the nuclear program and also recognizing that Persia has been a great historic civilization and it’s one of the great, founding civilizations of mankind and there are 75 million people there, 60% of whom don’t agree with Ahmedinejad and 80% of whom want closer relationships with the West. So I think we should be in dialogue with the Iranian people and I hope…I’d like to see an American leader go and talk at a university in Iran, just the way that Ahmedinejad’s been invited to speak at Columbia.

Meredith Buel: And you think we should be engaged diplomatically with Iran and Syria.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Absolutely. Absolutely, thirty years of isolation hasn’t worked – it hasn’t produced the changes in Iran’s policy, it hasn’t dimmed the fervor of their revolutionary disruption efforts in the region yet at the same time inconsistently, they want to be accepted in the world community and we’re the ones who are the keepers of the keys and so it’s up to us and we should be talking to them.

Judith Latham: This is your third book.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: It is. Thank you very much, it was a pleasure to be with you.

Judith Latham: It was a pleasure to have you on our program.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Thank you.

Judith Latham: General Wesley Clark’s new book, which is his third is: A Time to Lead: for Duty, Honor and Country, published by Palgrave McMillan. Press Conference USA on VOA News Now was produced in Washington with technical assistance from Evan Enutchka. Joining me on the program was VOA correspondent Meredith Buel. I’m Judith Latham sitting in for Carol Castiel who will be back next week on Press Conference USA on VOA News Now.