General Wesley Clark on KPFK 90.7 FM

October 14, 2007
transcript by Reg NYC

Ian Masters: This is KPFK, Los Angeles and I'm Ian Masters. And I'm speaking with General Wesley Clark who is a retired Four-Star General of the United States Army, a former candidate for President of the United States, an author and activist. He spent 35- 34 years in the Army and in the Department of Defense, receiving many military decorations, several honorary knighthoods and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Wesley Clark commanded Operation- Operation Allied Force in the Kosovo War during his term as the Supreme Allied Commander of Europe of, of, in other words the SACEUR, the head of NATO from 1997 to 2000. General Clark is also the author of several books including Waging Modern Warfare (sic), his latest just out A Time To Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country. And General Clark of course, this, this book is an extraordinary addition to the, essentially the, the lid being pried off a very secret regime. I've spoken in the past with Colonel Wilkerson who was Chief of Staff to Colin Powell. He help, he helped pry the lid off a little, and in your book, your, you, you tell of an extraordinary meeting that you had shortly after 9/11 at the Pentagon. Could you fill us in a little on that?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I had, I had come into the Pentagon about maybe two weeks after 9/11, ten days to two weeks, and I had gone in to see the Secretary of Defense because I was just a little uncomfortable. I was on television every day. I was talking about Al Qaeda. I wasn't getting any intelligence. It was just my own knowledge from when I-

Ian Masters: And, and this was on CNN, right, that you were their-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: It was on CNN.

Ian Masters: Right.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And I was on two or three times a day, it seemed like, at the beginning. And so, I went in to see Rumsfeld. He said, well I was doing okay. And then I had about five minutes with him and then I left. And as I was leaving, one of the officers on the Joint Staff that had worked for me in the past called me in. He said, "Sir, you've got to come in here and I've got to talk to you." And he told me when I went in that we were planning to invade Iraq. I asked him whether there was any connection with 9/11, and he said, "No." He said, "It's just-" He said, "I don't know why they're planning to do it, but that's the plan." He said, "It's, you know, it's like we're good at taking down states. We don't know what to do about terrorists, and if the only tool you have's a hammer, every problem has to be a nail." That's the way he described it. And so, I was disturbed. I went back and watched and tried to get my sense of where the administration was going. I-I listened to the speeches. I remember going, seeing the President go down and visit the 101st at Fort Campbell saying, "Get ready! Get ready! We're going to need you! We're going to need you!" He was all hopping up the military, and it did sound like there was something more than simply going into Afghanistan. So, I came back to the Pentagon in early to mid November of 2001. By that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. Of course the 101st wasn't committed to that. This was just a few Special Forces guys who were over there. And I went back in to see the same officer, and I said, "Well, I thought you had told me we were going into Iraq. We seem to be doing the right thing in Afghanistan. Are we still going into Iraq?" He said, "Oh Sir, it's worse than that." He held up a piece of paper on his desk. He says, "I just got this memo down from upstairs," pointing to the office of Secretary of Defense, "and it outlines a campaign strategy to go after seven states in five years-"

Ian Masters: Now this is 2000-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: "-starting with Iraq-"

Ian Masters: 2001, so-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Right. "Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and then Iran."

Ian Masters: Wow.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And I was just staggered. He was bringing the paper over to show it to me. I said, "Is it classified?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Don't, don't show it to me." I didn't, I just didn't, I hadn't gotten any classified information. I was on CNN. I didn't want to be a recipient of classified information. I didn't want to look at those documents. I, I-I was so stunned by this and it was so unbelievable that it took me a long time to focus on it, and it was only after I saw the administration's determination to, to, to go to war with Iraq. I listened to what Karl Rove said. I got reports from the British. I heard from American officers. All the public palaver was wrong. It was all a smokescreen. I went over and I talked to Senator Graham, who is a friend of mine. I talked to Senator Kerry. I warned Kerry what was going to happen and when the timing was and so forth. It was clear as the nose on your face what was going to happen AND that this was the first step in, in much more to follow. And I realized later, much later the memory came back of a conversation I'd had with Paul Wolfowitz in 1991. Paul Wolfowitz in 1991 was the number three guy in the Defense Department. Then he moved up to number two when the Bush administration came in, in 2001. And in, in 1991, he had told me that the key lesson of the Gulf War was that we had to, had five or ten years to use military force to knock out these old client regimes of the Soviet Union in the Persian Gulf - countries like Iraq and Syria before the next great superpower came along and contested the region. And I was stunned when he said it, because it was such an obvious strategic play, and yet people don't think that way. America's not an aggressive nation. We don't play nineteenth century geopolitics. We don't invade and knock off regimes and seize countries and consider the world like a chess board. That's not who we are as a people. And so, what he was suggesting was, you know, it was so wide of the mark of everything I knew about the American character that it was a, it was a passing conversation that struck a chord, and I, and, and I remembered it.

Ian Masters: Mm.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And here we were 1991 to 2001, it was as though a coup had taken place and a group of people had seized control of the government and imposed this strategy of Wolfowitz's from ten years earlier despite all the President's pretentions of running as a 'compassionate conservative' with a 'humble foreign policy' and not doing peacekeeping and nation-building. Suddenly we were embarking on a campaign of aggression.

Ian Masters: But this reckless utopianism that drove this counterproductive and counterintuitive foreign policy, we have, we are manifestly reaping the whirlwind. There's no doubt that all of this has backfired in the most hideous way. You only have to look what happened last week, General Wesley Clark, where General Sanchez, the first commander in Iraq after the invasion and the first commander of the occupation, said, finally went public, said, "There's been a glaring and unfortunate display of incompetent strategic leadership within our national leaders." He accused them of derelict in their duties and guilty of a lust for power and furthermore went on to say that if the people on the National Security Council had to live by military standards, they would've all been court martialed.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, Sanchez was absolutely justified in what he was saying. There was a lapse of leadership. There was a failure. But, but it wasn't just the National Security Council staff, it was the President of the United States, the Vice President, the Secretary of Defense. It was not even utopianism. It was a flight of fantasy. There's just no other way to describe it - a flight of fantasy - that we could take a Christian-Jewish army into the Persian Gulf, start knocking off states and imposing democratic processes on cultures that had never experienced that kind of government. It was a flight of fantasy. And every academician and most of us who were, who had been educated, gone through Vietnam, understood the processes of, and what happens when you're in a foreign country, we all objected to it. We warned against it. We knew what it was.

Ian Masters: Well, there's a lot of people, including people from President Bush's father's administration who tried to warn, starting with Brent Scowcroft, President Bush's closest friend and advisor, General Zinni, CENTCOM, former CENTCOM commander, Schwartzkopf - I spoke to a bunch of people myself.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I thought Zinni was a little slow in warning, honestly.

Ian Masters: Hm.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: But Joe Hoar, who was-

Ian Masters: Right. The Marine commander.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: (inaudible), he was very clear. I testified with Shalikashvili and Joe Hoar and an Air Force General at the Senate Armed Services Committee in the fall of 2002, and it was very clear to Joe Hoar exactly what was going to happen, and he was very courageous in speaking out.

Ian Masters: But it was, I think it was clear to, to people who knew the region, who spoke Arabic, who knew that the strategic notion of, of, of containing Iran, I mean after all that was what that eight-year war was about, the Iran-Iraq war that-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Saddam Hussein was the cork in the bottle. He was the plug at the end of the Persian Gulf that checked militant Shia expansionism, and that is what the war was about. And by knocking him off, we had effectively taken the brakes off Iran.

Ian Masters: And General Clark, here we are today with a, with a civil war that's morphed into a surrogate war between Iran and Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Egypt and, and I guess now the United States switched sides and, and joined the Sunnis. How does this now proxy war not become a regional war?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I think it's a matter of how far the respective sides want to push it. Inside Iraq right now - and, and this is in more detail really than I was able to get into in my book, which is more about America's role and American leadership - but, but just to go inside Iraq for a moment, there are many different Shia factions. They're not unified yet. They've got to sort out who's in charge, where and how one relates to another. The two principal factions are both of course engaged with, with Iran. Muqtada Al Sadr's faction is less inclined toward an Iranian client state relationship than Hakim's faction, but both factions are using and, and th-they're in debt to Iran. Iran has a major effort in this area, but it's not clear that the Iranian Shia, whoever emerges on top or whatever coalition of groups, want to be subsumed as the, the, a province of Iran. So, they're always be some desire to hang onto the United States and use us as an excuse as to why they can't buckle completely under the will of Iran. At least that's the way I would predict it, unless we force it and through our actions toward Iran, force the Iraqi Shia to choose sides. If we do that, we will go into a sort of a East-West Cold War type or hot war divide through the center or through the various regions in Iraq with a buffer zone of Sunnis formed up in Anbar Province and the Shia doing Iran's will, and it will be a regional war.

Ian Masters: And if, if indeed the surge is in fact a de facto or belated de facto recognition that both the Sunni and on the United States part that in effect they're fighting the wrong people, isn't it, isn't it inevitable that, that, that it seems that we're already in a countdown with the, with what General Petraeus was saying about Iranian interference in bringing in ordinance and training people. It seems to me that we're on that path. That's, that's the worst scenario a, a, a, less dire scenario would be that already we are suffering the, the, the dominoes if you will are falling against us rather than for us, as the neocons promised. Look at the frail state of Jordan. It's got a, it's being swamped by refugees. You have, if, if indeed the Sunni are defeated, which seems to be numerically the, the what one could predict, you'll have a lot of angry, trained, armed people in the state of Jordan. Where do you think they're going to turn?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Exactly. No, there are some very dire scenarios that can spin out of this. I think that as of right now the United States government at least is refusing to publicly acknowledge its failure, and, and, and what I'm asking is: What is the strategy? This is what Congress ought to be asking. This is what Democratic activists ought to be asking. What is this American strategy that's made us weaker and our enemy stronger at the cost of 800 billion dollars and 4,000 American lives, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who've been killed and, and, and maimed in this operation? What is this strategy? This administration has no answer for that, and that is the key question that should be used to hold the Republican Party and all of its henchmen out there responsible during the 2008 Presidential campaign. I hope we won't be continued, continuing to dwell on the exact numbers of troops in Iraq or whether the surge is working or not militarily. Those are really military matters, and the administration is guilty of, of, of geostrategic failure. It's not the military. It's the administration, and I think we have to keep this clearly in mind.

Ian Masters: But General Clark, it seems that, that if, if you've got this situation where the, the, the in effect the only people who are paying the price for this war are the military and the, and the military families, this is not American war. It's, it's being done on the cheap through contractors. It's all funded off the books. There's no involvement. I've just been watching the World War II series on PBS where you really saw that the whole nation pulled together in, in the-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: This is a, this is a Rush Limbaugh war. This is a war that you can feel good about on right-wing talk radio, you can beat your chest on, but you don't have to necessarily get involved in it yourself. And yet, there are so many middle class and working Americans who's sons and daughters have gone off to this war, either in the active forces or in the National Guard and Reserve, and this administration has done so little to give them the assistance and support they need.

Ian Masters: General Wesley Clark is talking to us. His new book A Time To Lead is available here for a pledge to this program 818-985-5735, A Time To Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country. Why do you think - you mentioned the Democratic Party, and you obviously ran on, on Democratic ticket back in '04 - the, why haven't they really made an issue out of the, the troops? I know Senator Webb, the, the freshman, tried to, to make, make that the central issue. The-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: The Democratic Part doesn't control the Congress in sufficient strength to be able to make an issue out of the troops, but I would argue that it would be a mistake to make an issue out of the troops. I'm fine with the Webb Amendment, but look, the Congress doesn't need to tell the President to withdraw troops. The President wants to withdraw troops. He knows this war is an albatross around his neck. So, when he withdraws troops, do you think he's going to thank the Democratic Congress and say, 'Thank you very much for encouraging me to draw troops. It turned out - draw down troops - it turned out to be exactly the right thing'? No, he's not going to say that. He's going to say, 'My policy is succeeding and I'm able to withdraw troops.' And, you know, 'To those Democrats who didn't have the courage and stamina to respect our men and women in the Armed Forces. This shows you that, you know, we were right. You were wrong. We were succeeding. You just didn't have patience and faith in the American fighting men.' Oh, it'll be ugly. And that's what's coming over the summer. So, I would encourage Democrats to move off the troops issue and move onto the strategy issue. That's the administration's failure.

Ian Masters: So, General Clark, do you think that, that if the Turks pull the plug on supply and make it almost impossible to maintain the, the war, will that give President Bush the political cover? Is he looking for political cover to get out?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I think what's going to give President the political cover to get out is that I do think the ethnic cleansing is, is moving toward its conclusion. I wouldn't say it's completed, but in many of the areas around Baghdad, to the South of Baghdad, the ethnic cleansing's been completed. What's left are the internecine power struggles between the various factional militias and their political arms, and that remains to be worked out. But that won't result in the kind of massive killings that you see. That results in the casual assassinations - the bomb that kills the governor and so forth - but, but not in the market bombing and the terror that's gone on. I think it's reasonable to expect that casualties will decline, absent some U.S. move against Iran in the near term. And so, therefore I think it's also reasonable to predict that because of the decline in casualties, the President will, for political reasons in the United States, by next summer be crowing about pulling troops back. And remember, to gain the political benefits of this, no, no American here in United States really knows how many troops are in Iraq. I mean we, there's no way for us to know. What we listen to is the announcements. All he has to do is announce the pullback and say, 'Oh, we're going to have a, less than a hundred thousand there by Christmastime of 2008,' and he will have substantially won the argument on troop drawdown. And, and then at that point, what are the Democrats going to say, 'No, a hundred thousand's not low enough. It has to be 80 thousand.'

Ian Masters: Mm hm.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And then you're back arguing about military affairs when the critical argument is not military. It's strategic.

Ian Masters: Well, it's also accountability, surely. I mean, here we have a situation where you have a choice either to believe that our President is either a cynic or a coward. Either he's been told, which we believe he's been told on numerous occasions how dire the situation is - well, I believe that both Abizaid and Casey told him under any number of occasions - and yet he has hung in there at the expense of, of our military and, and our treasury. And the theory has been that he's not man enough to admit that he's made a mistake and pull the plug, and is therefore going to keep this agony going long enough so that the, the, the next person, man or woman, inherits it.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I think there's no doubt about that.

Ian Masters: So, that's a pretty dismal choice between cowardice and, and cynicism.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: On the other hand, on the other hand, it's also true that the U.S. forces there aren't really gripping the enemy. What we are is we're a veneer under which all of this political strife and struggle with its military aspect is occurring, in which the Iraqis themselves are sorting out - underneath the purple fingered voters - they're sorting out who's really in charge. Maliki's a show. Underneath there are forces that have real power in regions in Iraq. Maliki isn't one of those. He's a, he's a government of show, but that's being sorted out. And there's no reason to expect that the situation a year from now is going to look like it does right now. There's every reason to believe that the situation a year from now will have a greater degree of stability. It just won't be in our interest, necessarily. It'll be more along the lines that you suggested earlier, that there'll be a hardening of the divisions and, and our enemies will have gained ground. And the United States may well at that point have switched sides, but all of this was predictable. All of this is the evidence of his strategic failure. And so, what I would ask the activist community to do if you're concerned about the United States and our future in the world to speak out against the strategic failure of Iraq, not against the troops levels, against the strategic failure.

Ian Masters: And how, and how we'll be paying for this for decades to come. It's not-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Exactly.

Ian Masters: And our entire arrangements in that part of the world may, may well go out the window. I mean, you know, we were talking earlier about how we in effect hanging by a thread if, if there's a regional war, then the immediate consequences would be, particularly between Saudi and, and Iran which is really where the lines are drawn.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Right.

Ian Masters: The, the-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: But, but-

Ian Masters: You'd have the Western economic lifeline cut. That would then reward the Soviet- I mean, not the Soviets actually (laughs) -slip of the tongue there - Russia and Venezuela. (laughs)

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And China.

Ian Masters: And China.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: You see, it's not just, you have to think in- Let's, let's not think only in military terms. Let's think in economic terms. There are many states in the region that are selling oil at these high prices, and the longer that we continue to fight there, the higher the price of oil will grow and the more risk there is of a confrontation with Iran, the greater the risk bringing that's imbedded in the price of oil. So, hundred dollar a barrel, hundred and ten dollar a barrel, hundred and twenty dollar a barrel, and yet that's delivering huge wealth into the region and huge power to a state like Russia. And so, the results are worldwide. It's not just the military consequences in the Persian Gulf. It's the flight from the dollar, the exchange rate. It's American jobs. It's American influence. It's ability to work diplomacy, to gain treaty agreements, to prevent aggression, to resolve problems like Darfur, to be able to bring allies to bear and work problems like the problem of Iran's nuclear potential. All of this is at risk as we continue our mis- mistaken strategy in the region.

Ian Masters: Again, General Wesley Clark, former Commander of Europe, the author of A Time To Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country, a book that we're offering up here as a premium to support this program, Background Briefing, and extraordinarily comprehensive look at both General Clark's career starting in Vietnam through be, be, the Rhodes Scholarship, becoming the Su-Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, running for President, and now here he is telling the activist community of the United States to get up and wake up and start focusing on what's really going on in terms of the political divide and that the Democratic Party may well be falling for the, for the wrong argument, arguing about troop levels when in fact the President may well do an end run around them, do a cosmetic troop reduction. But the same time, nobody out there is calling for the accountability, except (laughs) as I mentioned, General Sanchez. He wasn't mincing words, General Clark.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I think those of us who've been there and seen it on the ground or know war at heart, we know what accountability's all about and we recognize the failure. I think it's, it's hard for people back in the States to, who aren't, who haven't made this their life's work to see the enormity of the strategic blunder that we're in.

Ian Masters: And just in closing, General Clark, I, when General Hayden from the NSA took over the job as the head of the CIA, he talked about a paucity of strategic, a paucity of strategic thinking in this country. Where does, how do you do a kind of rapid injection of strategic thinking and get it into the, into the government or is it, is it a case that our political leaders are simply, you know, if we, if we got somebody like George W. Bush, you know, he just doesn't want to bothered by the facts? I mean are we, are we deficient in, in strategic thinking or is the problem-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, of course, of course. I mean, strategic thinking has to be done once in a generation. People spend their entire lives studying the problem of strategic thought, and it's impossible for most busy Congressional leaders to absorb the facets, the mind frame, the perspective, the history, the background and construct some new strategic syllogism. It doesn't happen. We were happy for 40 years in this country with containment and deterrence. We wanted to contain the expansion of co- Soviet communism. We wanted to deter the Soviet's attack on Western Europe or elsewhere around the periphery. By and large we succeeded. It was a bipartisan policy. Democrats and Republicans always disagree on the margins, but the core of it was bipartisan. There's no bipartisan consensus on where we're going. On the left, there's no real strategic doctrine that's emerged at all. On the right is the neocon doctrine, which says, 'Use military force, force regime change in the Middle East, try to create a, an environment of client states friendly and beholden to the United States.' That's clearly failed. It was wrong. It was an un-American strategy to start with. We don't do things like that, and it's why it failed and it must fail. But what we need is to first, recognize and talk about the failure. The alternative strategy will emerge, as it must, and it will be obvious, as it must if we fully understand the magnitude of the strategy failure of the neocon vision. And that's what George Bush basically has followed.

Ian Masters: General Clark, I must say, it sounds like the, the twelve step program with Alcoholics Anonymous. First you've got to (laughs) acknowledge you've got, you've got a problem. (laughs)

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I think it's that twelve step program and that kind of rigid thinking that's lead to so many of the problems that we have right now. But I do believe that in forms of public, in the, in the case of public dialog, you can't affect a change in something of the magnitude of U.S. national strategy unless people appreciate that the current strategy has failed.

Ian Masters: Well, I thank you so much for, for, for, for filling us in with your wisdom here today, General Wesley Clark. I now the audience appreciates it. And now I'm just going to go out there and beat them up and make them get your book, because it's, it's a worthy and necessary adjunct to what you told us here today. Again, I think you so much for joining us in Los Angeles, General Wesley Clark.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Thank you. Real pleasure to be with you. Bye now.

Ian Masters: B-bye. Hello again. I'm Ian Masters, and that was General Wesley Clark. His book is the A Time To Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country. It's 125 dollars.