Question 1: Chairman Duncan Hunter: (R-CA)
Summary: Do you agree that the move to multiparty elections in Egypt, Syria withdrawing from Lebanon, Qaddafi renouncing his adversity to the United States or at least turning over a fairly large package of weapons equipment were a result of American action in the region and that were you heartened by that?
Play Audio
Response from General Wesley Clark
I’m very heartened by the continuing efforts of people in the region to reform their governments, and achieve greater liberty and freedom and better treatment of the individual. It’s a long-term process in the Middle East. We’ve seen it swing in cycles in our lifetimes.Chairman Duncan Hunter interrupts....
I think that America does have enormous influence in the region -- both positive and negative. There have been many ripples of the American action there. I think we’ve got to be very cautious in taking a lot of credit for some of the changes. So far as I know, we had nothing to do with the death of Yassar Arafat. And that’s what’s really opened up the progress with the Palestinians.Chairman Duncan Hunter interrupts....
I think you’d have to go through each one of them and go through them in detail. But I think that if you’re going to try to, as a single matter, say “We used force, we were tough, we were going in there to free these people and look at the great consequences.” I think you’re giving the United States and our military action too much credit. It’s a very dangerous ....Chairman Duncan Hunter interrupts....
(crosstalk)
You’re forcing me into a binary answer, I’m trying to give you a real answer. You said we’re both big picture people, let’s be big picture people. Look, what’s happening in the Middle East is a result of many different forces. What we have over there is a lot of people who are very angry at the United States.
They do NOT want democracy by our standards imposed. They have fought for democracy for a long time. They’ll take advantage of the United States, or western Europe or the United Nations or anybody else who can help them. And they’re grateful for that.
But, if we really want to help democracy, we’ve got to do, in this country, we’ve got to do less crowing about the sunrise coming in the Middle East and a lot more behind the scenes to make it work,
For example, in Lebanon, right now, it’s great that the Syrian forces are coming out, but there was an agreement between lots of parties in the region that helped get the Syrian forces in and establish stability. Now what precisely can we do and are we doing to make sure that the withdrawal of Syrian forces is not accompanied in Lebanon by conflict.
That’s where the United States can make a contribution. So US strength is always appreciated., but people in the region, and I just returned from the region, they don’t want the United States to say we’re that imposing democracy on them. I think we shouldn’t be trying to take credit for that.
Question 2: Chairman Duncan Hunter: (R-CA)
Summary: Do you think there was any causal link between our activities ...any causal link... between our activities in the two war fighting theatres and those occurrences?
Play Audio
Response from General Wesley Clark
Mr. Chairman, If I can give you a very simple answer.
I understand your question. And I’m saying that there are many forces in the region, of which US activities are one.
To take the case of Kadafi for example. Kadafi had been under economic sanctions, there was a long-term British- led effort to get him to renounce his policy of terrorism, give up his weapons of mass destruction and come back in.
Did Kadafi then say “Hey we might get invaded?” Maybe he did say that . We don’t know that, but what we do know is that is wasn’t simply the US invasion of Iraq which triggered this. This has long roots.
As far as Lebanon is concerned, if Syria had listened and looked at the United States invading Iraq and had feared that they had to come out of Lebanon as a result, they might have come out right after we invaded Iraq. They didn’t. They came out when Prime Minister Arreri was assassinated as the result of some Syrian intelligence miscalculation that they could knock off the pressure for Syrian independence by having Arreri knocked off. Instead, it backfired. Bashar Assad is not a, he’s not a wise statesman. He’s presiding over a very shaky regime. It’s made shaky by a lot of things, and I’m sure it’s part of our policy to change that regime. So, if US pressure is contributing to that, then we should take some credit for it, but it’s not necessarily the fact that we invaded Iraq.
I don’t want to diminish the significance of what we’re doing, but I do think we have to be careful, because there’s a fundamental difference between what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989 and what’s happening in the Middle East today.
In Eastern Europe, we never invaded. NATO and the United States were there as a beneficent force. Had we gone in and said “Hey, we’re going to start the ball rolling in Eastern Europe. We’re going to knock off the Polish regime so that democracy can spread”, we don’t know what the consequences would have been. But normally people resist it. When you come into their country, kick down their doors and cause trouble.
In the Middle East, we have invaded a country and we’ve been very faithful in our support to Israel, we’ve been part of a lot of conflict in the region and we’ve been blamed for some of that conflict. So my point is, that there is a whole multitude of actions and I give credit to the United States for being strong, having strong values, bringing a lot of people over here for many, many years to be educated and seeing our way of democracy, but to attribute all of what’s happened to the fact that we invaded Iraq? I couldn’t do that.
Response from Richard Perle (not transcribed but available on audio)
Question 3: Chairman Duncan Hunter: (R-CA)
Summary: Our calculations indicate that Congress has increased military benefits and pay extraordinarily over the last few years. Do you have any recommendations going forward to make sure that the DoD intelligence contacts can be handed over to other intelligence agencies as the military footprint recedes in the future so that those DoD intelligence contacts are not squandered.
Play Audio
Response from General Wesley Clark
Well, several...
First, if I could just thank the committee for what it has done for the retirees and the active duty military. I think you have, as you indicated, done a number of things that are in our benefit. I do think that more needs to be done for the Reserve components, for the National Guard to facilitate their transition, and for veterans –perhaps we can discuss that.
With respect to Richard’s comment, if I could just say, I’m very strongly in favor of what the United States can do to help people gain democratic rights and I’ve talked to a number of dissidents across the region. But I think we have to understand both what our powers are and what the limits of our powers are. And we are much more powerful leading by example, than we are by leading by force. And I’m one of those who believes forces should be used as a last resort. It’s caused a lot of backblast for us in the region and I’ll be happy to discuss it depth, in terms of how you use it to promote democracy later.
With respect to DoD intelligence, Mr. Chairman, I’ve always felt that we’ve -- not only in the Middle East, but elsewhere -- not adequately taken advantage of the relationships that we develop, military to military and military to civilian. There’s never been a mechanism for really capturing these up and bottling them. Both in Europe and the Middle East, we have constant relationships and friendships that form and ideas that come in and they just don’t percolate up. And I might say that this is also true of the diplomatic community. When I was on active duty, I got some of my best intelligence by reading the diplomatic cables, rather than by reading the cables brought in by the intelligence community. Because the diplomats DO go in and talk to top-level people, they’re not in the decision-making, but they’re there.
So, if I could suggest a change that somehow, we need a bank, an information repository we need and we could do it with the communications ability we have with the Internet and so forth now, we need to retain to a greater awareness of the people we’re interfacing with around the world than what we’ve done in the past.
Other governments do this, our government doesn’t.
