October 13, 2006
transcript by Reg NYC

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

Well, I thank you very much for that kind introduction, for this warm welcome. It is great to be at the University of Alabama, and I guess it's a good thing I didn't take up Governor Riley on his invitation to be the President at Auburn. (laughter) But I'm thrilled to be here in Alabama. We've had a great couple of days traveling around the state. Been with your Agricultural commissioner Ron Sparks, with my friend from the White House Fellows Program John Saxon, and we have had a great time visiting people, talking about the issues and really experiencing the, the, the joy and the energy and the optimism of Alabama, and it's been a real pleasure. But I have to tell you that this is a very difficult time for our country. And that's what I'd like to speak briefly about with you tonight.

I travel all over the country most of the time on business, occasionally campaigning for Congressional candidates or whatever, and I'm almost invariably stopped in the airport. I'm asked, 'What's going on in Iraq?' 'How do we get out?' 'What should we do about Iraq?' Before that I was asked what to do about Osama Bin Laden. People know there's trouble. They know something's not right, but they don't know exactly what the problem is or what to do about it, and if you listen to the television news, you get slogans. You get a 'Cut and run,' 'Stay the course,' 'Democrats don't have a plan' or whatever. So, it's hard to get beyond the political dialog, and what I'd like to do with you this afternoon in just a few minutes is go beyond that dialog.

See, I don't think you can figure out what to do about Iraq unless you understand how we got there, Afghanistan and the rest of it. How did it actually happen? And the starting point for this is not 9/11. The starting point is actually 1989. It was the year of miracles in Europe. It's the year the Cold War was over. It's the year the Berlin Wall fell down. I was a One-Star General at the time. I was at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, and I remember in the spring of 1990, a German One-Star General was sent by the Bundesfeier to travel around to all the military posts to thank the American Armed Forces for all the years during the Cold War that we'd served in Germany. You know, we had 200 and some odd thousand American service members and another 300,000 family members in Germany, West Germany from, really from the end of World War II in 1945-46 all the way through the early 1990s. So, it was an enormous commitment and an enormous tie between these two nations. So this Brigadier General was telling us, "The Cold War's over." He said, "The Russian troops are going to leave Germany, and Germany will be united." I was stunned. I was out there in the desert. We were training the American forces to fight the Soviets, and suddenly the Soviets were gone. What were we going to do about this, and what was my purpose in the desert? I called the military intelligence people in Washington. I reported the German Brigadier, what he said, and I said, "You know, he says Germany's going to be unified by December. He said the Soviet troops are going to leave. Is there any possibility this is correct?" They said, "Absolutely not. It will not happen." But of course, Military Intelligence, that time, was wrong.

So, it did happen, and we ended up, in 1991, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The Cold War was over. We had won. People like me and many of you who are veterans, when we served in the Armed Forces, we never thought we'd see a day when there wasn't a division between East and West, when the Soviet missiles weren't aimed at the United States and ours aimed at them, with our Strategic Air Command on alert with peace as our profession, knowing that we'd never fight the Soviet Union, because if we ever dared to it might escalate into a nuclear exchange that would basically destroy humanity. We thought we'd have to live with what Winston Churchill called 'The Balance of Terror' all our lives. And suddenly it was, in the twinkling of an eye, it was over, gone. There was no more Soviet Union. It collapsed and became eleven independent states.

Some people saw the collapse coming and saw the consequences early. There was a man named Paul Wolfowitz, who was the number three man in the office of the Secretary of Defense. And I remember going to Washington right after the Gulf War in the spring of 1991, and he asked me to come into his office for a visit. I did and I congratulated him on the performance of our troops during the Gulf War, because as the number three guy, he was responsible for a lot of that. And he said, "Thanks but," he said, "no thanks." He said, "Really, the truth is, the United States failed in the Gulf." He said, "We didn't get rid of Saddam Hussein." He said, "What we did learn is that now we can use our military forces, and we can use them without any interference from the Soviet Union. We've got a window," he said, "of five years, maybe ten years to clean out these old Soviet client states, the ones that gave us trouble during the Cold War, countries like Syria, Iraq, Iran. We got to clean them out before the next great superpower comes along, and we got to make the Middle East ours." I was a One-Star General. I wasn't working for him. I wasn't even thinking about those kinds of things. I just said, "Sounds interesting" and, but it was a nugget, and I filed it. You see what Paul Wolfowitz was saying was that it was time for a new strategy, to move away from the strategy that had kept us safe during the Cold War, a strategy of deterrence, of not using force, of containment, into a strategy of using force, of invading countries, of overthrowing governments.

Well, the Bush administration was defeated in 1992, and I never heard anything more about that strategy. I ended up coming to Washington. I was promoted, given my Third Star in 1994, and I was brought to Washington to be the Director of Strategic Plans and Policies. And that's when I realized that I didn't know what our country's strategy was. I remembered working for General Haig during the Cold War. General Haig used to say in every speech. He would, he would talk about "the relentless growth of Soviet military power, year in, year out, spewing out vast quantities of materiel, far above any legitimate defensive needs. Is it the result of a mindless bureaucracy? Is it-" and so forth. I helped write those speeches, and (laughter) it was the engine in the speech that drove NATO consensus. It was the engine that drove continued defense spending and modernization in the Armed Forces. You had to have a threat. You had to have a reason. So, I got to Washington in the spring of 94, and I looked at it, and I couldn't imagine what the reason was. I didn't know why we had an Armed Forces.

And so, I was there for a couple of days, and the Presidents of two small countries in Africa were shot down, the President's of Rwanda and Burundi. And on Friday night when I tried to leave the office, I had on CNN, and I saw fighting, and it didn't look like a war movie. I called the National Military Command Center, and they said, "We don't know anything about any fighting." I said, "Well, it's on your television on CNN." I called the U.S. European Command, and the didn't know anything about it. So, I called the Belgian and French attaches, and they acknowledged that they'd invaded the country of Rwanda to rescue their nationals from a civil war that was beginning. On- There were these two tribes, and I remember asking about them. And it was Friday night a six o'clock, and people were trying to leave, and, and a guy came in and said, "Yes Sir, Sir there's two tribes." I said, "Get me a map. Show me what this is all about." He says, "Well, these, these two tribes. I, they're either the Hutus and the Tutsis or the Tutus and the Hutsis, and I'm not sure which." And we called the State Department, and we pulled an all-nighter.

Next morning, I when home, got a shower, came back into the Pentagon, met with the Secretary of Defense. I was going to go with him on a trip to South Korea. I thought it was a routine inspection trip. Little did I know, we were preparing to have to go to war against North Korea, because in October of 93, President Clinton had gone over to the Korean Peninsula. He'd said, "No nukes in Korea." When he got home, the CIA said, 'Oh, Mr. President,' said, 'we forgot to tell you, the North Koreans, they have this nuclear reactor, and they pulled the fuel rods out of it. And if they reprocess those, they can extract enough plutonium to make a couple of nuclear bombs, and they won't let us inspect the nuclear waste to see if it's been reprocessed or not.' So, we were going to go to the UN and call for a blockade. The North said, 'If you blockade us, that's an act of war.' The American General in Korea said to President Clinton, "I need reinforcements." We were preparing to send the reinforcements.

On Sunday, I went into the White House. This is all in my first week when I didn't know why there was a military. (laughter) And here we are talking about an air war. Well, there's this plane coming from this angle and a plane coming from this angle, and if that plane turns towards you, can you shoot it down, and there's the Secretary of State, the National Security Advisor, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Deputy National Security Advisor, the Secretary of Defense talking like flyboys with their hands, and none of them knew anything about the radar. I'm trying to take notes. I'm sitting in the the back. I'm saying, 'This is a really hard conversation to follow.' Yeah, no kidding. When people don't know what they're talking about, it's hard to follow what they're saying. (laughter)

And on Monday morning, a guy came in and (knocks) knocked on my door and said, "Sir, you haven't met me yet." This was my fifth working day on the job. He said, "My name's Tom Hill. I work for you." He was a One-Star General. He said, "I'm not allowed to tell you this," he said, "because this is a compartmented program, and you, you, you, they say you don't have a need to know, but since I'm working for you, I want to tell you." He said, "We're working on an invasion plan to invade Haiti." I said, "What!?!"

In five days, I had discovered there was a civil war in Rwanda, about to go to war with North Korea, fighting in the Balkans, and about to invade Haiti, and every weekend was a crisis. Somehow, it always ended up on Friday night with us getting called in for Saturday and Sunday meetings. And about a month after, after a month of this, General Shalikashvili, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said to me, he said, "Wes," he said, "we hired you to be the strategist, because you're supposed to be so smart." He said, "So, tell us, what is the strategy that has us working in crisis every weekend?" It was a trick question, because there was no strategy and he knew it.

You see, when we defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War, we lost America's strategy. The strategy is where you know what you're trying to accomplish in the world and how to do it. We'd been working against the Soviet threat, and suddenly it was gone, and we didn't know what to work against. So, we had these challenges out there, and we began to recognize that there were threats of regional instability. There were problems with proliferation of weapons. There were terrorists and drug traffickers and kidnappers, and there was always a threat the Soviet Union would turn hostile again. We wrote a strategy. It took a couple of years, and I helped participate in it. And we briefed it around the Congress and the American people. You never heard of it. It was a strategy of engagement and enlargement. If you saw the title today, you'd think it was an advertisement for a men's pharmaceutical product. (laughter) Obviously, you all aren't getting enough spam. (laughter) But we still were very, very active under President Clinton's leadership. We delivered relief supplies to Rwanda. We put 20,000 troops in to stop a war in the Balkans. We struck at Saddam Hussein. We struck at Osama Bin Laden. We stopped a war. We went into a 78-day air campaign, 23,000 bombs and missiles, 1,000 aircraft, 38,000 sorties in the Balkans to stop ethnic cleansing, broke Slobodan Milosevic, and we did it all without a national strategy.

In the summer of 2000, I was up at the French-American Business Council while I was still in uniform, just before I retired. And of course they had the best French, toughest, biggest French businessmen there with the biggest American businessmen, about 40 of them, and when you get the heavyweights in a room like that, you got to have reputable speakers who come in. So, we had Ken Black, who was running the Bush campaign, and we had Bob Shrum who was running the Gore campaign. And they spoke to the assembled group, and they talked through what they thought the top five issues would be in the campaign. Foreign policy wasn't there. National Security wasn't there. A national strategy for America wasn't there. It wasn't there. This was going to be a discussion of education and healthcare and Social Security and tax cuts and what to do with the budget surplus, but nothing about national security. Bush administration took office. 9/11, a catastrophe happened, and we were struck by Osama Bin Laden. We knew who he was. Clinton tried to get him, knew he was the greatest threat to American national security.

But America did not have a strategy. We had taken advantage of a decade of globalization, an incredible opening of trade, technology, communications, the fall of the, of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Iron Curtain, the entry of China into the modern economy, the creation of the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Act, the telecom deregulation, the rise of the Internet, the emergence of cell phones. It was astonishing, and we created 22 million jobs in America. And my friends from Europe who came over here would say things to me like, 'Gee, I was in your country. I never saw any foreign news on the news channels. There's nothing in the newspapers. You all don't care about the rest of the world.' And that's what they told me, and they were kind of right. I remember going back to Little Rock in the summer of 1999. Thirty days before that, we'd been bombing in Kosova, and all over Europe the pictures in the newspapers looked like war. There were refugees, talks of ground force invasion. People were scared. Parliaments were in revolt. You'd have thought the world was ending. So, I got back to Little Rock, and you know, hometown boy, and staying up in the top suite of the hotel there. And the local newspaper comes up to interview me, and the reporter says, "Now," she said, "wasn't there some kind of, like, bombing or something going on over where you were?" I said, "Yes ma'am there was." But, you know, it never penetrated the American consciousness. We were working the economic miracle of the 1990s.

So, when 9/11 happened, we didn't have a national strategy. The American people weren't engaged, and what happened is that we went to war in Afghanistan. We had to, but this administration determined shortly after 9/11, perhaps on the same day, that they would invade Iraq and settle an old score and move into that strategy that Paul Wolfowitz had described to me in 1991. There was no public debate. There was no discussion of what this meant. There was obfuscation. I went through the Pentagon a week after 9/11. One of the Generals called me in, and he said, "Sir," he said, "come in here in my office." I'd gone in to see Secretary Rumsfeld, because after you've been in the uniform for 35 years, when you're suddenly on CNN, and you know the people who are in, and you feel like you're still part of the Army. I kept looking at my suit and looking for that big black stripe that you wear around your sleeve and looking, my, my shoulder was bare, and I was in a blue suit, not a green one, and I wasn't Air Force either. (laughter) And so, I had to go back and touch base, you know, to the Pentagon. So, the General calls me after I'd seen Rumsfeld. He said, "Sir, come in here." He said, "Sir, we're going to invade Iraq." I said, "We're going to invade Iraq!?! Why?" And he said, "Because," he says, "I don't know why. Really," he said, "It doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but," he said, "I guess they don't know what to do about the problem of terrorism, and if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem has to look like a nail." He said, "We don't know what to do about terrorists, but we can take down governments. So, I guess they're looking for a government to take down. Meanwhile we started bombing in Afghanistan. So well, I came back to see the same General in early November. I said, "Are we still going to invade Iraq?" He said, "Yes, Sir," he said, "but it's worse than that." I said, "How do you mean?" He held up this piece of paper. He said, "I just got this memo today or yesterday from the office of the Secretary of Defense upstairs. It's a, it's a five-year plan. We're going to take down seven countries in five years. We're going to start with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, then Libya, Somalia, Sudan, we're going to come back and get Iran in five years. I said, "Is that classified, that paper?" He said, "Yes Sir." I said, "Well, don't show it to me, because I want to be able to talk about it." And I begin to see what wasn't being explained to the American people, which was the overall drift of where the policy was. We still didn't have a strategy, but we were driven to take action.

So, we went into Afghanistan. We took down the Taliban government. We knew, the military knew we needed 40 or 50,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan immediately. A friend of mine sent a note to Secretary Rumsfeld, a retired Four-Star, said, "Rummy, you need to put some troops in Afghanistan" He said, "I can't. Can't spare 'em. Saving 'em for Iraq." That was early 2002. We've pulled intelligence out of Afghanistan, Special Forces out of Afghanistan, and we lined up. The Military was told to prepare to invade Iraq as early as October of 2002. Turned out we didn't invade until 2000- spring of 2003, but the decision had been made long before they went through the charade of going to the United Nations and all that. And there were people actively pulling inside the administration for the failure of diplomacy, because they didn't want anything to stop the invasion.

I don't know what they were thinking about. They'd obviously never been to war. War us ugly (pounds the podium). It is unpredictable. And when you kill people's relatives they hate you forever. When we were doing the bombing campaign in Kosova, we had a misfire of a cluster bomb unit. It opened prematurely, dropped on a schoolyard, killed three little kids on the schoolyard, was targeted on helicopters on the airfield. Somehow I got letter from a man in Serbia, in Nis. He said, "You killed my granddaughter." And he said, "I will kill you for that." Well, I've never presented myself to him, but those kinds of feelings, they don't go away. When you go to war, it's a permanent act that marks forever a line that can't be walked back.

We went to war in Iraq. We did it on the basis of hyped intelligence and an underlying theory that was never explained to the American people. We never had a strategy. We named an Axis of Evil that was a figment of some speechwriter's imagination, who was told to concoct something zitzy for the President's State of the Union Speech in 2002. And we lumped North Korea and Iran and Iraq. We then invaded the country that had no nuclear weapons, leaving safe the country that had them or might have had them - North Korea - and the country that wanted them - Iran. We went into Iraq without adequate forces determined not to do nation-building, under the silly idea that you could walk in, destroy a government, 25 million people, three times the size of California, and then pull out again within six months. I don't know what they were thinking of. We kept troops in the Balkans for years.

There was no strategy. If there was, it was incoherent and it was counterproductive, because what it did was serve as a recruiting magnet for Al Qaeda. Those images of American troops killing Iraqis, they're flashed all over the world every day, and they make people's blood boil, just like if some Martians came in here and landed in Alabama - or nah, let's take care of Alabama - Arkansas, and you saw pictures of it every day in Alabama, and you saw people who looked just like you being killed by people from outer space. You wouldn't like it, and your young men would be angry, and they'd be sneaking off to try to do something to salvage what they believe in and your family's honor. My friends, I ask you, how could we in this country, with all that we stand for - Democracy, freedom, human rights, respect for the individual, a belief in the worth of every person - how could we have done this and believed that we wouldn't pay a price? It was a colossal strategic blunder.

And now, we're faced with an Iran that's busy acquiring nuclear weapons, but nobody trusts the U.S. Intelligence, and a North Korea that looked at Iraq and said, 'By golly, I don't have enough nuclear weapons. I'm getting me some more, and now I'm testing them.' How can it be that Osama Bin Laden is viewed in Pew surveys around the world as less a threat than our own President of the United States? How can that be?

So, what do we do? Got to go back to first principles here. Our power comes because of who we are as a nation, what we believe in, what we've stood for, what we've done. We protected nations against invasions. We stood for international law. We built alliances. We talked to people we didn't agree with. President Johnson talked to Premiere Kosygin during the Cold War. President Reagan talked to Gorbachev during the Cold War. We've got to talk to the leaders of countries we don't agree with - Iraq, sorry, Iran, Syria, North Korea.

We've got to meet Iraq's neighbors. We've got to fashion a way out, lower the objective. They're not going to be a Jeffersonian Democracy. It's not their culture. It's not their way. They don't understand it. We're discovering new things about Democracy every day ourselves. How do we expect to transplant it when it's not fully grown here? I was down in Birmingham today for the commemoration of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. That was only 40 years ago, in America. We think we're going to fix Iraq and make them a Jeffersonian Democracy like that? Come on, it's not real. Lower the objective, talk with the neighbors, work the politics, and back our troops out of there step by step in a way that preserves America's credibility, keeps Iraq together as a nation, and ensures that Iraq doesn't become another threat to the neighborhood. It can be done if we show the kind of leadership and respect for principles.

And then, we must talk directly to North Korea. They want a peace agreement with us, but they don't know how to get it. When they talk nice to us, we ignore them. When they talk tough, we threaten them. They want to come in out of the cold on their terms. We may not agree with those terms, but are we so weak that we're afraid to talk to North Korea, that all we can to is hide behind China and threaten them?

And we must talk to Iran. The Iranian leader, he's got a real bad mouth on him. He's real ugly. He plays to his right-wing. When he talks tough to America, he gets lots of people saying, 'Way to go Ahmadinejad! You the man!' And when President Bush threatens him, people come in and pat him on the back and say, 'We're behind you. Keep talking tough. We're with you.' It's the way politics works, and he's a political leader. He was actually, you may remember, elected. So, why is it that we can't talk to Iran? Maybe find some common interests. They probably don't want a big war in Iraq either. Now, they want what they want, which may not be what we want, but how are we going to know that if we don't talk to them?

We've got to use our power to build relationships. To win the war on terror you have to have more friends than enemies in the world. There are 50,000 people out there who support Osama bin Laden. That's about two and a half time more than signed up with him on 9/11. That's a pretty good indicator we're not winning, but on the other hand, there's not a single country that supports Osama Bin Laden, not one. So, why is it again that we don't want to work with these other countries? I'll tell you what Osama bin Laden's strategy is. He want's to encourage us to invade Iran and Syria. He wants war. His strategy calls for the creation of zones of chaos and savagery. He wants more Iraqs, where there is no government, no police, and where he can go in and mastermind civil conflict and beheadings, because he thinks from that chaos that he can emerge with leadership. Why do we want to play his game when it's totally against our interests?

What we need is a new strategy that puts us right in the world, that looks at what's important for America's future. We want to back out of Iraq, talk directly to the people we disagree with who are governments, work together with those governments using information exchange, law enforcement, economic development and, only as a last resort, military force to eliminate the hardcore terrorists who can't see the light and come over to our side. It's fundamentally a battle of ideas, and we've got great ideas and theirs, theirs are throwbacks. Most people don't support them. There's probably, there's 6.4 billion people in the world. There's probably 3, 3 billion people who know about the United States of America and there's hardly any of those who don't say they agree with what we stand for, which is protection of the individual, right to have a family, to raise your children to do better. Surely we can win this battle of ideas against 50,000 hardcore fanatics who want to take the world back to the seventh century. Surely that's doable. It's not even a major object of American strategy.

What we have to worry about is our economic future in a global marketplace - how to compete, how to bring jobs to America, how to protect our economic security, how to make sure that the next generation of Americans and the generation after that have Social Security and medical care and great educations, how to keep us on top economically, scientifically in a world where there are major powers like China and India who have more people and will eventually maybe even have more money. That's the strategic problem for America.

We've got to face reality. The time is now. We had no strategy after 9/11. We were taken on a mistaken journey. It's not too late to set the course right, but we must do it now. We must do it here in America's heartland, here in places like Alabama, where Americans every day go about their ordinary lives, and they get a glimmer of it on the television, here through discussion with neighbors, here through your voices, through talking to your elected Representatives and yes, through the ballot box. Here. Now. It's the time that we've got to put our country on the right course.

Thank you.

(applause)

Thank you very much. Thank you.

(continuing applause)

Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.

Moderator: General Clark has agreed to take a few questions from the audience. So, if you have a brief question, he will offer a brief answer. (laughter) So, we'll have time for lots of questions.

Audience member: General Clark, one gray hog to another, tell me, what is the ethical responsibility of a General officer if the civilian leadership is taking the nation down the wrong path? I know a great many General officers have spoken out recently, but not many resigned, perhaps General Shinseki, at the time this plan was ongoing.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, General Shinseki didn't resign. In fact, nobody's resigned over this issue, but if you're a General officer and you're at the level where you can see what's really going to happen and you think it's wrong and you feel strongly about it, your moral responsibility is to take off your uniform, get out of the chain of command and speak your mind. That, that's your responsibility, but before you do that, you should speak up when you're in uniform. And then , when the decision's made, and it goes against you, and you can't support it, then you get out. So, what I think we expect of our General officers is that they have moral courage, moral courage. It's a very important quality, and it means that you have to have the integrity to know what you think and the courage to speak out and try to make a difference and then the determination that if your advice isn't accepted and it's that important, you leave and you become a civilian Then maybe run for President or something. (laughter)

Audience member: There was just a book out that come lately called "Imperial Life in Emerald City". I forget the author, who's a Bureau Chief in Baghdad from the Washington Post. He simply said in the book that what happened in Iraq, because of Paul Bremer - his inadequacies, his incompetence and the people he put in there as political appointees - destroyed Iraq and actually made it, the attempt to rebuild Iraq, far from difficult to almost impossible. I'm just wondering, considering all that, I mean, moving out of Iraq we, what should we do - leave it as it is, try to fix it? In the movement, what should we do in the future?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I haven't read the book, but basically you can't actually fix Iraq. What happens is that people have- after their relatives are killed, in a tribal society like Iraq, there's a code of honor, you have to take revenge, or you have to be recompensed in some way. And this is the cycle that's going through Iraq right now. We don't speak the language. We're not part of the culture. We're not going to be very effective at halting that. We've got to put conditions in place where the Iraqis themselves can agree on what to do. We got to support them. We're going to have an obligation there to provide some funding for a long time, but we're not going to be able to fix it in the sense of going back to 2003 and keeping the Ba'athist in place so the utilities worked, keeping the Army in place so there was security. We're not going to be able to fix it, but the longer term lesson is: Don't do it again.

Audience member: We've heard overtone from Iran's President suggesting that the Islamic conflict could be rooted in religion and tied to the coming of the 12th Imam. How do you feel relations could be improved between the Islamic cultures and the West when this is one of their intrinsic beliefs?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, the truth is that most Muslims- I shouldn't say this, but I will. You know, do we have any Catholics here? (laughter) Okay. Do you know how, not to get too personal, but you know how some people only go to mass on Easter and Christmas Eve? You know what I'm talking about? There are a lot of people of the Muslim faith, I don't mean to insult anybody, but there are many who don't, they don't really actively work for the coming of the 12th Imam. In fact, as one of the people told me when I was in, going through one of the states in the Middle East, he said, "You Americans, you are so stupid," he said. "What you have done in Iraq is unbelievable." He said, "Iraq is a tribal, it's a tribal country. The tribes have all the power, and," he said, "members of these tribes overlap the borders and everything, and they're mixed between Sunnis and Shias." He said, "We've tried for over 100 years to take the power away from these crazy Mullahs, and the first thing you do is give them power and authority. You don't understand the first thing about Iraq," he said.

So, there are a lot of people there who don't want the Mullahs to have all that power. There are a lot of people in the Middle East who don't see it the way, a- as a religious conflict. These are people who lived in the United States, send their children here for education, own homes in the United States. They dress like Westerners. They talk like Westerners. They speak fluent English. They get stopped when they go through Kennedy Airport in New York for six hours, and they don't like it. But they want the same thing for their families that we want for ours.

Surely we've learned something beyond the 12th century. I know. Look, the way it works in the world is: People don't start fights mostly for ideas. They mostly start fights for other reasons, and then they drag on ideas to try to give them support. This war didn't begin as an Is- a war of Islam. Osama Bin Laden was angry at the Saudi government, because they stripped him of his citizenship. And then Ayman Al-Zawahiri was angry at the Egyptian government. And so, out of frustration because they couldn't get anything going against the Saudi or Egyptian governments, they joined forces and decided, 'Heck, if you're going to do this, why not go for the big banana. Let's go attack America.' They issued a fatwa in 1998 saying it was okay to kill Americans and now they've dragged in all this religious baggage. It was never there to begin with, and we shouldn't look for it.

I have no doubt that we can have a clash of civilizations and a refight of the Crusades if we want to, because we're proud of who we are. They're proud of who they are. It's natural. It's in the human heart. It's because you love your momma and daddy. You grow up that way. It's part of your family. It's what you believe in. It's why you're- you love the Crimson Tide and know the War Eagles, they're not nothing, (laughter) as we say in Arkansas. But we don't have to have that fight between Christianity and Islam, and we ought to do everything to prevent it.

Audience member: General Clark, I didn't go to the University of Arkansas. I went to Tuscaloosa, the University of Alabama, but I was taught here that the theoretical underpinnings for containment was the 1948 "X" Papers in- published in Foreign Affairs.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Right.

Audience member: And that was a theoretical basis.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Right.

Audience member: I'm not concerned whether we should get in or out of Iraq, whether we should do this, do that. I would like to see a theoretical underpinning for a new policy for America that is overreaching, that will encompass our entire policy structure rather than dealing with this little problem, this little problem. Because if we're putting out brush fires, as you enumerated in your first five days, we'll always be putting out brush fires, unless we know what we're doing. And four weeks ago I was in London. I was having supper with ten Iranians, medical doctors. I travel internationally quite a bit, and trust me when I say this, there are more than 50,000 people that are of the Muslim faith that hate America. They hate Christianity, and they will do anything to bring it down. I have seen this with my own eyes, and I've talked to people. This is not theoretical, but I really want to address the theoretical problems that we have in this country. I don't see it.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, most of the public opinion polling I've seen shows that there may be millions of people out there who hate the American government for its policies, but they don't hate individual Americans, and they wouldn't kill individual Americans if they have the opportunity. Now, you may see it otherwise, and if that's the case, then we've got- we've already gone too far down this road to ever get out of it. And if that's the case, I worry about humanity's future.

Look, we've got big issues to work. We've been trying for fifty years to get lesser developed economies developed. Now they're developing - India, China. We're pumping out carbon dioxide and greenhouse gasses at an astonishing rate. Go to, go, go to Canada and look at the recession of the glaciers. Look at what's happening to the world's climate. We don't even know where the tipping point is. You talk about a national security problem. That's global warming, and that's a global security problem, or the spread of disease.

(applause)

We've got important issue to worry about. And you know, I, I feel badly about the ten Iranians you met with, and I don't know, I guess apparently they didn't hate you enough to want to kill you, or they didn't think they could get away with it. But yes, there's a lot of demonstrations out there against the American government and its policies. We've made some serious, serious mistakes, the latest being - it's hard to pick the latest - but one of them recently was the one where we sided with the Israelis in that air campaign in Lebanon, and instead of stopping the bombing, we were cheerleading it. It would hurt Israel. It hurt Lebanon. It hurt us. It helped Iran.

So, I think to solve problems, you have to break them down into their component parts. So, the Sources of Soviet Conduct paper was an important paper. It was written by George Kennan about the Soviet Union. In fact, Islam is not a single entity that can be described and prescribed in a single paper. There's a whole panoply of actions we need to take and a whole set of strategic lines we need to operate on, but the most fundamental strategy is this: Right now, in our relations with the Islamic world, the United States by it's own actions is in a hole. And one of the things I learned in the military was: If you're in a hole and you don't want to be, stop digging. We got to stop digging and start being constructive by talking to people around the world.

Moderator: General Clark, we have time for one more yes or no question. (laughter)

Audience member: General, I would like to ask a question that doesn't call for a lot of debate. Your presentation has been so thrilling and so refreshing, so thoughtful. I want to ask whether you have given consideration or will give consideration of running for President of United States.

(enthusiastic applause)

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I have to answer it the way I've been answering that question. I say, I haven't said I won't. (laughter) That's all I can say. Look, it's not about me, and it's not about 2008. It's about you, and it's about right now. It's about this country. We're on the edge of a disaster in foreign relations. We can have a war with a billion Muslims. It's possible to make that many people hate you, but there's no reason to. And we can have a blow-up in the Korean Peninsula that will definitely effect the price of oil and your stocks and your employment and your future. All of that's possible, but we don't want it. So, I don't want to get it mixed up with me. Everybody knows I ran as Democrat. We probably got a lot of people here who are Republicans, and God love 'em, and I hope they believe in who they are and, and vote. It's about you. It's about the American people. It's about whether you see the issues clearly enough and feel strongly enough to have a voice, because we're in a Democracy, and your voice counts. And it doesn't just have to be about crime in the neighborhood or taxes for road improvements. It has to be about the most, single most important thing we're facing in America in this year which is: How do we keep America safe? We need your voices out there. We need this debate, and we need to carry it to the highest levels of government.

Thank you.

(Applause)