Dalam wawancarnya dengan Amy Goodman dari “Democracy Now” Jendral (pur.) Wesley Clark, mantan Panglima Tertinggi Pasukan Gabungan NATO di Kosovo (1997-2000), bersaksi bahwa AS berencana menggulingkan tujuh negara yaitu Irak, Suriah, Libanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, dan Iran, sebagian
sudah jatuh seperti libya, Irak, Saddam Husin Sudah digulingkan tapi
Irak masih terus di obok-obok dan di acak-acak… Suriah perang masih
berkepanjangan diluar jadwal mereka yang di target 6 bulan rezim jatuh..
dan akhir dari sekenario ini adalah Iran. Dengan segala cara Amerika
lakukan ini, jika tidak bisa terjun langsung maka dipakailah boneka
mereka rezim-rezim korup diktator di Timur Tengah seperti Arab Saudi,
Qatar, Jordan dll. dibawah video wawancara dan transkip wawancara
tersebut:
Dibawah transkip wawancara
“We’re
going to take out seven countries in 5 years, starting with Iraq, and
then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran” –
Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during 1999 War on Yugoslavia. Gen. Wesley Clark, U.S. Army
General Wesley Clark. Retired 4-star U.S. Army general, Supreme Allied
Commander of NATO during the 1999 War on Yugoslavia .
Gen. Wesley Clark Weighs Presidential Bid: “I Think About It Everyday”
Short version of video interview on U-Tube
Complete Transcript of Program, Democracy Now.
Today we spend the hour with General
Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general. He was the Supreme Allied
Commander of NATO during the Kosovo War. In 2004 he unsuccessfully ran
for the Democratic presidential nomination. He recently edited a series
of books about famous U.S. generals including Dwight Eisenhower and
Ulysses Grant – both of whom became president after their military
careers ended.
Well for the rest of the hour we are
going to hear General Wesley Clark on the possibility of a U.S. attack
on Iran, the impeachment of President Bush, the use of cluster bombs,
the bombing of Radio Television Serbia during the Kosovo War and much
more. I interviewed Wesley Clark on Tuesday at the 92nd Street Y in New
York.
- Gen. Wesley Clark. Retired 4-star US Army general. Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the Kosovo War.
AMY GOODMAN: Today, an
exclusive hour with General Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general.
He was Supreme Allied Commander of NATO during the Kosovo War. He has
been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2004, he
unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic presidential nomination. He
recently edited a series of books about famous US generals, including
Dwight Eisenhower and Ulysses Grant, both of whom became president after
their military careers ended.
On Tuesday, I interviewed Wesley Clark at
the 92nd Street Y Cultural Center here in New York City before a live
audience and asked him about his presidential ambitions.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of these generals who run for president?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: I like them. It’s happened before.
AMY GOODMAN: Will it happen again?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: It might.
AMY GOODMAN: Later in the interview, I followed up on that question.
AMY GOODMAN: Will you announce for president?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well, I haven’t said I won’t.
AMY GOODMAN: What are you waiting for?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: I’m
waiting for several different preconditions, which I’m not at liberty to
discuss. But I will tell you this: I think about it every single day.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, for
the rest of the hour, we’ll hear General Wesley Clark in his own words
on the possibility of a US attack on Iran; the impeachment of President
Bush; the use of cluster bombs; the bombing of Radio Television Serbia
during the Kosovo War under his command; and much more. I interviewed
General Clark on Tuesday at the 92nd Street Y in New York.
AMY GOODMAN: Now, let’s talk about Iran. You have a whole website devoted to stopping war.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Lihat website: stopiranwar
AMY GOODMAN: Do you see a
replay in what happened in the lead-up to the war with Iraq — the
allegations of the weapons of mass destruction, the media leaping onto
the bandwagon?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well,
in a way. But, you know, history doesn’t repeat itself exactly twice.
What I did warn about when I testified in front of Congress in 2002, I
said if you want to worry about a state, it shouldn’t be Iraq, it should
be Iran. But this government, our administration, wanted to worry about
Iraq, not Iran.
I knew why, because I had been through
the Pentagon right after 9/11. About ten days after 9/11, I went through
the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary
Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on
the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called
me in. He said, “Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second.” I
said, “Well, you’re too busy.” He said, “No, no.” He says, “We’ve made
the decision we’re going to war with Iraq.” This was on or about the
20th of September. I said, “We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?” He said,
“I don’t know.” He said, “I guess they don’t know what else to do.” So I
said, “Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to
al-Qaeda?” He said, “No, no.” He says, “There’s nothing new that way.
They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.” He said, “I guess
it’s like we don’t know what to do about terrorists, but we’ve got a
good military and we can take down governments.” And he said, “I guess
if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a
nail.”
So I came back to see him a few weeks
later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, “Are we
still going to war with Iraq?” And he said, “Oh, it’s worse than that.”
He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said,
“I just got this down from upstairs” — meaning the Secretary of
Defense’s office — “today.” And he said, “This is a memo that describes
how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with
Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing
off, Iran.” I said, “Is it classified?” He said, “Yes, sir.” I said,
“Well, don’t show it to me.” And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said,
“You remember that?” He said, “Sir, I didn’t show you that memo! I
didn’t show it to you!”
AMY GOODMAN: I’m sorry. What did you say his name was?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: I’m not going to give you his name.
AMY GOODMAN: So, go through the countries again.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well,
starting with Iraq, then Syria and Lebanon, then Libya, then Somalia
and Sudan, and back to Iran. So when you look at Iran, you say, “Is it a
replay?” It’s not exactly a replay. But here’s the truth: that Iran,
from the beginning, has seen that the presence of the United States in
Iraq was a threat — a blessing, because we took out Saddam Hussein and
the Baathists. They couldn’t handle them. We took care of it for them.
But also a threat, because they knew that they were next on the hit
list. And so, of course, they got engaged. They lost a million people
during the war with Iraq, and they’ve got a long and unprotectable,
unsecurable border. So it was in their vital interest to be deeply
involved inside Iraq. They tolerated our attacks on the Baathists. They
were happy we captured Saddam Hussein.
But they’re building up their own network
of influence, and to cement it, they occasionally give some military
assistance and training and advice, either directly or indirectly, to
both the insurgents and to the militias. And in that sense, it’s not
exactly parallel, because there has been, I believe, continuous Iranian
engagement, some of it legitimate, some of it illegitimate. I mean, you
can hardly fault Iran because they’re offering to do eye operations for
Iraqis who need medical attention. That’s not an offense that you can go
to war over, perhaps. But it is an effort to gain influence.
And the administration has stubbornly
refused to talk with Iran about their perception, in part because they
don’t want to pay the price with their domestic — our US domestic
political base, the rightwing base, but also because they don’t want to
legitimate a government that they’ve been trying to overthrow. If you
were Iran, you’d probably believe that you were mostly already at war
with the United States anyway, since we’ve asserted that their
government needs regime change, and we’ve asked congress to appropriate
$75 million to do it, and we are supporting terrorist groups,
apparently, who are infiltrating and blowing up things inside Iraq —
Iran. And if we’re not doing it, let’s put it this way: we’re probably
cognizant of it and encouraging it. So it’s not surprising that we’re
moving to a point of confrontation and crisis with Iran.
My point on this is not that the Iranians
are good guys — they’re not — but that you shouldn’t use force, except
as a last, last, last resort. There is a military option, but it’s a bad
one.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to get your response to Seymour Hersh’s piece in The New Yorker
to two key points this week, reporting the Pentagon’s established a
special planning group within the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to
plan a bombing attack on Iran, that this is coming as the Bush
administration and Saudi Arabia are pumping money for covert operations
into many areas of the Middle East, including Lebanon, Syria, and Iran,
in an effort to strengthen Saudi-supported Sunni Islam groups and weaken
Iranian-backed Shias — some of the covert money has been given to
jihadist groups in Lebanon with ties to al-Qaeda — fighting the Shias by
funding with Prince Bandar and then with US money not approved by
Congress, funding the Sunnis connected to al-Qaeda.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well,
I don’t have any direct information to confirm it or deny it. It’s
certainly plausible. The Saudis have taken a more active role. You know,
the Saudis have –
AMY GOODMAN: You were just in Saudi Arabia.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Hmm?
AMY GOODMAN: You just came back from Saudi Arabia.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Yeah.
Well, the Saudis have basically recognized that they have an enormous
stake in the outcome in Iraq, and they don’t particularly trust the
judgment of the United States in this area. We haven’t exactly proved
our competence in Iraq. So they’re trying to take matters into their own
hands.
The real danger is, and one of the
reasons this is so complicated is because — let’s say we did follow the
desires of some people who say, “Just pull out, and pull out now.” Well,
yeah. We could mechanically do that. It would be ugly, and it might
take three or four months, but you could line up the battalions on the
road one by one, and you could put the gunners in the Humvees and load
and cock their weapons and shoot their way out of Iraq. You’d have a few
roadside bombs. But if you line everybody up there won’t be any
roadside bombs. Maybe some sniping. You can fly helicopters over, do
your air cover. You’d probably get safely out of there. But when you
leave, the Saudis have got to find someone to fight the Shias. Who are
they going to find? Al-Qaeda, because the groups of Sunnis who would be
extremists and willing to fight would probably be the groups connected
to al-Qaeda. So one of the weird inconsistencies in this is that were we
to get out early, we’d be intensifying the threat against us of a super
powerful Sunni extremist group, which was now legitimated by overt
Saudi funding in an effort to hang onto a toehold inside Iraq and block
Iranian expansionism.
AMY GOODMAN: And
interestingly, today, John Negroponte has just become the number two
man, resigning his post as National Intelligence Director to go to the
State Department, Seymour Hersh says, because of his discomfort that the
administration’s covert actions in the Middle East so closely echo the
Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, and Negroponte was involved with that.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well,
I’m sure there are a lot of reasons why John would go back to the State
Department. John’s a good — he’s a good man. But, you know, the
question is, in government is, can you — are you bigger than your job?
Because if you’re not bigger than your job, you get trapped by the
pressures of events and processes into going along with actions that you
know you shouldn’t. And I don’t know. I don’t know why he left the
National Intelligence Director’s position. He started in the State
Department. Maybe he’s got a fondness to return and finish off his
career in State.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about — do you know who the generals are, who are threatening to resign if the United States attacks Iran?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: No, I don’t. No, I don’t. And I don’t want to know.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you agree with them?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well,
I’ll put it this way. On Labor Day weekend of 1994, when I was the J5 —
I was a three-star general. I was in the Pentagon. And it was a
Saturday morning, and so I was in the office. Walt Kross was the
director of the Joint Staff, and he was in the office. And I think it
was either Howell Estes or Jack Sheehan who was the J3 at the time. The
three of us — I think it was Jack still on the job for the last couple
of days. And the three of us were in Shalikashvili’s office about 11:00
in the morning on a Saturday morning, and he had just come back from a
White House meeting. And he was all fired up in the way that Shali could
be. And he said, “So,” he said, “we will see who will be the real
soldiers this weekend! There’s much work to be done! This operation on
Haiti has to be completed! The planning must be done correctly, and it
must be done this weekend! So we will see who are the real soldiers!”
Then the phone buzzed, and he got up from
this little round table the four of us were sitting at to take the call
from the White House. We started looking at each other. We said, “Gosh,
I wonder where this came from.” I mean, we were all getting ready to
check out of the building in an hour or so. We had finished off the
messages and paperwork. And we just usually got together because there
was normally a crisis every Saturday anyway, and so we normally would
come in for the Saturday morning crisis. And so, Shali came back, and so
I said to him, I said, “Well, sir, we’ve been talking amongst
ourselves, and we’re happy to work all weekend to get all this done, but
this is just a drill, right, on Haiti?”
He looked at me, and he said, “Wes,” he
said, “this is no drill.” He said, “I’m not authorized to tell you this.
But,” he said “the decision has been made, and the United States will
invade Haiti. The date is the 20th” — I think it was this date — “of the
20th of September. And the planning must be done, and it must be done
now. And if any of you have reservations about this, this is the time to
leave.” So I looked at Jack, and I looked at Walt. They looked at me. I
mean, we kind of shrugged our shoulders and said, “OK, if you want to
invade Haiti, I mean, it’s not illegal. It’s not the country we’d most
like to invade. The opposition there consists of five armored vehicles.
But sure, I mean, if the President says to do it, yeah, we’re not going
resign over it.” And so, we didn’t resign. Nobody resigned.
But Shali was a very smart man. He knew.
He knew he was bigger than his job, and he knew that you had to ask
yourself the moral, legal and ethical questions first. And so, I’m
encouraged by the fact that some of these generals have said this about
Iran. They should be asking these questions first.
AMY GOODMAN: General
Wesley Clark. He says he thinks about running for president again every
day. We’ll come back to my interview with him in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: We go back to my interview with General Wesley Clark.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the soldiers who are saying no to going to Iraq right now?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Iraq?
AMY GOODMAN: To going to
Iraq. People like First Lieutenant Ehren Watada, first commissioned
officer to say no to deploy. And they just declared a mistrial in his
court-martial. He will face another court-martial in a few weeks. What
do you think of these young men and women — there are now thousands —
who are refusing? But, for example, Ehren Watada, who says he feels it’s
wrong. He feels it’s illegal and immoral, and he doesn’t want to lead
men and women there.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well, I think, you know, he’s certainly made a personally courageous statement. And he’ll pay with the consequences of it.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think he should have to go to jail for that?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well,
I think that you have to have an effective armed forces. And I think
that it’s not up to the men and women in the Armed Forces to choose
where they’ll go to war, because at the very time you need the Armed
Forces the most is — there will be a certain number of people who will
see it the other way. And so, I support his right to refuse to go, and I
support the government’s effort to bring charges against him. This is
the way the system works.
Now, the difference is, the case that I
described with Shalikashvili is, we would have been given the chance to
retire. We would have left our jobs. We might not have retired as
three-star generals, because we hadn’t done our duty. But we weren’t in
the same circumstance that he is, so there wasn’t necessarily going to
be charges brought against us.
But an armed forces has to have
discipline. It’s a voluntary organization to join. But it’s not
voluntary unless it’s illegal. And you can bring — the trouble with Iraq
is it’s not illegal. It was authorized by the United States Congress.
It was authorized by the United Nations Security Council resolution.
It’s an illegitimate war, but not an illegal war.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think it’s wrong?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: It’s
wrong to fight in Iraq? Well, I think it’s a mistake. I think it’s a bad
strategy. I think it’s brought us a lot of grief, and it will bring us a
lot more grief. I think it’s been a tremendous distraction from the war
on terror, a diversion of resources, and it’s reinforced our enemies.
But on the other hand, his case is a moral case, not a legal case. And
if you’re going to be a conscientious objector morally like this, then
what makes it commendable is that you’ll take your stand on principle
and pay the price. If there’s no price to be paid for it, then the
courage of your act isn’t self-evident. So he’s taken a very personally
courageous stand. But on the other hand, you have to also appreciate the
fact that the Armed Forces has to be able to function.
So, you know, in World War I in France,
there were a series of terribly misplaced offensives, and they brought —
they failed again and again and again. The French took incredible
losses. And these were conscript armies. And after one of these
failures, a group of thousands of soldiers simply said, “We’re not doing
this again. It’s wrong.” You know what the French did? They did what
they call decimation. They lined up the troops. They took every tenth
soldier, and they shot them. Now, the general who ordered that, he
suffered some severe repercussions, personally, morally, but after that
the soldiers in France didn’t disobey. Had the army disintegrated at
that point, Germany would have occupied France. So when you’re dealing
with the use of force, there is an element of compulsion in the Armed
Forces.
AMY GOODMAN: But if the
politicians will not stop it — as you pointed out, the Democrats joined
with the Republicans in authorizing the war — then it’s quite
significant, I think, that you, as a general, are saying that this man
has taken a courageous act. Then it’s up to the people who are being
sent to go to say no.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Yeah.
But the courage that we need is not his courage. We need the courage of
the leaders in the United States government: the generals who could
affect the policy, the people in Congress who could force the President
to change his strategy. That’s the current — that’s the courage that’s
needed.
AMY GOODMAN: And how could they do that?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well,
you start with a non-binding resolution in the United States Congress,
and you build your momentum from there. And you keep hammering it. The
Congress has three principal powers. It has the power to appoint, power
to investigate, power to fund. And you go after all three. On all three
fronts, you find out what the President needs, until he takes it
seriously. I think it’s a difficult maneuver to use a scalpel and say,
“Well, we’re going to support funding, but we’re not going to support
funding for the surge,” because that’s requiring a degree of
micro-management that Congress can’t do.
But you can certainly put enough squeeze
on the President that he finally calls in the leaders of the Congress
and says, “OK, OK, what’s it going to take? I’ve got to get my White
House budget passed. I’ve got to get thirty judges, federal judges,
confirmed. I’ve got to get these federal prosecutors — you know, the
ones that I caused to resign so I could handle it — they’ve got to get
replacements in place. What do I have to do to get some support here?” I
mean, it could be done. It’s hard bare-knuckle government.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think Congress should stop funding the war?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: I
think Congress should take a strong stand to get the strategy changed. I
don’t think that if you cut off funding for the war, it’s in the —
right now that’s not in the United States’ interest. What is in the
United States’ interest is to change the strategy in the war. You cannot
succeed by simply stopping the funding and saying, “You’ve got six
months to get the Americans out.” That’s not going to end the misery in
Iraq. It’s not going to restore the lives that have been lost. And it’s
not going to give us the power in the region to prevent later threats.
What we do have to do is have a strategy
that uses all the elements of America’s power: diplomatic, economic,
legal and military. I would send a high-level diplomatic team into the
region right now. I’d have no-holds-barred and no-preconditioned
discussion with Iran and Syria. And I would let it be known that I’ve
got in my bag all the tricks, including putting another 50,000 troops in
Iraq and pulling all 150,000 troops out. And we’re going to reach an
agreement on a statement of principles that brings stability and peace
and order to the region. So let’s just sit down and start doing it. Now,
that could be done with the right administrative leadership. It just
hasn’t been done.
You know, think of it this way. You’re on
a ship crossing the Atlantic. It’s a new ship. And it’s at night. And
you’re looking out ahead of the ship, and you notice that there’s a part
of the horizon. It’s a beautiful, starry night, except that there’s a
part of the horizon, a sort of a regular hump out there where there are
no stars visible. And you notice, as the ship plows through the water at
thirty knots, that this area where there are no stars is getting
larger. And finally, it hits you that there must be something out there
that’s blocking the starlight, like an iceberg. So you run to the
captain. And you say, “Captain, captain, there’s an iceberg, and we’re
driving right toward it.” And he says, “Look, I can’t be bothered with
the iceberg right now. We’re having an argument about the number of deck
chairs on the fore deck versus the aft deck.” And you say, “But you’re
going to hit an iceberg.” He says, “I’m sorry. Get out of here.” So you
go to the first officer, and he says, “I’m fighting with the captain on
the number of deck chairs.”
You know, we’re approaching an iceberg in
the Middle East in our policy, and we’ve got Congress and the United
States — and the President of the United States fighting over troop
strength in Iraq. It’s the wrong issue. The issue is the strategy, not
the troop strength.
AMY GOODMAN: General Clark, do you think Guantanamo Bay should be closed?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN: If Congress cut off funds for the prison there, it would be closed. Should they?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well,
I think the first thing Congress should do is repeal the Military
Commissions Act. I’m very disturbed that a number of people who are
looking at the highest office in the land have supported an act which
advertently or inadvertently authorizes the admission into evidence of
information gained through torture. That’s not the America that I
believe in. And the America that I believe in doesn’t detain people
indefinitely without charges. So I’d start with the Military Commissions
Act.
Then I’d get our NATO allies into the
act. They’ve said they don’t like Guantanamo either. So I’d like to
create an international tribunal, not a kangaroo court of military
commissions. And let’s go back through the evidence. And let’s lay it
out. Who are these people that have been held down there? And what have
they been held for? And which ones can be released? And which ones
should be tried in court and convicted?
You see, essentially, you cannot win the
war on terror by military force. It is first and foremost a battle of
ideas. It is secondly a law enforcement effort and a cooperative effort
among nations. And only as a last resort do you use military force. This
president has distorted the capabilities of the United States Armed
Forces. He’s used our men and women in uniform improperly in Guantanamo
and engaged in actions that I think are totally against the Uniform Code
of Military Justice and against what we stand for as the American
people.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think that President Bush should be impeached?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well,
I think we ought to do first thing’s first, which is, we really need to
understand and finish the job that Congress started with respect to the
Iraq war investigation. Do you remember that there was going to be a
study released by the Senate, that the senator from Iowa or from Kansas
who was the Republican head of the Senate Intelligence Committee was
going to do this study to determine whether the administration had, in
fact, misused the intelligence information to mislead us into the war
with Iraq? Well, I’ve never seen that study. I’d like to know where that
study is. I’d like to know why we’ve spent three years investigating
Scooter Libby, when we should have been investigating why this country
went to war in Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: The Center
for Constitutional Rights has filed a complaint against Donald Rumsfeld,
General Miller and others in a German court, because they have
universal jurisdiction. Do you think that Donald Rumsfeld should be
tried for war crimes?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well,
I’d like to see what the evidence is against Rumsfeld. I do know this,
that there was a lot of pressure put on the men and women in uniform to
come up with intelligence. I remember — I think it was either General
Sanchez or General Abizaid, who stated that we don’t need more troops —
this is the fall of 2003 — we just need better information. Well, to me,
that was immediate code words that we were really trying to soak these
people for information.
And it’s only a short step from there to
all the kinds of mistreatment that occur at places like Abu Ghraib. So
we know that Al Gonzales wrote a couple of really — or authored, or his
people authored and he approved, a couple of outrageous memos that
attempted to define torture as deliberately inflicted pain, the
equivalent of the loss of a major bodily organ or limb, which is — it’s
not an adequate definition of torture. And we know that he authorized,
to some degree, some coercive methods, which we have — and we know
President Bush himself accepted implicitly in a signing statement to a
2005 act on military detainees that he would use whatever methods were
appropriate or necessary. So there’s been some official condoning of
these actions.
I think it’s a violation of international
law and a violation of American law and a violation of the principles
of good government in America. There have always been evidences of
mistreatment of prisoners. Every army has probably done it in history.
But our country hasn’t ever done it as a matter of deliberate policy.
George Washington told his soldiers, when they captured the Hessians and
the men wanted to run them through, because the Hessians were brutal
and ruthless, he said, “No, treat them well.” He said, “They’ll join our
side.” And many of them did. It was a smart policy, not only the right
thing to do, but a smart policy to treat the enemy well. We’ve made
countless enemies in that part of the world by the way we’ve treated
people and disregarded them. It’s bad, bad policy.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask — you’re a FOX News contributor now?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Oh, at least.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to
ask you what you think of the dean of West Point, Brigadier General
Patrick Finnegan, together with a military interrogator named Tony
Lagouranis and the group Human Rights First, going to the heads of the
program 24, very popular hit show on FOX, to tell them that
what they’re doing on this program, glorifying torture, is inspiring
young men and women to go to Iraq and torture soldiers there, and to
stop it?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: And not only that, but it doesn’t work. Yeah, Pat Finnegan is one of my heroes.
AMY GOODMAN: So what do you think about that?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: I think it’s great.
AMY GOODMAN: And have you been involved in the conversation internally at FOX, which runs 24, to stop it?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well,
as far as I know, they actually put out a call to all the writers in
Hollywood. My son’s a writer, and he was one of them who got a call.
They were all told: stop talking about torture. It doesn’t work. So I
think it was an effective move by Pat Finnegan.
AMY GOODMAN: So you support it?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN: General
Wesley Clark. I’m interviewing him at the 92nd Street Y. We’re going to
come back to the conclusion of that interview in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN: General
Wesley Clark recently edited a series of books about famous US generals:
Grant, LeMay, Patton and Eisenhower. When I interviewed him at the 92nd
Street Y, I asked him a question about the presidency of General Dwight
Eisenhower
AMY GOODMAN: 1953 was
also a seminal date for today, and that was when Kermit Roosevelt, the
grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, went to Iran and led a coup against
Mohammed Mossadegh under Eisenhower.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: People
make mistakes. And one of the mistakes that the United States
consistently made was that it could intervene and somehow adjust
people’s governments, especially in the Middle East. I don’t know why we
felt that — you can understand Latin America, because Latin America was
always an area in which people would come to the United States, say,
“You’ve got to help us down there. These are banditos, and they don’t
know anything. And, you know, they don’t have a government. Just
intervene and save our property.” And the United States did it a lot in
the ’20s. Of course, Eisenhower was part of that culture. He had seen
it.
But in the Middle East, we had never been
there. We established a relationship during World War II, of course, to
keep the Germans out of Iran. And so, the Soviets and the Brits put an
Allied mission together. At the end of World War II, the Soviets didn’t
want to withdraw, and Truman called their bluff in the United Nations.
And Eisenhower knew all of this. And Iran somehow became incorporated
into the American defense perimeter. And so, his view would have been,
we couldn’t allow a communist to take over.
AMY GOODMAN: But wasn’t it more about British Petroleum?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Oh,
it’s always — there are always interests. The truth is, about the Middle
East is, had there been no oil there, it would be like Africa. Nobody
is threatening to intervene in Africa. The problem is the opposite. We
keep asking for people to intervene and stop it. There’s no question
that the presence of petroleum throughout the region has sparked great
power involvement. Whether that was the specific motivation for the coup
or not, I can’t tell you. But there was definitely — there’s always
been this attitude that somehow we could intervene and use force in the
region. I mean, that was true with — I mean, imagine us arming and
creating the Mujahideen to keep the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Why
would we think we could do that? But we did. And, you know, my lesson on
it is, whenever you use force, there are unintended consequences, so
you should use force as a last resort. Whether it’s overt or covert, you
pay enormous consequences for using force.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about what you think of the response to Jimmy Carter’s book,Peace, Not Apartheid.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well,
I’m sorry to say I haven’t read the book. And it’s one of the things
I’ve been meaning to read, and I just haven’t. I will tell you this,
that we’re in a very, very difficult position in Israel. I say “we,”
because every American president has committed to the protection and
survival of the state of Israel. And I think that’s right. And I
certainly feel that way, and I’m a very strong supporter of Israel.
But somehow we’ve got to move off top
dead center in terms of these discussions with the Palestinians. And
this administration has failed to lead. They came into office basically
determined not to do anything that Bill Clinton did. I think that was
the basic guideline. And so, they have allowed unremitting violence
between Israel and the Palestinians with hardly an effort to stop that
through US leadership. And now, it’s almost too late. So Condi was over
there the other day, and she didn’t achieve what she wanted to achieve,
and people want to blame the Saudis. But at least the Saudis tried to do
something at Mecca by putting together a unity government. So I fault
the administration.
Jimmy Carter has taken a lot of heat from
people. I don’t know exactly what he said in the book. But people are
very sensitive about Israel in this country. And I understand that. A
lot of my friends have explained it to me and have explained to me the
psychology of people who were in this country and saw what was happening
in World War II, and maybe they didn’t feel like they spoke out
strongly enough, soon enough, to stop it. And it’s not going to happen
again.
AMY GOODMAN: General Clark, I wanted to ask you a tough question about journalists.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well, now, that would be the first tough question you’ve asked me tonight.
AMY GOODMAN: There are
more than a hundred journalists and media workers in Iraq who have died.
And particularly hard hit are Arab journalists. I mean, you had Tariq
Ayoub, the Al Jazeera reporter, who died on the roof of Al Jazeera when
the US military shelled Al Jazeera, then went on to shell the Palestine
Hotel and killed two reporters, a Reuters cameraman and one from
Telecinco in Spain named Jose Couso. Many Arab journalists feel like
they have been targeted, the idea of shooting the messenger. But this
tough question goes back to your being Supreme Allied Commander in
Yugoslavia and the bombing of Radio Television Serbia. Do you regret
that that happened, that you did that?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: No, I
don’t regret that at all. That was part of the Serb command and control
network. And not only that, I was asked to take out that television by a
lot of important political leaders. And before I took it out, I twice
warned the Serbs we were going to take it out. We stopped, at one news
conference in the Pentagon, we planted the question to get the attention
of the Serbs, that we were going to target Serb Radio and Television.
AMY GOODMAN: RTS.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Yeah.
And that night, in fact, Milosevic got the warning, because he summoned
all the foreign journalists to come to a special mandatory party at RTS
that night. But we weren’t bombing that night. We put the word out
twice before we actually I did it.
AMY GOODMAN: You told CNN, which was also there, to leave?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: I
told — I used — I think I used CNN to plant the story and to leak it at
the Pentagon press conference. But we didn’t tell anyone specifically to
leave. What we told them was it’s now a target. And it was Milosevic
who determined that he would keep people there in the middle of the
night just so there would be someone killed if we struck it. So we
struck it during the hours where there were not supposed to be anybody
there.
AMY GOODMAN: But you killed civilians.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Six people died.
AMY GOODMAN: I think sixteen. But I think it’s the media — it’s the beauticians, the technicians. It was a civilian target.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Yeah, they were ordered to stay there by Milosevic. Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: But it was a civilian target.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: It was not a civilian target. It was a military target. It was part of the Serb command and control network
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of Amnesty International calling it a war crime?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well,
I think it was investigated by the International Criminal Tribunal in
Yugoslavia and found to be a legitimate target. So I think it’s
perfectly alright for Amnesty International to have their say, but
everything we did was approved by lawyers, and every target was blessed.
We would not have committed a war crime.
AMY GOODMAN: Upon
reflection now and knowing who died there, the young people, the people
who worked for RTS, who — as you said, if Milosevic wanted people to
stay there, they were just following orders.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well,
it was a tragedy. But I’ll tell you something. If you want to talk
about tragedies, how about this one? We bombed what we thought was a
Serb police station in Kosovo. We saw the Serb vehicles. We flew
unmanned aerial vehicles over it. And we did everything we could to
identify it. And we found that there were Serb police vehicles parked
there at night, so we sent an F-16 in, dropped two 500-pound
laser-guided bombs and took it out. We killed eighty Albanians who had
been imprisoned by the Serbs there. They were trying to escape, and the
Serbs locked them up in this farmhouse and surrounded them with
vehicles. So, I regret every single innocent person who died, and I
prayed every night that there wouldn’t be any innocent people who died.
But this is why I say you must use force only as a last resort.
I told this story to the high school kids
earlier, but it bears repeating, I guess. We had a malfunction with a
cluster bomb unit, and a couple of grenades fell on a schoolyard, and
some, I think three, schoolchildren were killed in Nish. And two weeks
later, I got a letter from a Serb grandfather. He said, “You’ve killed
my granddaughter.” He said, “I hate you for this, and I’ll kill you.”
And I got this in the middle of the war. And it made me very, very sad.
We certainly never wanted to do anything like that. But in war,
accidents happen. And that’s why you shouldn’t undertake military
operations unless every other alternative has been exhausted, because
innocent people do die. And I think the United States military was as
humane and careful as it possibly could have been in the Kosovo
campaign. But still, civilians died. And I’ll always regret that.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think cluster bombs should be banned?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: You
know, we used, I think 1,400-plus cluster bombs. And there’s a time when
you have to use cluster bombs: when they’re the most appropriate and
humane weapon. But I think you have to control the use very carefully.
And I think we did in Yugoslavia.
AMY GOODMAN: Right now,
the US has rejected an international call to ban the use of cluster
bombs. On Friday, forty-six countries were in Oslo to develop a new
international treaty to ban the use of cluster munitions by — I think
it’s 2008. Would you support that?
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Well,
you know, people who are against war often make the case by trying to
attack the weapons of war and stripping away the legitimacy of those
weapons. I’ve participated in some of that. I’d like to get rid of
landmines. I did participate in getting rid of laser blinding weapons.
And I was part of the team that put together the agreement that got rid
of laser blinding weapons. I’d like to get rid of nuclear weapons. But I
can’t agree with those who say that force has no place in international
affairs. It simply does for this country. And I would like to work to
make it so that it doesn’t. But the truth is, for now it does. And so, I
can’t go against giving our men and women in uniform the appropriate
weapons they need to fight, to fight effectively to succeed on the
battlefield, and to minimize their own casualties.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’ll have to leave it there. I thank you very much, General Wesley Clark.
GEN. WESLEY CLARK: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: General
Wesley Clark. I interviewed him at the 92nd Street Y, the cultural
center here in New York, on the publication of the Great General Series,
on Grant, LeMay, Patton and Eisenhower.
(democracynow/stopiranwar/myartikel/ABNS)