The following is a tapped lecture by,
retired four-star US General Wesley Clark given in 2007 at the Commonwealth
Club of California. Clark babbles about a lot of
issues; after all, he is a former presidential candidate, and more importantly,
he is marketing a new book. However, he admits to the following:
- In 2001 the US had already taken the decision to take
down the governments of 7 countries (Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia,
Sudan, and Iran) in 5 years.
- The US was taken over by a group of people with a policy
coup, Wolfowitz and Cheney and Rumsfeld and you could name a half dozen
other collaborators from the project for a new American century. They want
to destabilize the Middle East, turn it upside down, and make it under their
control.
Below is a transcript of this lecture. In my
humble view, General Clark’s abilities to understand history strike me as,
dangerously handicapped and limited to the “face value” of events he lived or
learned about. This shows lucidly when he analyzes the Cold war and the reasons
underlying the fall of the Soviet Union (Highlighted
in Blue: bogus, superficial, pure American). It also
shows when he naively dismisses the creation of the Israeli State as the root
of all evil, when he judges the invasion of Afghanistan as a right decision,
and when gives his opinion about Iran, Lebanon and Hezbollah, Syria, and Israel
(Highlighted in Bold Fuchsia: completely bogus
and false; no understanding whatsoever about the great and real Zionist threat
embodied in the State of Israel). Stuff
highlighted in Bold Red is just amazing to read!
There is
also a shorter version of this video (its beginning and end are indicated in the text). Enjoy!
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START OF LECTURE
THE COLD: REASONS WHY THE US
WON
The beginning of this
problem with Iraq and Afghanistan and the war on terror and all of that...it's
not with the birth of Mohammed, and it's not with the
founding of the state of Israel. It's actually 1989, it was
the year of miracles in Europe.
It was the year in which the
Berlin Wall came down. It was the year in which the Soviet Empire in Eastern
Europe collapsed. It was the year in which we are generally credited with
having won the Cold War. We won the Cold War with an integrated civil,
political, diplomatic, economic and military strategy that was calling upon all
of America's resources and strengths to contain the expansion of communism
and deter the use of Soviet military power.
...The strategy was actually
formulated in the late 40's by Harry Truman and it was carried by Eisenhower...Republicans
always believe we should have more weapons and talk tougher and threaten more
people...Democrats always said, can't we be nicer and have more
negotiations and can't we sign more treaties...but those abroad common
agreement, that this was America's purpose in the world...And so Truman,
Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Reagan all carried this strategy
forward until the Soviet Union collapsed.
....It was
unthinkable to us that we would win...the Berlin Wall was down. We couldn't
believe it. And within two years the Soviet Union had collapsed. We won the
greatest victory of the 20th Century. We won it without ever having fought
the Russians directly.
REASONS WHY THE US WON THE
COLD WAR
We won it (the Cold War)
because we:
- Built our economy and Eisenhower said America's greatest
strength was our economic strength.
- Took our military and trained them, but we told them
that their real purpose was to deter war, not to fight war.
- Took our educational system and we tried to sharpen
it for training and teaching and science and education and technology
to compete with the Soviets on Sputnik and the race to the moon.
- Took our young people and we appointed the football
coach from Oklahoma to be the Presidential Physical Fitness Advisor
for America.
- (Encouraged) young people to be physically fit and get a
presidential physical fitness badge
- Did a lot of things to try to harness America:.
- Brought tens of thousands of young people here to
study and see our ideas.
- Sent American companies abroad.
- Encouraged them to hire local people and then bring
them back here for training. Those multinational corporations were
America's eyes and ears and ambassadors on the world.
All of that was designed to contain the spread of communism and deter
the Soviet Union and it worked.
THE COLD WAR IS OVER: IT IS
THE END OF HISTORY
But when we won the Cold War,
we lost our strategy. We had no adversary:
- We lost our purpose in the world.
- We lost the organizing principles that held the
American society together and focused just on the outer world
- We lost the organizing principles that kept the
NATO alliance together.
- We were in a new world. It was so new that
Harvard historian Francis Fujiyama it the end of history.
- George Bush proclaimed a new world order.
SIX DAYS, FIVE WARS
...Suddenly I was told I
was going to go to Washington, get a third star and be the Director of
Strategic Plans and Policy on the Joint Staff, the highest military staff in
the country. My job was to integrate military thinking with diplomatic and
political strategy.
...When I went up there.
I didn't know what we were doing because there was no Soviet threat, there
was no organizing principle...
...So the 2nd day, I was there...and somebody said, bad news
in Africa, we just had a shoot down of an aircraft by a
missile that shot-down the presents of Rwanda and Burundi...it turned out
it was a French missile and not an American missile...I said well, who are these people on Rwanda and
Burundi. They said [...] we don't have time to brief you on it right now,
but we will get on your calendar and come back and give you the run
down next week...I had already learned, when every time I went to
Shalikashvili's office, he had CNN on continuously.
...I realized - my
learning experience was if you ever want to find out what's happening, you
don't ask the National Military Command Center, you watch CNN.
...So I was leaving
office...on a Friday night (4th day)…I was looking on the CNN
screen, there is fighting, there are soldiers, they are in Africa...I said what
is this, a war movie or what?...My assistant said, oh no
it's some action in Kigali or someplace...I think
it's a French and maybe it's the Belgians.
...So I quickly called the
National Military Command Center and said I am the new J5, I am supposed to
know everything, what's going on in the world and looks like
we got a battle going on in Africa, what's that about? They said, sir we don't
know anything.
I said did you look at CNN,
they said, no sir. So I called the European Command Center in Stuttgart,
Germany...they are supposed to keep up with Africa. I said, what's going
on, they said, we don't know anything about it. So I had to call the
embassies...we were up all night with the State Department trying to
figure out what the French and Belgians were doing.
Saturday morning (5th day), I had a
nine o'clock meeting with Secretary of Defense Bill Perry and they said, if
you impress Perry you may get to go with him on a trip to Korea. So I went
in there and...I discovered we were about to go to war with North Korea.
It seemed like
President Clinton had been there in October of 93...the North Koreans
[...] told (that there's) no nuclear weapons on the Korean peninsula. He got
home, the CIA said, well Mr. President there has been a slight problem, it
seemed like we may have misled you...there is this Korean reactor and they can
take the fuel rods out of it and if they reprocess them, they could
extract plutonium from the spent fuel and that could make a nuclear weapon
and there could be enough plutonium to make two nuclear weapons...And so
we were going to threaten them and we were going to take them to the UN.
And they (North Koreans) said, if you take us to the UN and put sanctions
on us, we will consider it as act of war. And
so the generals in Korea called us to say they say it's a act of war, it's
going to be an act of war.
And on
Sunday (6th day) I got called into a meeting in the White House...there was the Secretary of State Warren Christopher...and
there was Madeleine Albright on a TV screen from New York, she was the UN
Ambassador and Sandy Berger, the Deputy National Security Advisor, Tony Lake,
the National Security Advisor and Bill Perry was there again and
Shalikashvili, my boss was there and several other people, Vice
President's National Security Advisor, and they are
arguing about the Air Rules of Engagement for flying combat air patrols
over Bosnia. And they are talking about what are the
criteria which enable them to shoot Serb aircraft...I am sitting there trying
to follow this conversation. I got a little stenographer's notebook. I am
thinking I have to copy everything down, I couldn't follow it, they
couldn't follow it, they want an aviator in the room, no body understood
the technology, we spent three hours there on a Sunday afternoon and we
ended with nothing. That was my first weekend.
And on
Monday morning (6th day), a guy came in, knocked on
the door, he was a one star general...he said, I have to report something
to you, I am not allowed to tell you this because it's classified
information and it's compartmented. But I and I am representing you in
this compartmented program, but I feel
like how to tell you any way we are planning an invasion of Haiti.
And you know, here I come
up, here it's the end of the Cold War, I don't know why we have armed
forces left and we are about to go to war with North Korea, we are
fighting the war over the Balkans and we are going to invade Haiti. And it
was crazy.
And it was a joke,
because there was no strategy. And so we tried to create a strategy.
We worked really hard to do it. And we labored for year and a half to
create. I mean - What do you do after deterrence and containment? There was
no obvious threat, we knew that there was a threat of regional war, there
was a threat of terrorism, there was a threat of nuclear proliferation,
there was a threat of Russia should be become hostile, but there was no obvious
immediate threat that you could sort of run up the flag and say, look
out here come here they come again, you know. And so how could you use
that to mobilize resources, build alliances, so we really puzzle over
this.
...What would be the 2000
election themes? What would be the top five issues? It was like the
economy, education, social security reform, and may be trade and that was
it. There was nothing about national security, nothing, no significant
foreign policy issues. Now, everything was going great.
And then 9/11happened...what
happened in 9/11 is we didn't have a strategy, we didn't have bipartisan
agreement, we didn't have American understanding of it...we had instead
a policy coup in this country...a policy
coup. Some hard-nosed people took over the direction of American
policy and they never bothered to inform the rest of us.
I went through the Pentagon
ten days after 9/11...An officer from the Joint
Staff called me into his office and said, I would want you to know we are going to attack Iraq. And I said, why? He said, we don't know. I said, will
they tie Saddam to 9/11? He said, no...but I guess, they don't know to do about terrorism and so the they think they can
attack states and they want to look strong...I guess they think if they
take down a state, it will intimidate the terrorists and you know what its
like that old saying, if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem
has to be a nail.
...I walked out of there
pretty upset and then we attacked Afghanistan. I was pretty happy about
that, we should have.
And then I came back to the
Pentagon about six weeks later, I saw the same officer. I said why haven't
we attacked Iraq? We are sill going to attack Iraq. He said, oh sir...it's worse
than that...I just got this memo from the Secretary of Defense's
office, it says we are going to attack and destroy the governments
in in seven countries in five years. We are
going to start with Iraq and then we are going to move to Syria,
Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran; seven countries in five
years.
...I was
so stunned by this, I couldn't begin to talk about it. And I couldn't
believe it would really be true, but that's actually what happened.
These people
took control of the policy in the United States...then it came back to me,
a 1991 meeting I had with Paul Wolfowitz...he was the Under Secretary of
Defense for Policy, it's the number three position of the Pentagon…and I
said to Paul, Mr. Secretary you must be pretty happy with the performance
of the troops in Desert Storm.
And he
(Paul Wolfowitz) said: "well yeah...not really...the truth is
we should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein and we didn't...But one thing
we did learn...we learned that we can use our military in the region in
the Middle East and the Soviets wont stop us...we have got about five or ten
years to clean up those all Soviet client regimes; Syria, Iran, Iraq, -
before the next great super power comes on to challenge us".
It was a pretty stunning
thing, I mean the purpose of the military is to start wars and change
governments, it's not to sort of deter a conflict, we are going to have invade
countries...
This country was taken
over by a group of people with a policy coup, Wolfowitz and Cheney and
Rumsfeld and you could name a half dozen other collaborators from THE PROJECT FOR A NEW AMERICAN CENTURY. They wanted at us to destabilize the
Middle East, turn it upside down, make it under our control.
It went back to those
comments in 1991. Now did anybody tell you that, was there a national
dialogue on this? Did senators and congressman stand up and denounce this plan?
Was there a full-fledged American debate on it? Absolutely not; and there
are still isn't, and that's why we are failing in Iraq, because Iran and
Syria know about the plan. All you have to do is read the Weekly Standard
and Bill Kristol and he blabber mouthed it out all over the world,
Richard, the same way. They could hardly wait to finish Iraq, so they
could move in to Syria. It was like a lay down, oh our legions are going to go
in there.
This wasn't what the
American people voted George Bush in to office, well they didn't actually
vote him to office, but it wasn't what many of the people who it wasn't
what he campaigned on. He campaigned on a humble foreign policy, the most
arrogant foreign policy in American history. He campaigned on no peace
keeping, no nation building and here he is with Afghanistan and Iraqis;
astonishing.
So the root of the problem
is not how many troops are in Iraq, please believe me, don't be mad if you
are a Democrat at your Democratic congressmen because they can't reduce
the troops and frustrate the president. That's not the issue. And if you are Republican don't be mad at the
Democrats because they are fussing with the troops.
Whether you
are Democrat or Republican, if you are an American you ought to be
concerned about the strategy of the United States in this region, what is
our aim, what is our purpose, why are we there, why are Americans dying in this
region? That is the issue (Shorter video version ends here) , for lack of an effective strategy we are going to lose in this
regional battle.
They have to
do with strategy, whether you talk to or isolate Iran, whether you punish
or reform Syria, whether you aid or condemn Lebanon, how you motivate
Egypt, how you deal with Saudi Arabia, those are key elements in a
strategy and there has to be a purpose for it and none of that has been
laid out in any coherent way.
No, its all
about politics, it's what Karl Rove said in January 2002, in Las Vegas, Nevada,
he said, "We going to run this President as a War President."
And you know what? They are succeeding. The Democratic challenge to Iraq
was in my view misplaced.
AND NOW THE
RHETORIC IS HEATING UP AGAINST IRAN
...And now the rhetoric is heating up against Iran. So where is this
going to go? Likely to a strike against Iran it could be strike against nuclear,
could be built as a strike against Iran because there are aiding and abetting
the insurgents who were fighting and killing Americans. And how many
Democratic congressmen do you think will be able to take a strong and
principle stand against this?
Well the answer is: Any
Democrats who want to stand up and say, "No, I believe Iran has a
perfect right to kill and attack American soldiers." Or any congressmen
who wants to say, "No, I have I favor Iran getting a nuclear weapon."
So, do you see he is kind of he owns the playing field, the President
does. It’s not about strategy, it's about politics. It's about election
politics. I am sorry to say, I am so disappointed, we can't seem to
control the dialogue.
And I am out here tonight
begging you to help us get this dialogue reoriented in the right direction
before it's too late and we are engaged in another and deeper war with
more costs, another unnecessary war in this region.
What should we be doing? We
should send a diplomatic region mission to the region. I would put Richard
Holbrooke over there in a heartbeat. Put him on a golf stream gave him a
General, gave him a couple of assistance. So I said, "Dick, see you come
back when you got it sorted out. I am giving you two months. Go visit
every leader in the good, we will give them this; if they are bad, we are
going to do this. And see if you can get make some sense out of this and
build some coherence."
Iran cannot tolerate a
hostile Iraq. We did them a great favor. But Iran is torn between whether
they want to be revolutionary power and up and everything, or whether they want
to be recognized and admitted to the world community as a major regional
power. They just don't know. They got an ongoing debate and like any you
know, good group, they are going to push in both directions as far as they
can until they run to an obstacle, because they like to have it both ways.
Syria, well, they like to
modernize they like to end the conflict with Israel, but on the other hand
they don't have the economic resources, they are under threat, they are
trying to maintain alliance with Iran; so they don't get pushed aside. They are
at odds with the Saudi's. There is no one to make peace.
Lebanon, completely
ripped apart by internal conflict. Israel,
the Palestinians you know about Hezbollah in the north but did you know
that the Hamas movement is heavily infiltrated by Iran and is preparing in
Gaza, the same kind of fortifications that the Israelis went against in south
Lebanon.
AMERICA HAS GOT ITS OWN CHALLENGES
So, there are a lot of
problems in this region, before we use force or threaten force we should
talk to people in the region. There is no guarantee, but if it were up to me I
would pull out two brigades right now, I would that diplomatic mission
over and I'd talk about a big regional strategy.
We have got to extricated our
resources and change our focus from the Middle East to the broader world
around us because while we are bogged down in terrorism, China and India
are growing. They are growing at 10 percent; or in the case if India, nine
percent a year. They are developing new technologies new challenges
new relationships and we are both customers and competitors of these
countries.
And we have got our own
challenges. We have got to fix education in this country and healthcare and
a business environment and re-ignite American technological ingenuity. We
have got to have an energy policy that make sense and gives us greater
flexibility and freedom from dependence on Middle Eastern and Russian Oil.
We have got to deal with problems that are too big for any one nation to
handle but there are national security problems like global warming and
climate change.
All of that is being
impacted by the politically driven excessive focus on war in the Middle
East. We need a real American strategy. And to get that strategy, its about who
we are as Americans. Are we dividers or uniters, bullies or people who
outreach and make friends? Do we fear others or do we welcome others?
Do we build fences
around America or build bridges to invite others into see us? Who are we
as a nation? I think we are open.
I think we are a nation of
immigrants. I think we are a nation of incredible energy, courage, stamina,
endurance don't ever sell America short. I want you to read my book. I
want you to figure out who we are as Americans and I want you to help me
open up this debate into a true dialogue about America's future, not just
an argument about 10,000 US Troops in Iraq. Thank you.
END OF LECTURE
