Draft Wesley Clark 2004

2003-06-05T14:32:00.000-07:00

WESLEY CLARK, speaking at the 2003 Morgenthau Lecture at the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs:

Thank you very much. Like everybody who studied international relations in the 1950s and 1960s, and perhaps even today, we at West Point studied Hans Morgenthau's Politics among Nations. Morgenthau was a realist, and there was something about the label itself that those of us in that granite fortress on the Hudson found appealing. He was what we aspired to be ourselves, realists.

I was reading Morgenthau's great work in the spring of 1965, just as the United States was deepening its military commitment in Vietnam. The first units had been deployed only to guard the airfields. The Vietnamese Airborne Brigade had been virtually destroyed, and South Vietnam had almost been cut in half. Those of us in my class and the class ahead that was about to graduate had a pretty good idea of what might lie ahead, and we looked for strong and thoughtful men, like Hans Morgenthau, for support. Except he didn't support us exactly.

His book was perplexing. It was disturbing. It was worthy of study and reflection. But we didn't want to think too much. We were readying ourselves for warfare in Vietnam -- which we thought of as a contest between respected teams. We weren't particularly reflective about the deeper issues that Morganthau raised. He presented us with a puzzle -- but one set aside by most of my West Point classmates.

Now we are in a different war. In the last couple of weeks, I have been in Italy, Germany, and Canada. The people I encountered were absolutely awestruck by the picture that has emerged of the American armed forces. This is an incredible military machine. You saw it. You saw the faces of the men and women; you saw the commanders; you saw the dirt, the grit, and the grime. You realized that war isn't just about people with mirrored visors in high-tech cockpits; it is about the day-to-day, hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute experience of danger on the battlefield -- danger unforeseen, danger unpredictable, danger that can wreck a life in an instant. And you saw our men and women come through that life-and-death experience in an incredible way.

This is an armed forces that has been thirty years in the building. Having learned the lessons of Vietnam, it has taken advantage of new technology, recruited high-quality men and women, and put together a power and a doctrine that not only makes America proud but also rewrites military possibilities. It's an armed forces that can drive American foreign policy.

As my friends abroad have warned me, not since the Roman legions has a single nation been so powerful militarily, so dominant, so able to impose its will -- and seemingly without significant cost at home. America's armed forces have cast a long shadow over the nation's traditional alliances. Their power incites envy among potential competitors and fear among potential adversaries; it deserves to be talked about and worried about. It fully justifies every French concern about the unipolar American hyper-power.

After what I've seen and heard in recent weeks, I am concerned about the emerging communications gap between America and the rest of the world. We've got to be careful with communication. Our armed forces and the way we use them sends a very, very powerful message abroad.

It's important today to ask ourselves: what does it mean to have armed forces that can engage in an operation like the one just completed in Iraq; what are the implications?

I don't think you can really address these questions unless you first ask: how did we get here? We have to go back to the starting point and figure it out.

The Anticlimax of Victory

The real starting point is not the birth of Mohammad or the Balfour Declaration founding the state of Israel. The real starting point is 1989, the year we won the Cold War. It's the year we brought those satellite nations out from under the sphere of Soviet domination and discovered that they wanted to be with us in the West. They became democracies. And, twenty-four months later, the Soviet Union itself was gone.

People of my generation, especially those of us who served in uniform, just couldn't believe that America had won the Cold War. For our entire adult lives, we had expected that Europe would be divided and that we would live under the threat of a surprise attack by the Soviet Union that would bring the world to the brink of destruction. And then suddenly, in almost the twinkling of an eye, the Cold War was over, and the Soviet Union was gone for good.

But in our moment of triumph, which we celebrated only quietly at a few military bases around the country, we recognized that for all we had won we had also lost. We had lost our foreign policy strategy and a sense of America's purpose in the world. For forty years, we had adhered to a policy of deterrence and a strategy of containment: our entire foreign policy was geared toward preventing war while containing the expansion of the Soviet Union. America knew that it was going to be engaged -- no more appeasement, no more withdrawal. We were out there; we had a mission.

Republicans and Democrats didn't always agree on strategy. For the Democrats it was more about, "Gee, fellows, let's get together and talk about this, and maybe sign some agreements." For the Republicans -- particularly those who fancied themselves, perhaps inappropriately, of the Morgenthau school -- it was a matter of: "Hey, let's be hardheaded about this; let's be tough. We need more forces. We need to make sure nobody out there thinks they can push us around." Nevertheless, at the core of American foreign policy was a bipartisan consensus, which, except at the margins, was beyond debate.

With the winning of the Cold War, we lost that consensus and entered a period of great disorientation [GENERAL CLARK SAID "DIFFICULTY" BUT I THINK WE NEED A MORE PRECISE WORD]. At the time, I was a division commander at Fort Hood, Texas, in command of the First Calvary Division. I had 17,000 troops, 324 tanks, 324 Bradley fighting vehicles, eighteen Apache helicopters, seventy-two tubes of artillery, and fifty-three horses -- that's why we called it the First Calvary Division. It was a great command.

Our division was recovering from Operation Desert Storm. We were preparing for contingency operations in the Middle East -- even though none of us expected it. President George H. Bush had said there was a new world order in play, and Francis Fukuyama, the great Harvard historian, had written a book saying it was the end of history.

And then I received the offer of a promotion to lieutenant general and a new assignment, if I would come to Washington and accept a job as director of strategic plans and policy for the Joint Staff. Now I knew there would never be anything as wonderful as riding that horse around wearing a big, black Stetson with crossed sabers, having the troops come up and say, "Sir, can I pet your horse?" I rode around like that twice a week, for an hour or so at a time. It was an absolutely wonderful way to communicate with the troops. I knew I wasn't going to do that on the Joint Staff, and I wasn't going to get back to the troops again, not in that way; but I accepted the job.

When I got to Washington, I was given three thick binders full of acronyms and problems. It wasn't a new world order exactly, if by that you meant a problem-free international environment. My assignment was to look at strategic military planning, at the political-military interface. That meant going to White House meetings; sitting in the back row in the Situation Room while the Chairman and Secretary of Defense talked; carrying back the information and reporting it to the Defense Department staff; and coordinating our intelligence with staff at the State Department and the National Security Council. Generally, I had to be aware of everything that was going on, so that we give the right kind of guidance to the combatant commanders in the field and to the services back in the Pentagon and elsewhere around the world.

It was a great learning opportunity, and I experienced a lot of surprises.

War as Crisis Management

On my third day in Washington (April 1994), the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi were killed. Three days later, I was leaving the office on my first Friday night, looking forward to the weekend, when someone said, "The French and Belgians have invaded Rwanda. There is fighting in the streets of Kigali."

I said, "What's this all about? Get me a map." We rounded up people before they could leave the building, and someone produced a map. Someone else said, "Sir, there is a tribal conflict. We haven't had time to brief you on it, but there are these two groups called the Hutus and the Tutsis. No, wait a minute, let me go check that. It may be the Tutus and the Hutsis." There was much confusion and some wild phone calls. We called the U.S. European Command. Nobody knew anything about it. (It was being carried on CNN, of course.) Finally, we talked to the Belgian and French embassies and got some explanations. It was my first Friday night -- and my first all-nighter -- in the job.

The following morning, I went to a meeting with Secretary of Defense William Perry in his office. This time we were preparing for a trip to Korea. There was a some urgency because as it turned out, the United States was on the brink of going to war with North Korea. It seemed likely that the North Koreans possessed a couple of atomic weapons, and President Clinton said he could not permit this on the Korean Peninsula. He even threatened to take the matter to the United Nations and ask for sanctions. The Koreans responded, "We'd consider that an act of war." Our commander said, "Well, if they say it's an act of war, these guys are crazy, and they mean it; therefore, I've got to have more troops in Korea." But then the Pentagon said, "If we reinforce South Korea, the North Koreans will see this as war preparations." A true Guns of August scenario was building up.

On Sunday of that weekend, I was called to a special meeting at the White House, my first visit over there in a long time. I sat in the back row of the Situation Room and watched as the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the National Security Advisor talked about an undeclared air war over Yugoslavia. I was waiting for the high-level policy discussions to begin. Instead, they were talking like a group of fighter pilots:
We'll take the planes here, and if this plane comes this way, and if he then turns this way and has his radar off and he's got a 30° cone out the front, and then if the radar illuminates the radar detector on our aircraft, is that a hostile threat or at least a hostile intent meaning we can then engage him?

But what if the radar is on the ground?

Well, there's two modes if the radar is on the ground: there's a target acquisition mode and a target tracking mode.

But also, isn't one a high power and one a low power? Don't you get a final third kind of radar that the missile locks on?It went on like this for three hours, and the odd thing was, there wasn't a fighter pilot in the room. Nobody there had ever seen a Soviet-built, Soviet-designed SAM-6 system; yet we are debating air-to-air tactics and the rules of engagement. I left, totally mystified, looking for the nearest lieutenant colonel fighter pilot to explain it to me. I imagine that's what the cabinet members did, too. That was a moment when many of us realized that the United States had entered a new world.

On Monday -- this was actually my seventh day on the job -- a guy came into my office, tugged on my sleeve, and said, "Sir, I'm not supposed to tell you this, as you're not cleared with a need to know; but since I'm working for you, I want you to know that there's a secret war plan being developed to invade Haiti."

I said, "We're going to invade Haiti? I want to see the plan."

"Sir, you're not cleared to see this. Please, don't tell them I told you about it."

This was the new world order. I watched over the next few weeks as various events unfolded: a near-war with North Korea, an undeclared war in the skies over the former Yugoslavia, a problem with refugees and immigration -- with people taking to the seas in anything that would float and dying en route to Florida -- that would lead to an invasion of Haiti.

I watched as Canadian General Romeo Dallaire, locked up in a soccer stadium with 1,000 African troops and 100 Canadian communicators [DOES THIS REFER TO UN PEACEKEEPERS???], stood by helplessly as 800,000 people were hacked to death by machete in Rwanda -- hacked to death by priests, neighbors, school teachers, and by police who were there to protect them -- while begging for their lives.

The United States in the meantime was examining UN contingency plans. I remember going in and talking to General John Shalikashvili -- Samantha Power has detailed this very elegantly in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, A Problem from Hell -- saying, "Sir, there's a UN plan and they're proposing to send a couple thousand more troops."

He said, "Do you think that will stop it?"

"No, sir, not in a country like that. I mean, a couple of thousand troops is not what you need."

"How many do you think you need?"

"We've looked at it. Maybe 20,000."

"Wes, do you believe that this Congress, after what happened in Somalia, is prepared to put 20,000 Americans on the ground in Central Africa? What is our interest there?"

It was a practical, as well as profound, question. In the end, we never answered it. The genocide ended, and we were still arguing back and forth about war plans.

In Search of a Strategy

A few weeks into this, Shalikashvili called me in and said, "Wes, you have been in this job for a while now, you have been to Korea, you have seen all these problems. We hired you because you're supposed to be so smart. You are a strategist. So tell me, what is the strategy?" It was a trick question, because there wasn't a strategy. We were lurching from event to event, trying to manage crises.

So Shali told me, "Go write the strategy." I worked on this assignment with National Security Advisor Tony Lake and some of his team. I did the national military part of it, and they addressed the broader political issues. But we could not find any consensus on what ought to be happening.

We went around town. We talked to Democrats and Republicans, the Heritage Foundation, Brookings, the American Enterprise Institute, and staffers on the Hill; we also wrote to the war colleges. We said, "What is this? Is it deterrence, coercion [NOTE: GENERAL CLARK SAID "COMPELLANCE"; BUT IS THAT A WORD?], or engagement? What is the U.S. strategy?"

There was one group, consisting mostly of Republicans, who said: "Look, the purpose of the American armed forces is very simple: to fight and win America's wars. You don't have a Soviet Union; you've finished off Saddam Hussein, or nearly so; and if the need for an American military presence ever arises, you can send the troops back. So bring them home."

There were a lot of people who wanted the American troops to come home. "Those Europeans," they said, "they never pay their freight anyway, they're always dumping their burden off on us. Why should we keep our troops in Germany?"

On the other side of the argument were the Democrats, epitomized by Madeleine Albright and her famous question to Colin Powell: "What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" People on this side were suggesting: "Why don't you use it to do humanitarian de-mining -- go save those children in Angola who are getting their arms and legs blown off from landmines? Why don't you deliver relief supplies to the starving refugees from Rwanda? Why don't you stop the war in Bosnia that has killed 150,000 people and made another 2 million homeless?"

The only real area of agreement between the two camps was that both wanted a peace dividend after the Cold War; both agreed the armed forces were too large and had signed on to a reduction, beginning in 1991 under President George H. Bush. This notion pervaded until 1996, when we finally stopped the continuing drawdown, which took away 30 to 35 percent of the strength and the resources our armed forces had at the end of the Cold War.

Tony Lake and I never did put together that comprehensive, comprehensible, publicly supported strategy to take the place of deterrence and containment. Tony wrote a great pamphlet that talked about when to intervene, that talked about engagement and [DEMOCRATIC???] enlargement. And I wrote something for the military and got it approved. These two documents[???] were the closest we ever got to developing a national security strategy [???]. Our proposals never captured the attention of the American people. They, as well as their representatives in Congress, continued to see things through their own lenses.

It wasn't that the American troops weren't busy. We delivered relief supplies to Rwanda. We invaded Haiti. We sent 15,000 troops back to the Persian Gulf in October of 1994. You probably don't remember it, but Saddam moved his troops and prepared to re-invade Kuwait -- in fact, he sent the same divisions from the same Republican Guards back to the same assembly areas they had occupied in July 1990. We couldn't believe it. We preemptively mobilized and deployed, and after a couple of weeks he backed off and we tightened up the no-fly zone, moving it from 32° to 33° north.

After an agonizing spring in 1995 and some tough fighting in the early summer, President Clinton decided that rather than send in 20,000 American troops in a NATO mission to rescue the UN Protection Forces in Bosnia, we may as well try to get a peace agreement using the 20,000 American troops as the bona fides of the American commitment.

I had the privilege, pleasure, and incredible experience of accompanying Richard Holbrooke on that mission. After three months of shuttle diplomacy and talks at Dayton, we secured a peace agreement, and the United States commited 20,000 troops on the ground in Bosnia. We succeeded in stopping that war, and it hasn't resumed since.

In the summer of 1998, we watched anxiously as yet another round of fighting commenced in Yugoslavia, this time in Kosovo. We tried coercive diplomacy to stop it because we knew that NATO's future reputation, as well as the performance of the mission in Bosnia, was at risk.

Our embassies were hit in Africa by Osama bin Laden. We struck back at his camps in Afghanistan.

Saddam Hussein was still denying that he had weapons of mass destruction. We put pressure on him; and when that didn't work and the inspectors didn't go back in and we couldn't get an agreement, we launched four days of very intensive strikes, called Operation Desert Fox, in December of 1998.

Oh, we were active all right, and we were busy. It's just that we never had bipartisan consensus on a foreign policy strategy, nor did we have the approval of the American people.

Lessons from Kosovo

Finally, in March of 1999, after a year of fruitless diplomacy and efforts to head off the fourth conflict in Yugoslavia, NATO entered the conflict. It was a seventy-eight-day air campaign -- in essence, it was war. We launched with 350 aircraft, going up to as many as 1,000, [ALL OF???] which were eventually deployed; we launched with fifty-one targets, ending up with several hundred. During the seventy-eight days, there were 35,000 sorties and 23,000 bombs and missiles. The campaign saw the first use of the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, the first use of the Predator in combat, and the first use of the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM).

By the end of that time, not only had we built up our air forces, we had put 30,000 NATO troops on the ground, including a 5,000-strong U.S. brigade-sized detachment in Albania with a corps headquarters -- [OUTFITTED WITH???] an Apache helicopter unit, tanks, artillery, and rocket launchers. We had another corps headquarters in Macedonia.

We were committed to moving ahead with a ground operation if Slobodan Milosevic didn't give in. We had isolated Milosevic. We had even succeeded in getting Bulgaria and Romania to close their borders to Serbia. And we had told the Russians what was going to happen. They then told Milosevic, "Don't expect too much assistance from us. We're just not capable of it."

On the seventy-ninth day, Milosevic caved in. He gave in to all of NATO's demands. He pulled out all his forces: military, police, and paramilitary. The 500,000 Albanians who had been living in the hills came back to their homes; 900,000 refugees who had fled the country came back in -- the largest spontaneous refugee return since World War II. Some 40,000 NATO forces occupied this province of Yugoslavia.

It was an incredible victory. It really was a victory, not only for NATO but for the principle of humanitarian intervention and for the principle of acting with force to right a wrong. NATO nations should have celebrated that victory, but they didn't. Because they couldn't call it a war, they couldn't call it a victory. And the joyous throngs in the streets of Pristina passed virtually unnoticed in the American media.

We moved on with the peacekeeping operations, the task at hand, under the stern guidance of the Republican-controlled Congress, to come up with our exit strategy and avoid "mission creep."1

Self-Absorbed America

I remember during that time how proud I was of the American armed forces. But I also remember when I came back to the United States in the summer immediately following the conflict, many people didn't even know that our forces had been engaged, that there had been a fight.

Americans were wrapped up in themselves during that period. My friends from other countries -- from South America or Europe -- would come to the United States to visit New York or Chicago or Houston, and they'd report back: "Oh, we loved your country. It was just wonderful. People were incredibly friendly -- they'd help us in the stores, and some even invited us to their homes for dinner or a barbecue." But then they said, "It was a strange thing. We watched your news. We never saw any news about foreign affairs. It was all about what was happening in your country. We never saw any news about our country at all. And when we talked to people, they'd ask us where we were from, and they didn't know the country; they couldn't find it on a map; they didn't know its capital; they didn't know its politics; they didn't know who its president was. We know about your country, we know about your president; but you don't know anything about ours. We care about you because you matter to us. We must not matter to you very much."

They had the feeling we were self-absorbed -- and we were. We were in the middle of the greatest peacetime economic expansion in American history. We were proving to the world that the best emerging market was not in Malaysia but in the United States of America. That's where you got not only the safest return on your investment but the greatest return on your investment. We were absorbed in living the good life.

When I was getting out of the army in the summer of 2000, I stood on the parade field at Fort Meyer, Virginia. My family was there, as were a bunch of my West Point classmates and army friends, with whom I'd served for years. Every four-star does this: you get the parade and the bands marching back and forth, and then they put your last medals on and you make your last speech and say good-bye.

I was watching the troops and thinking, "What a great armed forces." I mean, I was with these people in Vietnam when it was a draftee force. I was there when everybody left [VIETNAM??? THE FORCES???]. I was there when the military was one of the least-respected institutions in the United States -- I think we still outranked Congress, but not by much; we were down at the bottom.

We built that force back up. We put in new equipment, new training, new techniques, and new technology; but most importantly, we put in a new way of developing human potential so that each and every person in uniform could be all they could be. Looking at those soldiers passing back and forth, I felt really proud to have been associated with that effort and with those men and women.

I was also excited about getting out because I had determined I was going to be an investment banker and do my best to emulate George Soros. I had seen what he could do with giving away a few hundred million a year in Europe and had been pretty impressed. In my fondest dreams, I thought that maybe I could make enough money to give it away and make a difference -- and that this would be a worthy thing to do. I was excited about becoming a civilian and having the freedom to try new things.

The Post-9/11 Security Environment

It was the absolute apex of power and influence for America as we knew it, the summer of 2000. Shortly after getting out of the army, I had dinner with a famous Washington publisher. "You know, Wes," he told me, "people really don't care about folks like you much any more, generals and people in uniform. When I was growing up, we always had generals and admirals around our table, and people were always talking about the Soviet threat and how to keep the country safe. It's not important any more, not in the way that it was. It's a shame, really." And he was a man who had fought in Vietnam.

Now all that is changed, especially here in New York, because here, like no place else in the country, people understand that when you are talking about national security you are also talking about personal security. It's a much different country today.

We're now in Afghanistan. We've taken care of the Taliban. We have 10,000 troops over there plus 4,500 peacekeepers. We're still fighting. Hamid Karzai is still in charge in Kabul. The warlords are still in charge in the provinces, selling drugs and dealing weapons and blandishments. That Marshall Plan that was promised a year or so ago -- it hasn't shown up yet. 2

We're now in Iraq with 130,000 U.S. troops and maybe 20,000 Brits. Some people said it would take 200,000 to stabilize the country. Well, we didn't put 200,000 troops in there. We showed them. Yes, there were some items stolen from the Baghdad Museum, and we are still having problems with violence. We haven't even been all the way through Baghdad yet. But we're anxious to pull those troops down because they might be needed for the next mission.

It seems that the plan is to divide Iraq into three sections -- give the Poles the north, the British the south, and the Americans the area around Baghdad -- and then to take the number of troops down to about a division or so by autumn. We need to get our forces back so that they can ready themselves for the next challenge. As the President has told us -- and he said it again in his victory declaration on the aircraft carrier -- Iraq wasn't a war but just one battle in the continuing war on terrorism. We've got more challenges ahead.

By the way, there is also a great investment program for Iraq: $79 billion has been appropriated to make Iraq a model of democracy for the world.

So that's where we're coming from and where we are today. The question remains: what next?

I would suggest that the first thing to understand about the war on terror is that it is not enough to take down states. Within a few days after 9/11 attacks, the decision was taken to go after Saddam Hussein, regardless of whether he was actually involved. There may have been many good reasons for that; and I don't dispute that it certainly sent an object lesson to the world: that the United States has armed forces capable of taking down whole countries.

On the other hand, we should understand that this capability alone will not win the war on terror, because the problem with the war on terror is that terrorists are here in the West; they are in countries that you can't take down. We are not going to attack Germany; we are not even going to attack France, as angry as people are at the French. Both France and Germany are our allies in the war on terror, along with Spain and Italy.

I was in the Pentagon about three months ago, getting one of these unclassified briefings they give to CNN military commentators. Displayed on one of the walls was a chart that showed problem countries in the war on terror. Now you would expect to see Pakistan, Yemen, Kashmir, Nepal, Indonesia, and the Philippines. No, no, no. It was Germany and Spain, our NATO allies. Why? Because their intelligence services are fragmented and their laws aren't up to the task.

You see, it's not about military force if you want to win the war on terror. That's the easy part. It is about the harmonization of laws; it's about agreeing on what terrorism is and having a clearinghouse to get the laws governing terrorist acts standardized across countries, so that the international environment for prosecuting terrorist crimes is seamless. And it's about agreeing on the elements of proof, the standards of admissibility for evidence. If a country has conducted a wiretap that yields substantial proof of engagement in a terrorist cell, they should be able to hand that information to another country for use in court. We're not there yet.

We know that some 3,000 people have been arrested around the world for engaging with al-Qaeda or other terrorist organizations. What we don't know is how many of them were subsequently released. The best I can figure is on the order of between 2,800 and 2,900, because the necessary harmonization of the laws has not yet occurred.

Why don't we use NATO for this? Why can't the ambassadors to NATO orchestrate not only the military strategy but also the pursuit of justice across borders, including criminal investigations, information-sharing, and security clearances? NATO should become an alliance that can help us win the war on terror.

When I was in the middle of the Kosovo campaign, Tony Blair came over to see me in my office. It was an unannounced visit.

He said, "I just want to ask you a single question."

I said, "Can I give you a cup of tea?"

"No."

"I've got this great briefing here on the air campaign, Prime Minister. I'd love to --"

"No briefing," he said. "I just want to ask one question."

"Yes, sir?"

He was sitting on my couch, sort of crunched down, with his elbows on his knees and those bright blue eyes gazing at me, a young man -- at that time, he didn't have much gray hair -- and a very smart man. He said, "I just want to ask you one question: are you going to win?"

"Yes, Prime Minister, we're going to win."

"No, no, stop. I'm seriously asking this question. I want to know: are you going to win?"

I wasn't quite sure where he was coming from. But I remembered that there had been this op ed in the Daily Telegraph a couple of weeks earlier, written by my good friend John Keegan, the eminent British historian, whom I had invited to my battalion twenty years earlier at Fort Carson, Colorado, to talk about his book, The Face of Battle. Now Keegan had offended me by writing in the Daily Telegraph, "It seems like NATO needed a new supreme commander in the midst of war because, well, Clark is a nice young man, he's very smart, and all that; but he just doesn't look enough like Norm Schwarzkopf to be a good commander."

I thought for a few seconds and said, "Prime Minister, I have never lost anything significant in my life, and I am not going to lose this one."

He stared back at me for about thirty seconds and then said, "Okay, good, because the future of my government and of every government in Western Europe depends on the successful outcome of this operation."

I knew right then that I had Tony Blair hooked. He was committed. It wasn't just America's war on Slobodan Milosevic; it was Britain's war on Slobodan Milosevic.

Still in Search of a Strategy

We don't have that quite yet in the war on terror. In the elections in Germany this past summer, the issue wasn't which government was going to best protect Germany from terrorism. In the French elections that put Jacques Chirac back in for another seven years, it wasn't about which party is going to best protect France from terrorism. It should have been.

We need NATO. We need an alliance. We need to get European countries inside our camp, into the same boat, realizing that our war is their war. If Hans Morgenthau were here today, that is the first thing he would say about American strategy concerning the war on terror.

The second thing we've got to do, of course, is to look at our domestic scene. Our government has done a remarkable job post-9/11. There has not been another terrorist incident at all in this country, excluding that gunman who who opened fire near the El Al counter in Los Angeles a year or so ago and shot people -- but he wasn't connected to organized terrorism as far as we know.

We've got the FBI and CIA working together better than they have ever worked before. We have strengthened airport security -- you're not going to get a nail file, much less a weapon, on most of our airplanes, most of the time. (I don't know why they keep reporting that they're confiscating all these guns at airports. I can't understand it. But people are still bringing them in, and hopefully, they're all being taken.)

That said, this country hasn't really scratched the surface on homeland security. We haven't fixed the ports; we haven't fixed the borders; we haven't used modern information technology to help us identify the patterns and the signatures of real terrorist activity before it happens. We've created the Homeland Security Department, but it's still in the throes of the [BUREAUCRATIC REORGANIZATION THIS ENTAILED???]. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) put the damper on [SPENDING MORE MONEY ON HOMELAND SECURITY???] when the budget came in last summer. There was another stall last October, when OMB said no expenditures until March. We've got American private enterprise trying to secure the safety of our country, but we're having a challenging time moving forward. There's a lot more work that needs to be done.

The bottom line is, we've got to get our strategy right. It's not just about military forces, and it's not just about attacking states, and it's not just about being on the offensive. It's about working together with other nations in police and law enforcement activities. It's about taking care of security here at home.

There's also the broader picture to consider. The fact is, the United States represents only about 5 percent of the world's population but is using 25 percent of consumable resources. If Hans Morgenthau were here today, he would tell you that politics among nations is a function of human nature itself. And when you have lands in which people are impoverished, humiliated, resentful, angry, and ignorant, you're providing the ideal culture in which the seeds of terrorism will grow and come back against us again and again. We have to look at these issues.

In closing, I would like to suggest that we develop a strategy that addresses these three issues:

# When do we use force?
Under the threat of terrorism, with fear spreading throughout America, we went on to cast a shadow across the entire world with our doctrine of preemption. Our allies abroad still want to know the precise criteria that justify our use of force, and when.

They're very happy for [THE PEOPLE OF BASRA TO GIVE UP THEIR WEAPONS???] and for Saddam Hussein to be expelled; but when it comes to threatening to use force, they want to know what confers legitimacy on U.S. actions.

We haven't answered that question to their satisfaction yet; but if we're going to put together a strategy that brings this country together and moves us forward in a comprehensive way, we have to do that.

# What should we do about the UN?
One of the justifications for going after Saddam Hussein was that the United Nations couldn't survive if people were allowed to violate UN Security Council resolutions with impunity. Well, we need to revisit our views on the UN. And we need to ask why it is that Syria is in charge of disarmament, and Cuba is about to become in charge of human rights. We need to establish the kind of conditions in the United Nations that will legitimize its actions in the eyes of the American people, and then use the UN for the purposes envisioned by our own leaders a half-century ago.

# What should we do about NATO?
As already mentioned, we should consider giving NATO a mission to help fight the war on terrorism rather than relegating it to the periphery, because we need to get our allies deeply involved in this action.

How do we make our way ahead in the world? Hans Morgenthau understood that we had to be very careful with the grand moral visions that tempt all nations. He understood that we had to beware of the "triumphalist" instinct. He understood that the power of states is constrained and transitory. If he were here today, I think he would say: "Be careful where that incredible military is taking you as you employ it in the war on terror. Be careful of the great visions and the moralistic hopes." Instead, we need to work pragmatically on the problems we are facing today such as the challenges of North Korea's nuclear program 3 and the continuing bloodshed in the Middle East. We need to work on our real interests and avoid the siren song of moral crusades.

And Morgenthau would tell us one more thing. He would warn us to walk softly, with humility, even though we are now the world's lone superpower. That would be good advice for this country in the days ahead.

Thank you very much.

Questions and Answers

QUESTION: You painted a very convincing picture of our problems. What can we do in 2004 to find a leader who will help solve those problems?

WESLEY CLARK: Right now we should be talking about ideas, not candidacies. We've got to get the American people engaged in a dialogue: What does this country stand for; what do we want to be remembered for; how do we want to be viewed abroad; what's going to make us safer at home; what are the right actions, policies?

Incidentally, one of the most serious charges you can level against any man or woman is that they might have presidential aspirations. It's a guaranteed discreditor from serious dialogue. That's an unfortunate commentary on the state of discussion in the United States today, but it has been my observation since leaving the military three years ago.

We ought to be talking about starting up a dialogue. We ought to be challenging the people in office and those who seek it: "Give us the ideas; show us the way; give us the vision; don't dole it out crisis by crisis; tell us where we're going and why; tell us the purpose of our government's actions." That dialogue is not here yet.

Going back to the record on Iraq: as early as October 2001 it was clear to me that the United States would invade Iraq. I knew this was why Vice President Cheney went to the Middle East last spring. But I didn't hear anyone discussing it. Chris Matthews, an MSNBC announcer, came to me in June of last year and asked, "Do you think we're going to invade Iraq?"

I said, "I certainly do."

"Well, I've been trying to get people interested in it, and no one's paying any attention."

Senator Joe Biden held hearings last summer and, as I recall, there wasn't an spokesperson or witness from the Bush administration who would testify. The president, on vacation in Crawford, Texas, said, "What's all this hubbub about Iraq? What's the rush? I'm a patient man." I can't remember Secretary Rumsfeld's comments, but they were along the same lines. Then, two weeks later, Vice President Cheney said, "We've got to hurry and do something about Saddam before there's a mushroom cloud over America," or words to that effect.

We need a dialogue that helps this country formulate a new strategic conception of itself in the world. How do we take advantage of this tremendous opening of trade, communications, technology, travel, and immigration that brought us so much prosperity in the 1990s? How do we take advantage of it but at the same time mitigate the risks? We need a strategy. We don't have one yet. And as much as I love the American armed forces, they are only a part of the solution. They are no substitute for a vision of what America will be in the future.

QUESTION: You alluded to the notion of "mission creep," which was a criticism of you when you were running NATO. Would you comment on the new book by Dana Priest, The Mission, where our armed forces are depicted as so incredibly powerful that they seem to be beyond criticism because they are identified with patriotism. According to Priest, the temptation is to use a military solution even if it's not a solution at all but a new problem.

WESLEY CLARK: Dana Priest has done the most comprehensive job of anyone yet in laying out exactly what our armed forces are truly engaged in. And it is staggering. Our armed forces are already driving American foreign policy. They are the "last resort" problem solver for this country abroad. We have no other action agency. We don't have an agency for international development in the sense that there isn't anything like what Bob Komer put together in Vietnam, called Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support, which really did modernize and change the economy of South Vietnam dramatically, even during the course of the war. We don't have an agency like that today.

What we do have are military units that venture out on a mission to maintain order -- and then end up tracking down the troublemakers and doing police-type investigatory work. Meantime, none of the important work -- the development of a political structure, the creation of an effective judicial code, the ability to train judges to implement that code, the creation of a prison system to confine perpetrators or violators of the criminal code, the ability to handle property disputes that have simmered for years 4 -- is being addressed, and it cannot be addressed by men and women in uniform. That's not their job; that's not their training. It takes them way beyond the bounds of their competency, much less authority. So who should be doing it?

One of the key issues is this problem of nation building. You can't duck it by calling it a dirty word and saying you're not going to do it. It has to be done. The failure of states to meet the needs of their citizens can lead to conflict, both internally and externally. Thus we have to help rescue these states -- not out of altruism, not simply because it's right, but because it's in our very real interest to do so.

I hope we will find out who is actually responsible for putting that Marshall Plan in place in Iraq [??? THE ORIGINAL SAID "AFGHANISTAN"]. I'm pretty sure it's not the Secretary of Defense -- I mean, he doesn't do economic development. If it's the State Department -- well, they're interested in foreign policy, but they're not an action agency in the sense of having a trained cadre of civil engineers, not to mention lines of funding and accountability and perk charts. That's not up to Colin Powell's office, at least not to my knowledge. And although Colin is a remarkable guy, there's only so much any one person can do.

I think you need a Cabinet-level official to help move this process forward, at least on a temporary basis, someone who can take over all the strands of authority and say, "Look here, Iraq is my problem, not the military's problem. They're working for me here."

Until we get that, we're going to continue to encounter the kinds of problems that Dana Priest cited in her book, and we'll continue to see the resurgence of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in places like Afghanistan, and the entrance of al-Qaida recruiters and Shi'ite fundamentalist recruiters into places like Iraq.

QUESTION: General Clark, you raised a question in both your last answer and in the course of your presentation about the strategic policy of the American government, which you say was not formulated years ago and still isn't formulated now. Strategically, what do you think is the right direction for American foreign policy?

WESLEY CLARK: The first thing you should do is have a dialogue with the American public to try to bring them back on board. We have lost the American people out somewhere in the hinterlands, in places like Kansas and Arkansas and Mississippi. To them there was something nasty about the term "mission creep." We've got to bring them through this learning process and make them aware that they are living in a changed world. If we don't get the information out to the public first, we'll never be able to set in place the policy that needs to emerge.

Then we need to work with our representatives in the House and in the Senate. We need to put together the right agencies of government to deal with the problem of failed states. That is at least 30 percent of the problem.

Next we need to take the terrorist issue and make sure we are responding to it not only with military strikes, law enforcement measures, and reprisals but also with an understanding of Islam. Once we know what's motivating the terrorists, and can perceive the sources of the terrorist education, we should be able to take preventive measures to stem the flow of funds from Saudi Arabia to the madrassas [Islamic religious schools]; change the curriculum in the madrassas; and work against the folks in Pakistan who are opposing General Musharraf and feeding the terrorist threat there, in Kashmir and elsewhere. So we need a broader set of policies to deal with terrorism.

Third, and as I mentioned in my presentation, we need to step back again and look at our international institutions and where we want the world to be in thirty and fifty years. What we have to do is continue to formulate a code of behavior for states.

Yes, weapons of mass destruction do change the nature of the threat because it is no longer just a state, but a band of individuals, that can wreak enormous damage on another country. That means you've got to have closer cooperation between and among states.

But such cooperation cannot be imposed from without. No matter how powerful our military, we don't have unlimited power, and especially not unlimited staying power. It has to be arrived at on the basis of consensus; and the place to begin that consensus is by working with other like-minded democracies. We urgently need to sit down and talk to them.

President Bush has put his chips on the table. And his chip is a big one: it's the United States armed forces, which can go anywhere, any time, and attack anyone who is a challenger or a potential challenger to the United States.

If I were another country, I would be quite concerned about that -- and they are. And I would be willing to listen and dialogue with the United States intensively about this -- and they are. But we need to do our part in laying out the framework for that dialogue.

How do we take the United Nations and NATO to the next level of dealing with threats in the international environment? Those organizations were set up to resolve disputes between nations, but this is no longer enough to provide security. You've got to go deeper into the fabric of each nation, making sure they are fulfilling their responsibilities to the rest of the world by controlling the behavior of errant citizens and limiting the damage they might do abroad. Countries should all be working together on that goal and on sharing information cooperatively. If we do that, maybe we can reduce our reliance on the military in this process.

So these are three elements of strategy. And that strategy must then be linked with the economic piece, the environmental piece, and all the other elements that govern our intercourse with other nations; and then it's got to be understood by the American people. We are not quite there yet. There is a lot of labor that still needs to go into creating a comprehensive plan.

QUESTION: I think it was John Adams who once said that America was going to be the next superpower but the real question was what kind of different superpower it would be, as opposed to Great Britain. Your presentation gave an inspiring answer to that question. I would like to know what you think about current efforts in Europe to develop an independent defense mechanism or an independent defense force, and what the status of that effort is right now?

WESLEY CLARK: Europe has been talking about having an independent defense force for a decade, and the United States has always been threatened by this. No matter how the Europeans broach the matter, it always chills policymakers in Washington -- they take hours and hours and hours of reading dry diplomatic cables to try to figure out what is really meant. In the end, almost nothing comes of it except ill feelings, because the defense ministers in Europe today are not defense ministers: they are assistant finance ministers in charge of the defense portfolio, taking their orders through the Maastricht Treaty from the minister of finance. The minister of finance doesn't care about the Quai d'Orsay and its aversion to belonging to NATO -- "There's only so much money that's available and you're not getting it."

There was a meeting last week [???IDENTIFY THE MEETING], and the American participants reported to me they were basically deceived by their European counterparts, each of whom had individually agreed with Washington that nothing would come from this meeting, only to issue a joint pronouncement calling for more headquarters[???], more planning [???], and more redundancy within NATO, with a sort of tinge of anti-Americanism to it.

On the other hand, we've seen it before. Not one Euro-cent will go to support that defense.

Let's put the hard feelings aside on both sides of the Atlantic and start working together, because the simple message is that America's greatest friends and greatest supporters are in Europe. Together, we are 700 million people, depending on where you draw the boundary with Eastern Europe. Together, we've got three of the five permanent votes in the U.N. Security Council. Together, we're producing half the world's GDP, we're the greatest investors in each other's countries, we share a cultural heritage, we have mutual languages, we have business relations, and together we can move the world and shape it and make it safe for ourselves and our children.

If we remain apart -- driven by some faulty notion of multi-polarity or a sense of anger, betrayal, and "get even" spirit -- we're going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, which brought fifty years of peace and prosperity and stability to the United States and Western Europe. Let's not give that up.
1"Mission creep" was a charge leveled at the Clinton administration for allegedly trying to turn the military into an organization devoted to previously nonmilitary -- humanitarian, or "nation-building" -- tasks.

2 Read what reporter and Afghanistan expert Ahmed Rashid had to say at a recent Carnegie Council talk.

3 See the Carnegie Council's special report on the ethical aspects of the North Korea challenge.

4 For an account of how important it is for developing nations to sort out a system of property rights, read the transcript of last year's Morgenthau lecture, The Mystery of Capital, given by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto.

2003-05-09T07:32:00.000-07:00

Wed May 7, 2003 17:33 EDT
WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND
The real stuff
By Jack Anderson and Douglas Cohn
WASHINGTON -- The 1988 Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis
donned a helmet and drove a tank. President Bush landed on an aircraft
carrier off San Diego and emerged from the jet in full flight regalia.
Neither Dukakis nor Bush ever served in combat. On the other hand,
America's man in Baghdad, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, a Vietnam War
veteran, wears civilian clothes and tells people to call him Jay. Similarly,
President Eisenhower, who led allied forces to victory in Europe during
World War II, and President Kennedy, who was highly decorated in that
war, both shied away from military symbolism. They, like the public,
understood the civilian nature of their jobs, and they, like most combat
veterans, never flaunted their service. Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, the
former NATO commander who led the war in Kosovo and who was cited for
gallantry in Vietnam, and whom we have previously mentioned as a possible
candidate, is made of the same stuff.
Though officially undeclared, Clark has been behaving like a candidate
for the 2004 presidential bid, making frequent trips to Iowa and New
Hampshire to offer his thoughts on the war on terrorism. His candidacy
may be just what the Democrats need to effectively counter the perception
that the party is anti-military while simultaneously undermining the
president's military posturing.
But Clark is avoiding the muss and fuss of the early jockeying. He
hasn't even yet declared himself a Democrat. It's unclear how much he is
doing behind the scenes to further his candidacy, but by seeming the
reluctant candidate, he is hearkening back to history, to the days of
George Washington, who affected the persona of a reluctant candidate above
the fray. Washington, as he did in so many ways, set the standard for
the soldier-turned-politician. When he sought command of the Continental
Army in 1775, he appeared in Congress in full dress uniform; but when
he sought the presidency, he dressed only in civilian attire.
Clark is a Rhodes scholar and a graduate of West Point. He knows his
military history and his literature, and is no doubt familiar with
Coriolanus, the Roman general immortalized by Shakespeare whose self-regard
would not allow him to lower himself to the level of ordinary people. It
is said that pride brought him down. Applying the Coriolanus factor to
politics, Clark is apparently the true reluctant candidate in one
sense: he is unwilling to compete for the nomination on the level of the
others. When the candidates line up for a cattle show, the least among
them stands next to the most accomplished. A glittery resume doesn't
guarantee a better camera angle or deference from the media.
It's difficult for a non-politician who is serious about the issues to
engage in the give-and-take of grassroots politics. It's one of the
reasons why Colin Powell, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, did not run for president; he couldn't bear the treadmill of chicken
dinners, fish fries and church teas along with the intrusions on his
privacy. People like Powell and Clark, who have the real stuff, achieved
what they have through competence, not through bluff and bluster and
sound bites, and they tend to look down on politics as a dirty business.
Should Clark choose to run, there will be no tank or plane rides for
him. Like Garner, Eisenhower, Kennedy and Powell, he understands the
difference between military and civilian protocol, between military and
civilian images.
Prediction: Clark has the real stuff, and public dissatisfaction with
those who don't may propel him into the Oval Office.

2003-05-08T12:55:00.000-07:00

Domestic Issues
Courtesy of DraftClark.com

The social positions that Clark has spoken of are in line with the principles of the Democratic Party. Clark voted with the Democratic Party in Arkansas during the 2000 election. His father was a Democratic lawyer in Chicago.

Safety Net

"I grew up in an armed forces that treated everyone as a valued member of the team. Everyone got healthcare, and the army cared about the education of everyone's family members. It wasn't the attitude that you find in some places, where people are fending for themselves and the safety net doesn't work." (Source: Waging Modern War)

Affirmative Action

From his youth, Clark has distinct memories of the Little Rock integration crisis of 1957, when he was 12. "I saw first hand the racial prejudice, the civil disobedience, the intolerance." As an adult, "I've often gone back to that experience. It's something I've related to." Clark was recently one of several former military men to file a pro-affirmative action "friend of the court" brief on behalf of the University of Michigan in their battle against the Bush Administration efforts to dismantle Michigan's admissions policy. Clark said he was "surprised and dismayed" by the president's decision. (Source: Waging Modern War)

Read the consolidated brief (PDF) of retired military leaders (including Wesley Clark) in support of University of Michigan's affirmative action program.

Abortions, Gays in the Military, Guns

Regarding other issues, Clark has said that he is pro-choice, supporting the rights of women to make these decisions outside of governmental regulation (Source); Clark respects the current policy regarding gays in the military; and Clark has implied that gun ownership is mostly a local issue.

Patriot Act

"One of the things about the war on terror that I am disturbed about is that we've essentially suspended habeas corpus. Which is something that's only been done once in American history and then only for a very brief period. When I go back and think about the atmosphere in which the PATRIOT Act was passed, it begs for a reconsideration and review. And it should be done. Law enforcement agencies will always chafe at any restriction whatsoever when they're in the business of trying to get their job done. But in practice we've always balanced the need for law enforcement with our own protection of our constitutional rights and that's a balance that will need to be reviewed." (source)

Environment
"Yes, human beings do affect the environment and all you have to do is fly along the Andes and look at the disappearing glaciers down there and you recognize that there is something called global warming and it's just getting started as China and India modernize." (source)

2003-05-08T12:34:00.000-07:00

articles about Clark I am compiling a list of articles about the General, both flattering and not, and I was hoping my fellow bloggers could help me out in the endevor. The more traffic to these articles the better. I figure if Clark and his people will see more and more interest in him throughout the month, he will go ahead and declare.

First, read his argument on what Bush Should have done after 9/11 and how the war on terrorism was made a lot more difficult unnecessarily.

The National Review has mentioned him several times: As a doomed presidental but good VP pick calling Clark a "Dick Cheney to a figure like [NC Sen.] John Edwards." Another NR piece which claims all his CNN exposure will hurt him because he didn't pull a Fox News.

Slate even piece on Clark is here. Leftie mag The American Prospect called him Mr. Credibility.

Fringe sites go on about how Clark was involved in the assult on the Davidian complex in Waco, TX and how he is a "War criminal".

More to come as you and I find them.

2003-05-08T09:18:00.000-07:00

Excellent. Let the drafting begin. Send a letter to the General, and tell your 10,000 closest friends to do the same! :)

2003-05-07T11:44:00.000-07:00

Mic Check! 1, 2, 3 test, test! Drafting the General has officially begun!