Public interviews are part of the campaign Wes Clark is waging to keep us out of armed conflict in Iran. Readers of these diaries and Clark supporters are well aware that his chief allies are VoteVets, Fighting Dems and StopIranWar. I've been tracking this campaign at Wes Clark's blog.
This is the fourth and final segment of the long interview held at the 92nd St. Y in NYC some few weeks ago. Wes Clark talked with Amy Goodman. Transcript available through DemocracyNow!
Like many of you, I've signed the StopIranWar petition and sent it to friends, family and colleagues. If not, why not today? That's the pitch, the goods are below the jump.
Last week'sClark diary contained some particularly powerful information about civilian casualties and torture. Unfortunately, it got lost in the firehose. Still, it's there and I encourage all to read it. Moving on...
On President Eisenhower, the Middle East and Oil
AG: 1953 was … when Kermit Roosevelt, the grandson of Teddy Roosevelt, went to Iran and led a coup against Mohammed Mossadegh under Eisenhower.
WKC: 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.
AG: But wasn't it more about British Petroleum?
WKC: Oh, it's always -- there are always interests. The truth … 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 [in Africa] 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's always been this attitude that somehow we could intervene and use force in the region. … 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.
On the response to Jimmy Carter's book, Peace, Not Apartheid.
WKC: Well, I’m sorry to say I haven't read the book. … 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.
On Congress, war authorization, funding and bare-knuckle government.
AG: 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.
WKC: 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 … courage that's needed.
AG: And how could they do that?
WKC: 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.
AG: Do you think Congress should stop funding the war?
WKC: 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.
[We have to] 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.
… 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… 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.