It bothers me that retired Gen. Wesley Clark is rarely mentioned by the television talking heads when they dicusss potential Democratic presidential candidates for 2008.
A recent Daily Kos poll showed he still has considerable support, thought, and at a recent appearance at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa he sounded every bit the potential candidate.
He also told an amazing story about the run-up to the Iraq war that I haven't seen published before.Wesley Clark's conspiracy theor
TUSCALOOSA | Former four-star Gen. Wesley Clark, who unsuccessfully ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, has been unstinting in his criticism of the way the war in Iraq has been run and the aims of the Bush administration. There's a reason for that.
At a recent appeared at the University of Alabama Clark recalled that as a one-star general, he paid a courtesy call on Paul Wolfowitz, then the number three official in the Secretary of Defense's Office in the Pentagon.
It was shortly after the 1991 Gulf War, in which Iraq had been driven out of Kuwait and its army devastated, and Clark said he congratulated Wolfowitz on the smashing victory.
"He said, 'Thanks, but no thanks,' he said, 'The truth is the United States failed in the Gulf,' he said, 'We didn't get rid of Saddam Hussein,'" an incredulous Clark said in a lecture to the UA's Blackburn Institute. "He said, 'What we did learn is that now we can use our forces and we can use them without any interference from the Soviet Union. We've got a window,' he said, 'of five years, maybe 10 years to clean out these old Soviet client states, the ones that gave us trouble during the Cold War. Countries like Syria, Iraq, Iran -- we've got to clean them out before the next great super power comes along and we've got to make the Middle East ours.'"
Clark said as a newly-minted one star general who "wasn't even thinking about those kinds of things," he vaguely replied, "Sound interesting" and filed the conversation away in his mind. But upon reflection, Clark said what Wolfowitz was saying was, "It was time for a new strategy, a strategy that had kept us safe during the Cold War -- a strategy of deterrence, of not using force, of containment, into a strategy of using force, of invading countries, of over-throwing governments."
Wolfowitz, now president of the World Bank, was one the leading so-called "neoconservatives" of the day, but one of the few actually in the first President Bush administration. Such neocons, who believe in a much more muscular and belligerent foreign policy than has been the norm since the end of World War II, now dominate the second Bush administration and include in their ranks Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney.
But after President George H.W. Bush was defeated in 1992, Clark said he never heard anything else about Wolfowitz's theory that the first Gulf War was actually a defeat and the need to make the Middle East "ours" as he worked his way up to become a four star general and Supreme Allied Commander of NATO in Europe under President Bill Clinton. The strategy for Iraq then was to keep Saddam constrained through sanctions and "no fly" zones of the Kurdish areas, which developed almost autonomously into prospering regions.
After the George W. Bush was elected in 2000 and the catastrophe of 9/11 occurred, Clark, then retired, said we went to war in Afghanistan because "we had to" in order to bring down the Taliban government that was harboring Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
"But this administration determined shortly after 9/11, perhaps on the same day, that they would invade Iraq and settle on old score and move into that strategy that Paul Wolfowitz had described to me in 1991," he said. "There was no public debate, there was no discussion of what this meant. There was obfuscation."
Although then a private citizen, Clark said he visited Secretary Rumsfeld in the Pentagon in the week after 9/11 and while there was summoned by a general he was still on good terms with who into his office.
"He said, 'Sir, we're going to invade Iraq,'" Clark recalled. "I said, 'We're going to invade Iraq? Why?' And he said, 'I don't really know why, it doesn't't't't make a whole lot of sense, but they [the administration] doesn't know what to do about the problem of terrorists, and if only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem has to look like a nail.'
"He said, 'We don't know what to do about terrorism, but we can take down governments, so I guess we are looking for governments to take down.'"
Clark said he was in the Pentagon again in November of 2001, visiting the same unnamed general.
"I said are we still going to invade Iraq?" Clark said. "He said, 'Yes sir, but it's worse than that'" and that the general said he had just gotten a memo from Rumsfeld's office containing a disturbing "five year plan."
"We're going to take down seven countries in five years," Clark quoted the general. "We're going to start with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, then Libya, Somalia, Sudan and we're going to come back and get Iran in five years."
Clark said only then did he begin to understand "what wan't being explained to the American people, which was the overall drift of where the policy was...
"The decisions had been made long before they went through the charade of going to the United Nations [for authority to invade Iraq] and there were people actively pulling within the administration for the failure of diplomacy because they didn't want anything to stop the invasion.
"I don't know what they were thinking about," Clark said, his voice rising with indignation. "They obviously never went to war -- war is ugly, it is unpredictable, and when you kill peoples' relatives, they hate your forever.
"When you go to war, it is a permanent act, it marks forever a line that can't be walked back," Clark added, now almost mournfully. "We went to war in Iraq, we did it on the basis of hyped intelligence and an underlining theory that was never explained to the American people...
"My friends, I ask you, how could we in this country, with all it stands for -- Democracy, freedom, human rights, respect for the individual, a belief if the worth of every person -- how could we have done this and believe we wouldn't pay the price," the retired general said. "It was a colossal strategic blunder."
But the blunder has bogged us down in Iraq for more than three years and Clark believes it was also the un-doing of a seven-country conspiracy that would have taken us to war all over the Middle East to make it "ours."
So if he sounds a little strident on the campaign trail now or leading up to another presidential run (which he would neither confirm nor deny here), now you know at least one reason why.