General Wesley Clark on the Diane Rehm Show, 7.12.07
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK:….I would say this, that you cannot win this war militarily. Everybody says it, including Generals Petraeus and Odierno. So, the question is what is the administration doing to help the men and women in uniform? What are they doing diplomatically? What are they doing politically? The answer is, diplomatically they’ve done very little. From the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, it was known that this administration had plans for regime change throughout the Middle East. Iraq was the first, Syria was going to be the second, Lebanon and ultimately Iran. Those countries viewed their first line of defense as keeping us bogged down in Iraq. So they’ve had an incentive to feed the insurgency. If you don’t deal with that incentive, whatever the efforts of the military, they come to naught because we’re going in a very resistant medium.
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GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I think it’s pretty clear that given the porous border, the proximity or Iran, the cultural relationships, the family relationships, the deep historical and cultural connections, that military interdiction along the border is not going to build an impenetrable fence around Iraq. So, military measures alone aren’t going to insulate Iraq. You’ve got to do diplomacy. You’ve also got to do the heavy lifting of politics. We’ve never put in the kinds of teams we need in the provinces to help government really deliver services so the surge has been sort of a wish list. It’s been more of ‘hey, let’s dump the problem back on the guys in uniform and gals in uniform and then let’s hope that by greater effort somehow like magic the Iraqis will somehow agree.’ The government is made up of factional leaders who have more to gain by continuing to fight and maintain their militias and hold out their options than they do by compromise and the surge has not affected that.
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GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: You mentioned Anbar province and you mentioned throughout the country but I haven’t seen any evidence that we’re running a counterinsurgency campaign throughout the country. In fact, in most of the country, the militias are in control. Take the area around Basra where the British are, they’ve been driven back into one simple … one single position in Basra. They’re under continuing attack and threat there. So I’m fully supportive of counterinsurgency but I don’t see the glimmer of hope. I see one more turn of the wheel while Iran and Syria mark time against the United States.
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GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I think that General Petraeus and General Odierno get a lot of credit for what they’re trying to do over there, but the essential point is that the administration hasn’t given them the kind of leadership and support it needs at the policy level. I’m talking about the diplomacy, the dialogue with the countries in the region. One tactic after another has been tried in Iraq and these techniques work. We know what the counterinsurgency techniques are. We know that personal connections can be established. We know that people forge bonds in combat. We know that friendship goes so far but this isn’t our culture. It’s not our home court but it’s very close to the home court of Syria and Iran and until we can deal with the larger playing field and take away some of their incentive to continue to meddle in there, we’re … we’re trying to balance on a very shaky life raft over there, so whatever gains we might make in one operation or another, in arresting five people or ten people, we have no idea the extent of true Iranian or Syrian connections and influence inside that country. This is not a problem that’s going to be resolved militarily with a change in tactics on the ground. It requires a regional approach.
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GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: This whole debate has been on a lesser agenda that keeps out of the public debate the real issues that are at hand. Those issues are: the war against the terrorists, dealing with Iran’s nuclear issue, trying to bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians, working the issues of Lebanon and Syria. Instead we’re arguing about a few thousand troops and their tactics on the ground in Iraq. It’s a crazy, misplaced debate. It serves one interest. It serves the interests of those who want to label people who question this as not supporting the troops. The real issue is the grand strategy of the United States. We were attacked on 9/11 and we responded by briefly intervening in Afghanistan and then turning our attention to Iraq. It was a fundamental strategic failure by the United States to do that. We’re living with the consequences. The latest report shows al Qaeda’s regained its strength and every day that we’re in Iraq, we’re feeding the al Qaeda recruiting machine.
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GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I think right now the Congress has to assert its authority to insist on a change – a real change – in strategy by the administration. This is not southeast Asia. We can’t simply walk away …
Diane Rehm: It’s so interesting to me that during the break General Clark, both you and Larry Korb said that while you were in Vietnam, you believed that the war, the strategy, was working. The difference between being in there and looking at it from the outside?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I spent years afterwards trying to understand what went wrong in Vietnam because when you’re in it, especially when you’re in it with an American unit, you feel good. I mean American units are competent, they believe in each other, we’ve got great leadership, we’ve got good equipment, we may not have everything we need, but we believe in each other and we generally succeed in what we do but tactical success doesn’t necessarily add up to strategic success and what I think the Congress has to do is insist that Bush get a grip strategically on the region. So I’d like to see them start the withdrawal. I think we’re overcommitted right now, we need to pull a couple of brigades back to reconstitute the force so we have strategic reserve in the United States. But I think what really needs to be done is Congress needs to demand that the Executive Branch produce and brief to the Congress a comprehensive regional strategy that folds all of this together because without dealing with this on a regional basis, our troops’ effort is not being used productively inside Iraq.
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Kimberly Kagan: al Qaeda in Mesopotamia is actually the central front in the war on terror according to the global al Qaeda second in charge Zawahiri who issued a statement just a couple of weeks ago encouraging jihadists to fight the United States in Iraq. And I think that before we decide that al Qaeda is elsewhere and must be fought elsewhere, we must realize that whatever the situation was in Iraq in 2003, right now al Qaeda is in Iraq, it is fighting and killing US soldiers, Iraqi civilians and it is in fact funneling regional assets into Iraq rather than elsewhere around the globe.
Diane Rehm: General Clark.
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well I certainly wouldn’t take my enemy’s definition of what the central front on war should be. In World War II, we didn’t listen to the Nazi high command tell us where they wanted us to invade, we didn’t listen to the Japanese tell us where they wanted us to invade and we shouldn’t listen to Zawahiri when he says Iraq is the central front. It’s a good front for Zawahiri because he’s got access to a lot of American soldiers to attack and train against and build al Qaeda. It’s been a diversion and a distraction for the United States to have engaged in the war in Iraq. It was a strategic failure. Having said that, I think we have to be realistic about Iraq. We can’t simply pack up and leave. There is a threat there. It does have to be dealt with.
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GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well I think there have been a number of recommendations under the Baker-Hamilton approach, but essentially setting a timeline, pulling out over a lo … over a definite period of time doesn’t address the regional problems. It’s a lot better to do the diplomacy before you have the timeline and I think we’ve got one more chance …
Diane Rehm: What kind of diplomacy would you do right now?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Richard Holbrooke led a team to the Balkans in a very ambivalent situation. We started with a state of principles. We went to each of the leaders that were there. He didn’t know whether it was … it wasn’t like an orchestra, it was jazz. You just went there and you tried to create something, um starting with some tools in your toolkit. You had the commitment of troops, you had some reconstruction money …
Diane Rehm: But don’t we still have troops in the Balkans?
GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well we’re … US troops are out of Bosnia and uh a solution to Kosovo is at hand if we can get the Russians to agree. And once we put our troops in, we never had any problem. We did the diplomacy up front. What we need now is … there’s still a window with the right leadership in the White House or the right attitude in the White House, we could put a team in that region. We could stitch together these countries, find common interests and within that context, then find the right way to bring others in and get US troops out.
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GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: We’ve known from the beginning that when we went into Iraq, as we told everybody, including a lot of the NeoCons who testified before Congress that Iraq was just the first step. So we gave Iran and Syria every reason to oppose us. If you were in the Iranian’s position right now, you’d see themselves surrounded by US forces with US aircraft carriers there, an insurgency trying to be fomented from Baluchistan which would be hard-pressed not to blame on the United States, the continuing rumors of special forces operations inside Iran and perhaps overflights from unmanned aerial vehicles.
