General Wesley Clark’s Keynote Speech at Yearly Kos 2007 (excerpts) – 8.03.2007
…I go to the Middle East….And when I travel, they ask me, they say, ‘Well look, you know, the biggest cause of terrorism, the thing that we’re most worried about is that you Americans haven’t done your duty in trying to bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
(applause)
And oh, by the way, they get around to mentioning Iraq too. (laughter) Not one of them, not one, no statesman, no scholar, no businessman has come to me and said, ‘What you Americans did in Iraq, you know, getting rid of Saddam Hussein, thank you very much. Come and do it to my country!’
(snip)
But here’s where, here’s where I need your help. We got to get out of there the right way, because unlike Vietnam, when we leave Iraq, we’ll still be left with a whole passel of interests there. We’ll still have concerns about Iranian nuclear potential. We’ll still have worries about Israel and the Palestinians. We’ll still be worried about, yes, the security of the world’s principal supply of oil. We’ll still be worried about our friends in the, in the Persian, in the Arab Gulf who, who are dependent on us for some of their security. We’ll still be worried about Lebanon. We’ll still be worried about terrorists. Those interests won’t go away simply by pulling U.S. troops out. So, we not only have to come out, we have to come out the right way.
(snip)
But what we’ve got to do is create not an argument in the United States over the troops or their tactics, but raise the debate to the administration’s strategies and policies in this region. Here’s why. We can’t succeed in Iraq with the numbers of troops, no matter how good they are, because you can’t succeed in this war just by killing people or intimidating the opposition.
(applause)
Dave Petraeus would be the first one to tell you that. The military’s part of the solution. It’s not the answer. The answer’s the politics. The politics inside Iraq are not just people who are afraid. It’s not just a group of people who say, ‘Gee, if I just, if I could just let my kids go to school, I wouldn’t have to join a militia.’ Maybe there’s some of that, but there’s a lot more than that going on. This is a power struggle within religious factions. It’s a power struggle between religious factions. And it’s a geo-strategic struggle between different nations in the region. – All playing out on the ground in forms of violence, intimidation, blackmail, corruption, payoffs, influence, healthcare, coaching, counseling, there’s no telling how many different intelligence agencies and means of action and influence from different nations are present in Iraq. It’s a whole lot more then the number of nations participating in our coalition. I can promise you that. (Applause)
And so, we’re not going to solve this problem unless we work it at the diplomatic level and that means we’ve got to stop isolating people we disagree with and start engaging those people.
(applause)
The Iranians have tried several times over the last three or four years to engage us. We’ve rebuffed them every time. Of course, you understand the Iranians are not our friends. We’ve been in a virtual state of war. It’s a cold war. We’ve been in a state of war with them for 30 years, and that government is not our friends. Now, their population is the most pro-American population in the Middle East. They all love Americans and 61 of them, 61% of them think they’re government’s no good. That’s what the latest polls show. But the Iranian government is not going to have a friendly conversation with the United States. Look, they’ve got something they think we want. We want some support in Iraq and we want them to stop building their nuclear weapons. These people are in this for sort of the larger aggrandizement of their, of their purposes, their, their nationality, their heritage, their religious faith. And so, they’re going to bargain. They’re going to joust. They’re going to work. The United States has to engage. It can’t isolate and get what it wants. It’s time to engage.
The Bush administration says we don’t have enough leverage. Well, we’re the most powerful country in the world. We’ve got aircraft carriers on two sides of Iraq. We got air bases on the other two sides. We’ve got planes that can fly over. We’ve got military dominance over Iran. And we can go into Iran any time we want, and they know it. Not only that, we’re the most powerful nation economically in the world. Virtually every organization that Iran wants support from we either control, dominate or heavily influence. So, we don’t have enough leverage? We want to capture five more Iranian spies or something? It doesn’t make sense.
Let’s get engaged. Let’s talk. Let’s give our troops the kind of diplomatic support they need. We’re-
(applause)
Now, people usually say, ‘Okay well, what’s your plan?’ Well, we did this in the Balkans. We started with a statement of principles. We had, here’s the principles we’re looking for. Here’s what we can do, plusses and minuses for you. And then we sort of launched out. As Richard Holbrooke said, “It’s not exactly, it’s not exactly like a military plan, it’s more like jazz.” You know, the thing about diplomacy and engagement is it takes two, three, four sides to participate. So, you can draw up all the timelines and visits you want, but it doesn’t mean anything if you haven’t got the other side to sort of engage with you.
So, no one can sit up here and give you a timeline for diplomacy. No one can say, ‘Two trips to Tehran, then a trip to Damascus, then a trip to Riyadh, then back to…’ That all has to be worked out in the process, but what has to be done to start that process is the United States has to be willing to engage with a nation that we don’t like. And to do that we have to be willing to move away from the state of war that we’re a part of with that nation.
(applause)
I’m not saying that Iran is not a serious problem, but I’m saying you can’t, you can’t deal with that serious problem until you’ve tried to engage. I’m not taking any options off the table with Iran, but remember the rule: When you’re talking about the use of force, it’s only, only, only, ONLY as a last resort.
(snip)
I don’t think Iraq is, well I was going to say I don’t think it’s a total failure, but it’s getting pretty down, far down the list. It’s clearly not going to be a Western-style democracy. It’s not going to have the America flag imprinted on one corner of its constitution. (laughter) It’s not going to invite the United States Congress to, or the Presidency to send a representative to sit in permanent session with the Iraqi Assmebly. It’s not going to ask to become a member of NATO. It’s not even probably going to ask to host U.S. bases. In fact, the majority of Iraqis seem to want us to leave.
But what we can hope for still is a state that holds together, that doesn’t break apart. And we can hope for a state that tries to work law and order issues with its own, within its own territory and doesn’t become a breeding ground for future terrorist activities or for exporting violence in the region. And we can hope for a state that in some way will allow the wonderful, industrious, smart and capable people of Iraq to make their own way forward. And we can hope for a state in which thousands of Iraqis aren’t dying every month.
(applause)
Those are pretty modest, those are pretty modest objectives, and as we move toward those objectives, if we do it the right way, I think we can protect the larger U.S. interests in the region and we can withdraw our troops, but we can’t do it without a change in the United States strategy of engagement in the region. We must engage people we don’t agree with. We must take seriously our responsibilities to help bring peace between Israel and the Palestinians….We got to get out the right way, because history doesn’t stop when the last American troop heads down the road to Basra.
