From NBC News in Washington, this is Meet the Press with Jim Russell.
Our issues this Sunday, the general makes a run for the White House.
I intend to seek the presidency of the United States of America.
Where does he stand on the issues?
Does he have the experience, the temperament to be president?
With us, in his first Sunday morning interview, since announcing his candidacy for the Democratic
nomination, General Wesley Clark.
And in our Meet the Press minute, Carl Sandberg in 1957 and General J. Lawton Collins in 1951.
Very different views about military men as presidents.
But first, joining us is the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, General Wesley
Clark.
Welcome.
Thank you very much, Jim.
In one word, how would you describe the current situation in Iraq?
It's a mess.
How would you describe the Bush administration's policy?
They have not had a strategy for success.
I don't think they have one yet.
If the president of the United States called you in tomorrow and said, General Clark, I
need your help, your guidance.
The United Nations is gone from Iraq.
The French, the Germans will not allow them to participate.
NATO will not participate because they're now working in Afghanistan.
Taking the United Nations and NATO off the table, what do I do?
What do you advise them?
I'd say, Mr. President, the first thing you've got to do is you've got to surrender exclusive
U.S. control over this mission.
You cannot build the kind of international support you need if we retain exclusive custody
of the mission.
And there's no point in it.
Build an international organization like we did in the Balkans.
We called it the Peace Implementation Committee there.
Call this one the Iraqi Reconstruction Development Authority.
Bring in every nation that wants to contribute.
Give them a seat at the table.
Put a non-American in charge.
And the responsibilities are to assist the political and economic reconstruction of Iraq.
And then go to the Iraqis, and there's no reason to wait until June to give the Iraqis
back their country.
We should be transferring that authority tomorrow.
They've already elected local councils.
Let each local council send two people to a central location.
Let that be a transitional central government.
Give them staff and let them start forming up the kinds of committees they need to have
visibility over and make decisions on what's being done in Iraq.
Give the country back to the Iraqis.
We're not there to occupy it.
We're only there to help.
So let's give them their country back.
Is the country now secure enough to give back to the Iraqis?
How could a Iraqi interim government possibly protect itself against the same insurgency
that it's attacking the U.S.?
Well two things here.
First of all, of course, it's not secure, and you've got to have the United States there
for a while.
I would still go to NATO, and under my plan I would announce a new Atlantic charter.
I don't think this administration can do it, but you've got to build, rebuild that relationship
with our allies in Europe.
This administration's practically, severely, maybe permanently damaged that relationship.
It's got to be built back.
I'd still like to have NATO there so that other nations can see what we're doing militarily,
but we'll be there for a while.
We've got to train that Iraqi force and bring it up to speed so it really can help secure
the country.
And step by step they'll pick up regions of the country.
In terms of NATO, this is what the NATO Secretary General George Robertson said, we're trying
to get it right to make sure that it works in the long term, and before we take on any
new obligations like Iraq, I think we've got to get Afghanistan right.
NATO's not ready to go into Iraq.
Which other countries would you possibly attract into Iraq that aren't there now?
Well I think that you start with what's there right now, and then I think you ask NATO.
I think you tell John Abbasid to report to the NATO military committee and through NATO
to the United States, just as I did in Kosovo, because this brings NATO into the problem.
These two problems are in many ways linked.
We're running them by the same command, the US Central Command.
We should link these two problems, and we should have NATO nations watching.
Now it's true that Germany and France have said they don't want to participate, but we
have Italy, we have Poland, we have other countries who are participating on the ground.
But just one country can veto NATO participation.
They can, and you've got to work those things, but this is the kind of diplomacy that works.
I mean you've got to talk with people, you've got to build relationships, and you've got
to seek and seek common interests.
This is the whole thing about leadership.
You know, with the United States and Europe, you can emphasize the things that separate
us, and no doubt there are differences in perspectives.
But I think we have to build on what unites us.
We have common interests, we have common heritage, we're greatest investment partners in each
other's countries.
We need to tighten, strengthen, build this relationship so it can help us move into the
21st century successfully.
One of my greatest concerns is this administration hasn't done it, and now it may be too late
because of the poisonous personal relationships between the administration and some European
leaders.
Maybe too late.
You think we may lose Iraq?
I think it may be too late to strengthen this relationship.
Now let's talk about Iraq for a second.
I think there was a window of opportunity at the end of the military operation to be
able to bring the Iraqi people on board.
They could have seen a really smooth, effective, impressive U.S. occupation.
American soldiers could have been in every village.
They could have known the names of the people there.
They could have provided food and water right away, but we didn't do that.
There was no plan for that.
And as the weeks went by and this insurgency began, the target of the insurgency is the
will of the Iraqi people to resist the American presence.
That's the target of the insurgency, and every helicopter shoot down strengthens those in
Iraq who would use the Americans to gain their own power inside Iraq.
And they would strike the Americans.
They would show their power vis-a-vis the Americans.
It's those cheering crowds in Fallujah that all this is directed toward.
And so I don't know if it's too late, but I know that window is closing very, very quickly.
In order to take advantage of this time, we must move right now to give authority back
to the Iraqis.
I know June is too late.
Do you believe we should have more U.S. soldiers on the ground in Iraq in order to stabilize
it?
I think we need to change the force mix in Iraq as rapidly as we can.
I think we need a lighter, more mobile force, more agile, more intelligence-driven.
We need to take those 1,400 people who are searching for weapons of mass destruction,
pull them off that search, give that to the United Nations people, use them to help us
track down Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and to help us find the people in Iraq who are
attacking our soldiers.
And then we need to start reducing the size of the U.S. force there.
We may have to temporarily increase it, but we need to transform what it does.
All these heavy forces have big logistics footprints.
And when you have lots of logistics, you have lots of unarmored humvees.
You have lots of opportunities for ambush.
We need to reduce those opportunities.
When the President went to Congress and asked for $87 billion, $20 billion of which would
have been for military aid to the troops on the ground, body armor, armored humvees, you
came out against it.
How could you not support money for the men and women on the ground in Iraq?
I do support money for the men and women on the ground.
I came out against this because to vote for this resolution at that time was to give the
President of the United States a blank check, a blank check because he didn't have a strategy.
And I think what the troops in Iraq need more than anything else is a strategy for success.
Each day that they go forward without a strategy, the danger increases.
And that's the responsibility of the President of the United States to provide that strategy.
He hadn't done so, and it was the duty of the Congress to press the administration to
do it.
They didn't.
They gave him a blank check.
Now if they had pressed and said, Mr. President, we're not going to give you this until your
spokesman come up here and you lay out a strategy.
What are you trying to do there?
What's going to happen in the region?
Give us the vision.
Tell us your timelines.
Give us your estimates.
If he'd done that, then of course we would have supported, I would have supported, taking
care of the troops.
That wasn't done.
And that was the duty of the United States Congress to have the, hold the executive branch
accountable.
Do you believe the war in Iraq is legal?
Legal?
Well, it's technically legal, yeah.
Why?
Well, you had a United Nations Security Council authorization against weapons of mass destruction.
Now the problem is that all of the underpinnings for that, they're not there.
We haven't found those weapons of mass destruction.
I wouldn't have gone to war at that point.
We didn't have our alliances in shape.
We didn't have a plan for what happened next.
We hadn't exhausted all the diplomatic possibilities, but there was a resolution.
Let me turn to your role in Kosovo because this caught my eye in the profile of New Yorker
magazine.
Clark had declared that chief among America's mistakes was that it had gone to war in Iraq
without the mantle of authority bestowed by United Nations approval.
It had in the Kosovo war also been conducted without the endorsement of the UN Security
Council.
Yes, Clark allowed.
And in that regard, the Kosovo war was technically illegal, he went on.
The Russians, the Chinese, they said both would veto it.
There was never a charter, a chance that it would be authorized.
You believe Kosovo was technically illegal?
That's what Kofi Annan has said, absolutely.
It didn't have a UN Security Council resolution authorizing it, but we went to the next largest
international body, which was NATO.
And we acted in that region to avoid another humanitarian disaster and to maintain regional
stability and security.
And so laws are made by nations, and in this case, nations had to act.
The case in Iraq is more or less the opposite.
In other words, if you said that the war in Kosovo was technically illegal, you might
also say, but it was legitimate, it was justified, because it was an urgent, imminent danger.
The case in Iraq was the opposite.
It was technically legal, but it wasn't an imminent danger, it wasn't an imminent threat.
We had an exhausted diplomatic possibilities.
We really didn't have our UN allies with us in this.
You are about to launch a major television campaign in New Hampshire, particularly.
We have obtained a copy of your television ad.
So I'd like to roll a portion of it and come back and talk about it.
Here's a paid political ad.
Now when we need a leader to clean up the mess in Iraq, he's the one who has done it.
In the Balkans, he helped negotiate a peace between age-old enemies and led a multinational
force that stopped a campaign of terror, liberated a people, and brought peace without the loss
of a single American soldier.
Are you suggesting that if you were in charge, you could have liberated Iraq without the
loss of a single American soldier?
No, not necessarily.
But I would have worked on Iraq a different way.
I would have viewed it as a challenge, but not an imminent threat.
I would have taken the problem to the United Nations.
I would have put pressure through the United Nations on Iraq.
I would have worked for robust inspections.
I might have kept a force in the region, and bit by bit we would have reduced the imminence
of any threat that Saddam Hussein might pose.
I was one of those, along with Senator Bob Graham, who believed at the outset that this
was a distraction.
This was a distraction from the more important war against al-Qaeda.
And in fact, it was a distraction, Tim.
When we went into Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, CENTCOM was already planning the
operation in Iraq.
Instead of planning how to get Osama bin Laden, instead of putting the U.S. troops on the
ground in Afghanistan to finish the fight against al-Qaeda and bring back Osama bin
Laden dead or alive, we had our top leadership distracted in preparing what to do about Saddam
Hussein.
And then, when we could have put the U.S. troops in, we withheld them, because there
was uncertainty as to how long we would be in Afghanistan and how soon we might need
those troops to go into Iraq.
So we've stretched and we've accommodated the Afghanistan mission.
We've done as little as possible.
In military terms, it's been economy of force.
And the result is today that al-Qaeda and the Taliban are coming back in Afghanistan.
I want to talk a whole lot more about Iraq, but I want to stay on Kosovo for just a second.
In 1995, the President of the United States announced, and you echoed it, that the troops
would be home from Kosovo in a year.
That never happened.
No one believed at the time it would happen.
In hindsight, did you mislead the American people in suggesting the troops would be home
in a year when there are facts still there?
Well, it was, let me just make clear, it was Bosnia at the time in 95.
That was the policy.
That was the intent, was to get the troops out in a year.
We used that intent during the negotiations.
It was productive to put pressure on Bosnian President Iza Begovic, who wanted to stall
the elections.
And we said to him, Mr. President, you can't stall because these troops are going to be
gone in a year.
We have to move rapidly toward democracy here.
So it was productive in terms of the negotiations.
It wasn't an accurate forecast.
I had reservations at the time, but that was the policy of the United States government,
that we would work toward that aim.
And of course, as we got in there and looked at the practicalities on the ground, it simply
wasn't possible to move that fast.
There was an assumption when we did those negotiations that you would have strategic
consent by all parties.
That is to say that they would agree to the negotiations.
They really wanted to live by that.