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And we are back to General Clark.
One of your opponents in the Democratic primary, Howard Dean, said your biggest problem may be convincing Democratic voters that you're truly a Democrat.
And what they refer to is now famous speech you gave at a Republican county dinner on May 11th, 2001.
Let's listen to a portion of that.
If you look around the world, there's a lot of work to be done, and I'm very glad we've got the great team in office, men like Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Paul O'Neill, people I know very well, our president, George W. Bush, we need them there because we got some tough challenges ahead.
A great team.
We need them there.
And then on January 22nd, 2002 at Harding University in Arkansas, again, you added to that.
Let's watch.
Well, I didn't say this earlier and I should have.
I tremendously admire and I think we all should the great work done by our commander in chief, our president, George Bush and the men and women of the United States Armed Forces.
That sounds like a ringing endorsement of the president.
I can see President Bush using those bites in commercials if he runs against you.
That's politics, Tim.
But, you know, I'm not a politician, but I am a fair person.
I supported the president in Afghanistan.
I think we should have gone in there and stayed in there and gotten Osama bin Laden.
And I give the men and women in the armed forces, including our commander in chief, who's at the top of the chain of command, the credit for waging a very effective campaign as far as it went in Afghanistan.
And I think you have to give credit where credit's due.
As far as the earlier speech is concerned, you know, I did not vote for George W. Bush.
I had reservations about it, but I do know Colin Powell and Paul O'Neill and Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney.
I wished them well.
I wish they could have led this country well.
I don't want to see America fail.
I don't want to see another American soldier killed in Iraq or another American here at home lose the job.
And I think it's the duty of every American to put the country above party in your book, Winning Modern Wars, you write on page one 30, the following as I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat.
Yes, we were still on track for going against the rock, he said, but there was more.
This was being discussed in part of a five year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, Sudan.
So I thought, so I thought this is what they meant when they talk about draining the swamp.
This was November 2001.
In January of 2002, you were still praising the president.
When did you have this St. Paul moment where you suddenly saw the light, that the president was not a good leader?
Well, there wasn't a St. Paul moment.
What it was is you have to praise the actions that have done that are done and done correctly, and you have to work to head off the trouble that's ahead.
So at the same time that I had praised the United States and Afghanistan, I was talking to George Robertson and saying, this business in Iraq, Secretary General said, you think they're going into Iraq?
I said, absolutely.
And I said, and you've got to get NATO involved in that, and you've got to hold the United States through NATO to a reasonable plan and so forth.
And so I was working on many different levels.
I mean, that's the way it's done.
Do you believe there's a five-year plan to invade seven countries?
Well, I think this was being discussed at the time, just as that man told me, as part of a five-year plan.
This administration made a fundamental choice early in the war on terror to go after states rather than to go after terrorists.
They wanted to use the conventional power of the United States Armed Forces to take down states.
And Don Rumsfeld's still talking about it, as though these old states are central to the problem of terrorism.
The problem with that is they aren't.
And when you take them down, you're left trying to pick up the pieces, as has happened in Iraq.
Attacking Iraq has done almost nothing to help us deal with the problem of al-Qaeda.
In fact, if you'd asked Osama bin Laden, what would he like us to do, to sort of play into his hands, he would have said, well, why don't you have the power of the United States Armed Forces to take down states?
To sort of play into his hands, he would have said, well, why don't you have the United States invade an Arab country?
He would have preferred we invade Saudi Arabia.
Of course, that would have really mobilized opinion.
But if you can't do that, Iraq's a pretty close second.
He is using, and his organization is using, our presence in Iraq as a focal point.
President Bush has said it's a centerpiece for the war on terror.
It isn't.
It's a sideshow.
It's simply their easiest means of access to attack American soldiers.
That's all it is.
Do you believe that President Bush deliberately misled the American people by hyping intelligence in order to invade Iraq?
I think there was an effort to create the best possible case to justify their decision to go after Iraq.
I didn't see it at the time.
There was this comment from the joint staff that we were going to go after Iraq.
But as I worked through the evidence and talked to people later on, I realized that at the very beginning, I read it in Bob Woodward's book,
there was discussion of Iraq.
There was discussion of Iraq as an easier target than Afghanistan.
Discussion of Iraq as you could really change the Middle East.
There were people saying, well, the road to peace in Jerusalem runs through Baghdad.
So I think it's exactly what Paul Wolfowitz said in the Vanity Fair piece about six months ago.
He said, the lowest common denominator, I'm sort of paraphrasing,
the way we could get everybody to agree was talk about weapons of mass destruction.
But there were many reasons to go after Iraq.
Mislead?
Well, yes.
I mean, I think the information wasn't there to justify the attack the way it was presented.
If we have not found the weapons of mass destruction, why isn't the administration
and others all moving as forcefully as possible to find out what happened?
Was there a colossal intelligence failure?
And should we not know about it?
I think this administration knows what happened.
I think this administration recognizes that they took the intelligence, they made the best possible case for it.
The intelligence information was always a little shaky.
I don't think they ever had specific locations for where the actual weapons were
because we would have struck them if they had.
And I know that Tony Zinni struck those sites back in December of 98.
There was no reason to suspect they'd been reoccupied unless we had it on satellite.
Will we ever find out the truth?
What did the CIA know and when do they know it?
I hope we will, but I hope we'll ask a deeper question than that.
Because I don't think this goes simply to the intelligence agencies.
I think it goes to the heart of the decision-making process of this administration.
I think they owe the American people an explanation.
Why, when we were struck by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, why did we determine to attack Iraq?
Why did we distract ourselves from the war on terror?
Why are we spending $150 billion on Iraq?
What's the answer?
I think the answer is that it was going to be very difficult to go after al-Qaeda.
It required a new way of thought, new organizations,
and this was an administration that was concerned about its image,
concerned about reassuring the public,
and had a predisposition to believe that somehow it could use military force
to clean up the Middle East during this period after the fall of the Soviet Union
and before the rise of the, quote, next great power.
So I think there were mixed motives on this,
but the administration needs to come clean with the American people
and not just blame the intelligence community.
You also said that there's no way this administration can walk away from its responsibilities for 9-1-1.
How can you blame the Bush administration for 9-1-1
when you also, in several interviews, said that the Clinton administration should have done more against al-Qaeda
and that the Reagan administration had not been forceful enough against Saudi Arabia?
Well, Tim, let's be clear.
Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9-1-1.
We know he did that.
But I think we need to be asking what happened, why did it happen, and how could we have improved it?
In the United States Armed Forces, we have a military operation,
and it goes well or it doesn't.
You always hold an after-action review.
And the commander sits in on the after-action review, and he participates in it.
And you ask, what happened, why did it happen, and how could it be improved?
You can't lay this on some mid-level intelligence officials.
When the administration had a clear warning on the threat of Osama bin Laden
and apparently did not have a plan after over eight months in office, you have to ask why.
Now, would the plan have prevented it?
I have no idea.
We don't even know why they didn't have a plan.
But had preceding administrations, including the Clinton administration, been vigilant enough against al-Qaeda?
Well, clearly in retrospect, no.
But it's what Harry Truman said.
When you're in that seat, the buck stops here.
This president likes to take credit, but he doesn't like to take responsibility.
And that's fundamental to good government.
As I showed in May of 2001, you were talking about the president's great team.
In your speech at the Center for American Progress, you said this.
This was the dream team.
Remember Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell.
What did the dream team give us?
An election-driven, poll-driven, ideologically-driven foreign policy.
Take out Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.
Do you believe that Colin Powell would ever participate in an election-driven, poll-driven, ideologically-driven foreign policy?
I love General Powell.
He's a tremendous guy, and he's part of that team, and he's worked against it.
He's done his best to be loyal to the commander-in-chief.
That's the position he accepted.
He's put forth his views.
The struggles in this administration are monumental.
Some people have said that it's the greatest split ever.
And I remember during the election of 2000, people were saying, you know, he's going to have Colin Powell.
He's going to have Dick Cheney.
He's going to have great advisors, even though this is a president who is sort of inexperienced in foreign policy
and unlearned in the ways of the world.
But he's going to have a great team.
But what we didn't know was what would happen when that team disagreed.
And that's what we've seen.
What happens?
He sides, the president sided with the hardliners in case after case.
Policy hasn't been made.
And there was no success strategy for Iraq because the Pentagon took over the policy
and didn't want to follow through on the consequences and the concerns that everybody had about the aftermath of that war.
So I think that this administration, this dream team, bears responsibility.
But it starts with the president.
When you were last on the program in June, you raised a lot of eyebrows when you said that a call had come on 9-1-1.
Right.
And I said, by whom? Who did that?
Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House.
You later explained that it wasn't a precise call from the White House, but someone from Minnie's think tank.
You then later in Phoenix Radio talked about the White House trying to get you kicked off CNN.
But you said, well, you know, it was only rumor.
Newsweek had a piece where you said that I'd be a Republican if Karl Rove had taken my phone calls.
And then in The New York Times you said that Don Rumsfeld had to leak his own memo about Iraq.
And when asked what evidence you had, you said, well, there were rumors about that.
Which has led your home state newspaper to write this.
We liked Wesley Clark better as a general than a presidential candidate.
As a general, his words were measured, responsible, careful.
As a presidential candidate, his way with words is a little too loose.
Correction, way too loose.
Are you too loose with words?
And should you be more precise in talking about the White House and about Secretary Rumsfeld and calling CNN
and having you removed as an analyst?
Well, I think I've been very accurate in what I've said,
and I've given the best information on the sources that I've given them.
I could take each incident, but I don't think that's productive.
But no one from the White House called you on 9-1-1?
But I never said that.
What I said was there was a concerted effort.
And I did say I got a call from a Middle East think tank.
There was chatter that there wasn't such a think tank, but of course there is.
It's the Begin-Sadat Institute.
It's in Israel, but it has a branch in Israel.
A man named Thomas Hecht.
Exactly.
And he did call me and he did say, suggest this.
But what surprised me, I didn't know at the time, but what I found out later was
there were a lot of people pulling in the same direction.
And that's what we saw in Bob Woodward's book and other things, Tim.
When you see that, there was a concerted effort.