And of course, I was in the Ford administration. I knew Rumsfeld and Cheney and all those people, but this was 2000. They weren't in the picture then. I said, 'I'll call, I'll call Condeleeza and ask her, you know, about things," and I called her. She said, "Oh, I'll come over and talk to you." So, she came over to talk to me and, and it was- It turned into a pretty one-sided conversation, in which she accused us of wrecking the relations with Russia, of being involved in a war in the Balkans we didn't have to be in, of having our troops mal-deployed.

And then she said, "There's no point in the United States doing peacekeeping." She said, "We've got the only soldiers who could fight, and that's our, what our soldiers need to be prepared to do, and we're going to move them where they're going to fight." Well-

Cen Uygur: That's a tremendous irony.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: By the time that was over, I was like, you know, 'Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.' And, you know, she got kind of, you know, her authority was being CHALLENGED by ME, just a retired 4-Star General, and she was, you know, the National Security DIRECTOR designate of the-, you know- she knew a lot, she thought. And, and so, we agreed we'd talk again, but we never did.

(laughter all around)

So, I couldn't support that vision of, of international affairs. So, I didn't want to get involved in politics, but I did speak out. And then I got on CNN and-

Ben Mankiewicz: So let me just- But let me understand it. So, your though objection to the Bush administration started significantly before the no-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Before they were ever elected.

Ben Mankiewicz: Before the nonsense started.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Yeah, before they were ever elected. I mean, I said, 'These people are crazy. You know, they don't know what they're doing' They, they, they, they're coming in with an ideology instead of taking the facts and the circumstances and creating a strategy. They're coming in to impose something. But then you see, as I sort of unravelled this over time, after 9/11, and I begin to realize this over a period of years what had happened.

I remembered being in the Pentagon in 1991, when I was a One-Star General, I was commanding the National Training Center out of Fort Irwin, but I had to go back to DC for a set of classes and things as part of my General officer education. So I went by the Pentagon one afternoon, I think it was a Friday afternoon, and I saw General Colin Powell. And when I was down in his office, I asked his assistant could she call up and see if Paul Wolfowitz is here. Paul had come out to visit us at the NTC while we were training the National Guard before the war in Iraq, or, and Kuwait, and Gulf- you know, in the Gulf War. And he said if I ever get back to the Pentagon, come and see him. So, I thought, 'Well, I'll just, it's a Friday afternoon, I'll see if he's available.'

So you know, he said, "Come on up." So, a guy named Scooter Libby opened the door

(laughter)

and brought me in. I mean, I never heard of Scooter Libby. And I went in to see Paul Wolfowitz. He was the Undersecretary, the number three guy, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy.

I said, "Congratulations, Mr. Secretary, on the war in Iraq. It's a, you know, it went, it went real well. We're real proud of the troops." He said, "Well, thanks," he said, "but," he said, "not really." He said, "We should've gotten rid of Saddam." He said, "Some people say he still could be overthrown," he said, "But I, I, I doubt it." He said, "But we did learn one thing," he said, "we discovered that now, for the first time, we can use US military power, and the Soviets won't challenge us and act against us." And he said, "We've got a window of five years, ten years, maybe more to clean up this region before the next big superpower comes along, and we've got to do that." And this was the germ that became the Republican strategy eight years, nine years later.

Cen Uygur: Well yeah, that's-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: And that's, that's the whole rationale. It was to go in and clean up with military effect, to lick you-know-what, and you know, 'Go in there and shape 'em up!' Yeah. But the problem with it is that these are people that don't know about military forces. Military forces don't go in and CCRRRKK! shape thinks up. I mean, you know, military forces go in, you tiptoe in. You give them enormous responsibilities, and you ask them, 'Please don't break the china. You're authorized to do anything you have, but please don't do it unless you absolutely have to.' Because when you hurt people, when you go in and violate someone's home, knock in the door, throw the guy on the ground, put his hands behind his back, put your boot in his back, shove his wife into the other room, and the kids are screaming, that will never be forgotten, and they will hate you for that.

You would in the United States. In Arkansas, where I live, if people did that, we'd be shooting at them.

(laughter)

And, you know, it's- you can't do that. We were very careful in the Balkans to be very respectful, and somehow we lost all that.

Cen Uygur: See, General Clark, I want to ask you about that. Kosovo you got sectarian strife, like you do in Iraq. You had a, a, a bad dictator, like you did in Iraq. Kosovo, we do the war. We don't lose a single US casualty, and Iraq, we see the mess now. What was, do you think in your experience - obviously you were the, the Allied Commander there - what was the critical difference? Or may- were there several differences? And, and what do we do wrong in Iraq that we did right in Kosovo?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: First of all, we only got involved in the Balkans because we had to, not because we wanted to. It wasn't elective. It wasn't a choice like it was in Iraq. It was like, in Iraq, it was like, 'Hey, lets go find some, some people and let's, let's show 'em we can take down a government. We're going to prove to Al Qaeda we're tough, and we can take losses and...' Whoawhoa, that, none of that was the case. We were drawn into the Balkans, because diplomacy alone didn't work. It had to be backed by the threat of force.

You know, we did the Dayton Peace talks in 1995, but they only really got traction when a Serb mortar shell landed in a marketplace in Sarajevo and we retaliated by seventeen days of some very limited air strikes in Bosnia.

And I was with Milosevic at the time with Richard Holbrooke and, Milosevic was saying, (Milosevic voice) "Please, General Clark, General Clark, please stop bombing. Is bad for peace."

Well, no, no, it was very good for peace, because Milosevic didn't want to get bombed. I spent hundreds of hours with Milosevic with other members of our delegation during the time 1995-96 and we were putting the peace deal together in the Balkans, and when it came time to go to war against Milosevic, I knew him. I'm probably the only General in the twentieth century who's really known the mind of his adversary. So, when I would get on television every day or every other day in these press conferences in Brussels, and I would say what the facts were, and at the end of it I'd say, "Milosevic is losing. We're winning, and he knows it."

I knew he was watching me. He was looking to see was I confident, did I have big bags under my eyes. He knew he couldn't trust his own Generals. He knew General Clark was telling the truth. And eventually, when we ramped up the air campaign and we planned for ground power, and then we started the negotiations at the same time to give him a way out - he was a very rational, calculating guy - he picked a way out, because knew the hammer was coming, and he knew he would be destroyed if he let Kosova be invaded with, with the Albanians and, and the American forces. He knew. We knew he was rational, and I knew his mind and how to work it.

Cen Uygur: So General Clark, it was a matter of a, a combination of diplomacy and negotiations and threat of force and force, rather than the one-tiered approach that they used with the Bush administration, which is force and complete force. And, and that's not going to work because it doesn't give somebody an out, as you said. And-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well they could have given Saddam Hussein an out. I mean, at the end apparently he was willing to leave the country, and they didn't want it. They, you see, the administration had always went into this thing with mixed motives. It wasn't just about WMD. It wasn't about, 'Gee, maybe he'll negotiate and let us finish the inspections.' They were people in the administration that said, '(gasp) Gosh, I hope he doesn't give in to this UN inspection thing. What if he opens up, and what if he lets us inspect, and then we won't be able to invade!?!' It's like-

Ben Mankiewicz: Well, the inspectors were there for crying out loud.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I know, but it was like, 'We got to have a pretext for invade, invading,' you know, 'We got to make him so mad, we'll get to invade.'

Why? Because they wanted to demonstrate the US use of force.

Why? Because they had a mistaken impression of the, of how America's viewed in the world and of how America gets it's way in the world. America gets it's way in the world, not because people are afraid of being struck by aircraft carriers. America gets it's way in the world and has in the past, because people generally understand that our ideas have a lot of power.

They're backed by economic power, legal power, diplomatic power, and people liked us. And then in addition, you know, if necessary, you backed us into the wall, we, we were pretty competent militarily.

It wasn't like the Roman Empire. It wasn't like, 'Here come the legions,' you know, 'look out, they're going to crucify everybody.' And yet, somehow these people got the entire wrong impression about the world. They read a couple of, I guess, voice intercepts of somebody saying, "We're not afraid of the Americans." And so they, you know, that was the excuse to justify an invasion. Look, you're dealing with a mentality in which people are very macho. It's a very normal thing in many societies and especially in the society we're, we're up against there. People beat on their breasts and talk about, you know, they're real men and they're not afraid on anything and blah, blah, blah. That's not an adequate justification for an invasion of a country.

Ben Mankiewicz: You know, you, you mentioned earlier, and I just wanted to touch on it, because I find it fascinating about a 19-, that 1991 meeting-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Yeah.

Ben Mankiewicz: -with Paul Wolfowitz and, and your meeting back in 2000 with Condeleeza Rice, who we know had the history of, sort of a, she was a Sovietologist.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Right.

Ben Mankiewicz: And it just strikes me of, of how much of the 2003 Iraq war is still leftover obsession with the Soviet Union, which I think makes the war seem perhaps even more ridiculous than it already seemed twelve minutes ago to me.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Yeah, I don't disagree with that. I mean, people are always the victims or beneficiaries of their own experiences, and we had a whole mindset about this. I, I'll give you another example.

I was out at a, a conference in Jackson Hole, Wyoming in the summer of 1998. I was still in uniform, and I was on a leadership panel with some other people who were at the conference. The other people were Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and Jim Baker. And there were four of us plus another woman who was sitting up on these stools, you know, talking to these students.

And they were asking me about leadership. Well, I was in uniform, and I was- This was during the time when the ethnic cleansing was igniting in Kosova. The Albanian Generals had come to me, and they said, "From our border posts, we can see the artillery falling in Kosova on our cousins, and we don't like it." I mean, I knew it was going on. People were giving me eye witness accounts of it.

And when I tried to explain this, all I could get from Cheney, Powell and Baker was, "Well in 1991, when we went against Saddam Hussein..." And they, you know, it's these three old buddies here all jousting with each other, talking about 1991.

It was like Europe is irrelevant, the Balkans is irrelevant, Bosnia was irrelevant. This was a huge thing the United States did to step into the Bosnian war and bring peace. It was huge, and it was also a huge thing the United States did to motivate NATO to stop another round of ethnic cleansing by Slobodan Milosevic. And yet, these people were not prepared to even acknowledge it. It was like, 'Oh Democrats, they don't know anything.'

Cen Uygur: See-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: 'This- Go back to our view.' See, they, they, they didn't want to learn. So, when they came to office- And here's, here's a point I want to leave you all with and, and focus on. Look, we knew Osama Bin Laden was a threat. I mean, my troops in Europe were on alert from August on, after those bombings in, in Tanzania and Kenya-

Ben Mankiewicz: Right.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: -in 1998. We knew that was coming from Al Qaeda. We had a full-court press on against Al Qaeda. Probably should have done more than we did, but we did send Tomahawk missiles in there. I wasn't in on the planning of that. I don't know what the considerations were. It wasn't, you know, my responsibility, and I couldn't get access to it, but that's the way it works in the military chain of command. You can't do everything, but we sure knew about Osama Bin Laden. And we talked to the administration.

My friend Richard Clarke talked very clearly to Condeleeza and others, so did Sandy Berger when there was a transition period and after the 25th of Januray of 2001. And they chose to ignore the advice, the information, and the plans they were given.

They chose to ignore it, because it came from an administration that they didn't respect. And that ignorance, to my view, constitutes command negligence by the President of the United States for failing to organize our government to take action on the intelligence and warnings we received about a potential threat to the United States that resulted in 9/11.

Cen Uygur: See, I don't-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: That's, that's the flaw. The Iraq war is a coverup of the failure that lead to 9/11.

Cen Uygur: That's an interesting point as well. We're talking to General Clark. You see, I've always thought the Democrats didn't do a good enough job of emphasizing, 'Look, when we ran a war, we didn't lose a single US soldier. We completely achieved our objectives.' I've written about this. Why don't they brag about that? Instead they're always playing defense. They're always playing defense. Look at the war the Republicans did. Look at the war the Democrats did. On a political level, I don't know why they don't do that, putting aside policy. No, as far as policy is concerned-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I don't think-

Well, let me answer that question.

You know, I don't think wars are something that anyone should be bragging about. A war is something ugly. You do it only as a last resort. It's not like a football championship. When you've been in it, and I've been in it, it's real bad. I-in war, every single issue become a matter of life and death. People who could normally compromise suddenly won't compromise. Questions of fact become matters of honor and integrity. Tempers flare. People stay up all night. There's total exhaustion. Everything is, every problem is magnified, and the consequences are, are, are permanent. When those bombs fall, people die.

And we had a, we had a mistake for example where it was a defective device on a cluster bomb unit that was dropped over Nish. And the cluster bomb unit broke open at, at too high an altitude, and it scattered bomblets, and three or four of them hit on a schoolyard. And a couple of kids were killed. Believe it or not, about three weeks later, I got a letter from a Serb. He said, "YOU KILLED MY GRANDDAUGHTER. I WILL NEVER FORGIVE YOU, AND I WILL KILL YOU." I knew how he felt. And these- that's why I don't, I don't, you know, get, get upset because Democratic Party leaders aren't bragging about this thing.

This is a very serious matter when a nation goes to war. It's never to be done lightly. It's not bombastic. It's with deep regret, because human life is going to be lost, and the fortunes and honor of nations are at stake. So, it's just very different, and there's been- because the United States hasn't had a war in its own territory, some states ever, even in the South for 150 years, people forget how ugly and awful war is. It's awful, and that's why it can only be taken, undertaken as an absolute last resort.

Ben Mankiewicz: We got less than a minute, General Clark. We have to do the Tim Russert, you know, it's the end of the interview, now you ask about running for President, and I want to ask it in two ways. One: are you going to run, and two: is it too dau- or is it too daunting a challenge with as much money as Hillary is capable of raising?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I haven't even thought about 2008. I, I'm just working 2006.

Ben Mankiewicz: Is that really, that's really true. Are you 100% swear, cross your heart?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, I'm working 2006, because I'm in business right now. When I got out of the race in 2004, I didn't have anything but my military pension. I couldn't pay for my house and my secretary. I had to go back into the business community. I'm not in elective office. I mean, people are nice enough to donate money so I can have a little bit of a staff. I go out and campaign for people. I don't know about 2008, but frankly, it's irrelevant. 2006 is what's important, because we get the right people in office, we can stop the deterioration of this country, and we got to do that.

Cen Uygur: General Clark, I want to ask one more thing about policy. Are you, you know, you say how grave war is, and we couldn't agree more, and it seems like they might do it again with Iran. I don't know if they, you know, what you think the status of that is. Certainly they're thinking about it.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: I'm worried.

Cen Uygur: Yeah, and do you get the sense that there's more push-back from the Pentagon and from the actual-

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Yeah.

Cen Uygur: -Generals and soldiers now, and will that, do you think that'll make a difference or will there come a time where they say, 'Oh, these Generals again. They don't know what they're doing. Let's do, let's just bomb Iran. We won't put soldiers in. We'll just bomb them. It'll be easy.' Do you think that they might still be that arrogant, or is the push-back going to make a difference this time?

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Push-back's going to make a difference, but it may not be decisive. Yes, there's some push-back, but ultimately I think the President, by all of his statements, he's going to, as long as the Iranians continue to, to, to, to enrich uranium, as long as they don't agree, as long as the current government's in power in Iran, unless the intelligence suddenly says there's no threat, I think the President's going to have a very hard time stringing this thing out for two more years until he leaves office. I think he's going to be hoist on his own petard, so to speak. And, and I'm very worried about this, because we should not have gone down this track. We should not have declared an Axis of Evil. We should have cut Iran out of that a long time ago.

We should have opened up with Iran. We should have dealt with Iran the same way we dealt with Eastern Europe and people we disagreed with during the Cold War. Flood them with rock music and blue jeans.

(laughter)

And you know what? They're going to come our way. Iran's a great civilization, but maybe it's too late for that now. I don't know, but I know this. We need to be talking directly to Iran. We need to be working on ways of meeting the security interests in the region. We need to keep the military option on the table, but it has to be the absolute last resort.

Ben Mankiewicz: General Clark, thank you so much for talking to us. We really appreciate you coming by.

GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Thanks a lot.