Clark: Neocons yearning for superpower enemy
Q-As a decorated leader yourself who served as NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander during the war in Kosovo, how would you assess the threat that Al Qaeda poses to this country?A-Al Qaeda is not an existential threat to the United States the way the Soviet Union was. You have to understand that the Soviet Union was a country of more than 200 million people. Al Qaeda is maybe 50,000 angry and destructive individuals.
Q-You make Al Qaeda sound as unthreatening as a schoolyard gang.
A-Al Qaeda is unpredictable and dangerous and has an unknown number of sympathizers. But the Soviets had thousands of nuclear warheads, nuclear bombs, biological and chemical warheads and specially trained assassination teams aimed at us, and all of it was on a hair-trigger status that could have been set off by accident or miscalculation.
Q-Neoconservatives generally argue just the opposite, claiming that the fight against terrorism is no less daunting than the cold war and in fact constitutes “World War IV,” to borrow the title of Norman Podhoretz’s forthcoming book.
A-Thus far, we don’t have an opposing superpower against us, no matter how much the neoconservatives long for this. Perhaps the neoconservatives believe that we can only be defined by having an enemy.
