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Wesley K. Clark
His Views
Wesley Clark Speeches Sorted By Subject:
Abortion  Affirmative ActionAlliesAmerica's Global Role EnvironmentForeign PolicyGun Owners RightsIraqMilitary FamiliesMilitary IssuesPatriot ActPublic PolicyValuesWar on Terror
Abortion
- Pro-Choice
- Favors a woman's right to choose without the involvement of the government
Affirmative Action
- Growing up in Little, Rock, Arkansas during the earliest days of integration, General Clark witnesses firsthand
- Wesley was taken a back by The Bush Administration's recent efforts to change the admission policies of the University of Michigan. he was so disturbed by the decision, that he and several ex-military officers files a "friend of the court" brief on behalf of the U of M.
Allies
America's Global Role
Axis of Evil
- "The Iranians are further along with regard to nuclear weapons. The North Koreans are much further along. Iraq is third. We went after this in a reverse order. ... They chose Iraq as a problem before they explained what the problem was."
Environment
- Stands behind the belief man, not science or ecology, is responsible causing and reversing global warming
- Clark feels that the first step to solving the problem of global warming it to have to look at the industrial waste output of emerging nations such as China and India.
- Oct 1998 - A National Security Strategy for a New Century
Foreign Policy
- "The United States is a 225-year rolling revolution. ... We are the embodiment of the Enlightenment. If we're true to those principles, then it's a foreign policy of generosity, humility, engagement and of course force where it is needed. But as a last resort."
The substance of Clark's critique of the Bush foreign policy hinges chiefly on two assertions. First, that the administration has offered competing -- sometimes, in Clark's view, dodgy -- rationales for an invasion of Iraq and therefore has not adequately or properly unified the American public behind the idea. He gives the administration points for having done this well with regard to al-Qaeda, which he regards as the more important war to be waging right now. But on Iraq, he says, a rationale for attacking now has "never been clearly and decisively articulated"
Gun Ownership/Gun Rights
- Gun laws and regulations should be determined by the states and not the federal government.
Iraq
- The Diplomatic Effort
"The diplomatic struggle appears to be winding down," says retired U.S. Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark. "But there's still time. The diplomatic process is not over, yet."
Clark, in Vail Tuesday to address a group of American Express executives, says while France, Germany and Russia appear to have their heels dug in against armed conflict with Iraq, there's still time to get those nations, and others, to support a U.N. resolution to disarm the Middle Eastern country and remove Saddam Hussein from power.
Still, Clark says, there's no urgency to attack Iraq this second.
"It could be a week, two weeks or a month," he says. "It really doesn't matter."
Clark, who appears regularly on television as a national security analyst for CNN, says the objective of the mission, to disarm Iraq, will be met. With hundreds of thousands of troops committed to the region, the theoretical line in the sand has been crossed.
"It's a little late to say we made a mistake, that Saddam isn't that big of a problem, that he's not a threat to the security of this nation and others, and we'll let him stay. That's dreamworks," says Clark. "Saddam cannot be allowed a victory, and anything that allows him to stay in power is a victory."
After the War:
What happens after a military conflict with Iraq is as important as the conflict itself, Clark says, just as it was in the Kosovo campaign he helped coordinate. After helping forge a NATO military campaign to oust Slobodan Milosevic - the first military action in NATO's 50-year history - Clark and others watched Kosovo fall into disarray as the NATO alliance collapsed. Clark says he lays blame for the region's current mess squarely at the feet of the French, who refused to cooperate with NATO's post-war efforts in Kosovo and created a Serb enclave - a trouble spot to this day.
"The U.S. didn't step up to the bar like it needed to, and the prospect of U.S. leadership is irreplaceable," Clark says.
Clark echoes the sentiments of White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who accused the U.N. Security Council of remaining impotent during the 1990s as ethnic slaughters raged in the Balkans, as well as Rwanda.
"There are many ways to form international coalitions," Fleischer told the New York Times. "The United Nations Security Council is but one of them."
Nations that fail to support the U.S.-led effort to disarm Iraq could find themselves left out of what President Bush has often called the "coalition of the willing," which could oust Hussein and oversee post-war Iraq.
"You judge legitimacy by whether the United Nations Security Council acted," Fleischer said. "Once Saddam Hussein is overthrown, the people of Iraq will know who to thank."
Lessens Should Apply:
Clark refers to a Washington Monthly article he wrote in which he says the lessons from Kosovo should be applied to Iraq and the War on Terrorism. He says the Kosovo campaign suggests alternatives in waging and winning the struggle against terrorism, hinging on "greater reliance in diplomacy and less on the military along."
"We should have helped the United Nations create an International Criminal Tribunal on International Terrorism," says Clark. "We could have taken advantage of the outpourings of shock, grief and sympathy to forge a legal definition of terrorism and obtain an indictment of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban as war criminals charged with crimes against humanity."
Such a move would have created greater legitimacy and won stronger support in the Islamic world, Clark says, and that legitimacy could have been used to raise pressure on Saudi Arabia and other Arab states to cut off support for terrorism and to strengthen the international coalition against Saddam Hussein.
Military Familes
- Improve the education of soldiers' children recieve
- Increase military pay
Public Policy
- Clark feels that if the Bush Administration's efforts with regard to U.S. public opinion have been wanting, its attempts to change world opinion have ranged from halfhearted to downright hostile. He disdains the administration's unilateralist bent both as a moral matter -- preemptive war, he says, is something the United States could always do if it needed to, "but we never made it a principle" -- and on the strategic grounds that antagonizing old allies will come back to bite us one day.
Lessons stemming from that lack of communication in Vietnam, as well as the Gulf War 12 years ago, are not complicated, Clark says.
"The government must have candid, balanced communication with the American people," says Clark. "If the government says something, some people are going to doubt it. That's a healthy part of the equation."
War on Terror
- "The issue to me has been that we have known for a long time that Osama bin Laden is a problem. The difficulty was always to mobilize the American people and bring enough comprehensive pressure to bear to do something against terrorism. Well, 9-11 did that. But the administration has squandered a lot of the international goodwill that came our way after the attacks and is now squandering our domestic energy by forcing us into Iraq."
"Terrorism is a multilateral problem. You cannot defeat it in one nation. You need international police work, teamwork, international harmonization of laws against terror, a whole series of things. You act unilaterally, you lose the commitment of your allies to make it work. That's the one thing that will kill you in the war on terrorism."
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