In an interview with Democracy Now on March 2, 2007, General Clark told of a
meeting at the Pentagon:
"About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, "Sir, you’ve got to come in and talk to me a second." I said, "Well, you’re too busy." He said, "No, no." He says, "We’ve made the decision we’re going to war with Iraq." This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, "We’re going to war with Iraq? Why?" He said, "I don’t know." He said, "I guess they don’t know what else to do." So I said, "Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?" He said, "No, no." He says, "There’s nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq." He said, "I guess it’s like we don’t know what to do
about terrorists, but we’ve got a good military and we can take down
governments." And he said, "I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer,
every problem has to look like a nail."
So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were
bombing in Afghanistan. I said, "Are we still going to war with Iraq?" And
he said, "Oh, it’s worse than that." He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, "I just got this down from upstairs" -- meaning the Secretary of Defense’s office -- "today." And he said, "This is a memo that describes how we’re going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran." Wes Clark
Is this administration still on plan to take out 6 more countries, and is
Iran next? All signs point to yes.
After several months of cries from former commanders with impeccable
military records--Generals like Paul Eaton, John Batiste, Wes Clark and
even current top man in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus-- pleading for this
President to seek a diplomatic solution not only for Iran, but also in
Iraq, Bush finally decided to hold what can only be described as token
meetings with Iran.
Did this really fool anyone? Now they can say, "We TRIED to talk to Iran."
Forget that for months this administration has been using the same
saber-rattling techniques and making the same comments as they did leading
up to the war in Iraq--with Vice President Dick Cheney making comments like this in his West Point commencement address:
"As Army officers on duty in the war on terror, you will now face enemies who oppose and despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for. Capture one of these killers, and he'll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away. These are men who glorify murder and suicide. Their cruelty is not rebuked by human suffering, only fed by it. They have given themselves to an ideology that rejects tolerance, denies freedom of conscience, and demands that women be pushed to the margins of society. The terrorists are defined entirely by their hatreds, and they hate nothing more than the country you have volunteered to defend.
"The terrorists know what they want and they will stop at nothing to get it. By force and intimidation, they seek to impose a dictatorship of fear, under which every man, woman, and child lives in total obedience to their
ideology. Their ultimate goal is to establish a totalitarian empire, a
caliphate, with Baghdad as its capital." Dick Cheney
Let me speak to the last statement first. ("Their ultimate goal is to
establish a totalitarian empire, a caliphate, with Baghdad as its capital.") The debate is still open as to the extent of Al-Qaeda’s "stronghold" in Iraq. And if there is a stronghold in Iraq, this administration created it. Saddam was an enemy of Bin-laden and effectively kept them out of Iraq. The only evidence to a connection to Iraq prior to the war was manufactured by the Vice President’s office.
His comments suggesting that maybe we shouldn’t follow the International
laws set forth by the Geneva Convention and the U.S. Constitution is
horrible to think of. If we can not follow international laws or the laws
that we set for ourselves, how can we be the great moral compass that this
Nation has always been. How can we enforce our own vision of right and
wrong when we cannot follow our own rules of warfare. To say that these
people are not lawful combatants is no different than 150 years ago when our leaders said that Native Americans were not really people. We all but exterminated the Native Americans, is that what Bush and Cheney want to do in the Middle East? The comparison is not a stretch. If you want to exist you have to believe what we believe and do what we tell you. If not you are evil and we are granted by Gods hand the right to exterminate you. This is what they would have you believe.
Yesterday, while appearing on FACE THE NATION , Sen. Joe Lieberman, former Democratic Vice Presidential candidate now turned Bush lap dog, made the following statement:
"If there's any hope of the Iranians living according to the international rule of law and stopping, for instance, their nuclear weapons development, we can't just talk to them. I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq and to me, that would include a strike into... over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers." Joe Lieberman
To begin with our military is perfectly capable of cutting off any interference from within the borders of Iran. Second, any violation of Iranian borders by the U.S. Military would be the excuse needed for the
Iranians to actively participate in the war in Iraq. This would probably
bring more nations into the conflict and plunge the entire Middle East into a devastating regional war.
Rumors say that Bush was already set to invade Iran on April 6, 2007, but canceled the operation due to Iran’s capture of British servicemen. Also, it was reported by Arnaud de Borchgrave in the Washington Times that Bush told a recent visitor that he would "fix" things to insure that his successor will be "locked in" to his vision for the future of the Middle East.
Mr. Bush we do not need another senseless war. We do not need the deaths of thousands of U.S. servicemen and tens of thousands of Middle Easterners. If you had listened to the prophetic words of Gen. Clark when he testified before congress in 2002, we would not be in the mess that we are now. So please, listen to him now and do not start another war. Exercise some real diplomacy and settle our differences with Iran. Let us begin to restore the nation’s dignity and honor for all Americans.
Sign the petition at StopIranWar.Com