Globe interview with Wesley K. Clark

On December 17, 2003, the Globe editorial board interviewed Democratic presidential candidate Wesley K Clark, former US general. The following is a complete transcript of the interview.

Q: Ground rules here -- this is on the record. Welcome to the Globe. And, we are mostly members of the editorial board here and columnists. So, this is our sort of endorsement interview. But, of course, there's other than these people here, and we very much want to hear about The Hague, as well, so... Usually we just give the candidate a few minutes to open up with whatever you want to say.

A: Well, I very much like your endorsement.

Q: (laughter) Check! Anything you say.

A: Well, now, this is a very influential newspaper, obviously, not just because of New Hampshire but because it's an international newspaper, and I've read it all the way around the world. And I very much respect the things you day and the way you approach the news and the editorial policies of the paper. I just got back last night from testifying a -- it was odd -- and the way that things happen in one's lives sometimes, it was very odd. You know, I got off the plane in Amsterdam on Sunday morning, and as soon as one of my colleagues turned on the Blackberry, they received the word that Milosevic had been captured--

Q: Saddam.

A: So as we -- I'm sorry, it's Saddam who had been captured. So, we walked off the plane. We thought we were coming to testify about Milosevic. It was all about Saddam. And, by the time I actually got in -- and I had to go meet with the prosecutors, and then I had been over to (?Carla del Ponte?), whom I hadn't seen in a long time. She's the chief prosecutors on Sunday night, and then the trail started Monday morning. And I couldn't help but reflect on the differences and the similarities of the two. Both were dictators. Both caused regional devastation. In Milosevic's case, it was with a different kind of weapon of mass destruction. It was with this terrible idea of ethnicity as being the driving factor in life and turning ethnic groups against each other and exploiting previous episodes dating back into the mid-Nineteenth Century of ethnic hatred in the Balkans to pursue his aggrandizement of Serbia. Two million driven out of their homes. A hundred and fifty thousand, I think, seems to be the established or at least the conservative low figure for casualties in the Balkans. Add another 10,000 casualties killed and (?demission?) and other things in the case of Kosovo, maybe. So, 150-160,000, maybe. And, when you go through all of that and you look at it, the two cases are exactly the opposite. In the case of Milosevic, we had a wily, shrewd, manipulative, deceitful man who adroitly walked the boundaries between war and diplomacy to advance his (?aims?). And, there were four wars in the Balkans under his leadership in Serbia. Each one he lost, and, nevertheless, he remained in power, building up wealth and gaining control over his country. NATO actively tried to prevent the fourth war. We acted with diplomacy, with the use of force as a last resort, only after our allies were on board, and after we had a clear plan of what was going to happen next. It was an air campaign with the threat of ground forces intervention. We didn't lose anybody, and that cost $3-4 billion total. And, he's in the hay overthrown by his own people standing trial. And, it was en imminent threat to regional destabilization. When I look at Saddam -- of course, he was a terrible tyrant with a long list of crimes against his own people and abroad starting two wars using chemical weapons -- don't parentheses note. We knew it at the time. We didn't seem to object at the time that he was using chemical weapons. In fact, we knew the German firms that were supplying him. And, former Secretary Rumsfeld went over and met with Saddam in 1983 in that famous meeting. And I recall being in the Pentagon '83, '84, and we were sending intelligence information to Saddam, and (?so?) that we considered as war at that point in America's interest -- Iran. So, I think we have to temper the sanctimony a little bit here with the (inaudible). But nevertheless, the terrible crimes against his own people were awful. But at the time the United States acted after 9/11, he wasn't and imminent threat, not to the region, not to us, except through bluster against Israel and providing money to the Palestinian suicide bombers. I thought he still had some weapons of mass destruction, but his army had deteriorated by half from what it was during the Gulf War. It wasn't much then. His economy was falling apart. And I was struck by the passage in Bob Woodward's book in which he talked about how soon the discussions began after 9/11 on attacking Saddam. And when I saw it as... in the Pentagon and heard that... my colleagues say, "Hey, sir, you heard the joke?" "It's 9/11. If Saddam didn't do it, too bad. He should have. We're going to get him anyway." Of course, it wasn't much of a joke, but it was what I call an elective war. I think it was a mistake, but having done it, we had to succeed. Now we've got Saddam. We're still a long way from success, but hopefully he will stand trail for his crimes, and hopefully it will be a trial that is conducted under the complete rules of international law with transparency, with evidence being presented, with protection for the witnesses, with defense counsel, with no pre-determination of what his punishment's going to be, with qualified justices. I don't think you can take the death penalty off the table, but I do think that you shouldn't prejudge it.

Q: So, would you not have that trial in Iraq, then, does the (two words inaudible)?

A: I think it's going to be very hard not to have it in Iraq.

Q: You can have these kinds of protections even (two words inaudible).

A: I think you have to have... I've been thinking about this, and I'm going to come out with something later in the day. I'm still working it through based on my experience in The Hague and how it provides an important precedent. The Hague experience is the first time we've tried a head of state. It's been a long trail. It's absolutely transparent international rule. At my testimony -- I think it's the first one that hasn't been completely real time filmed and observed, and that was at the request of the State Department, who didn't want to take the chance that his former military guy in a high position divulge classified information -- but I think the whole transcript will be released. It's taken a long time, and I don't know that this trial with Saddam -- I think the pace of the trial is an important factor, but on the other hand, you don't want to accelerate to the extent that people afterwards are going to say "you (?watched?) the justice" because you not only want justice done, you want the perception of justice. The trial of Milosevic is huge for Europe and especially for the Balkans because it's the European rule of law that's being established there. This trial for Saddam is an opportunity to establish the rule of law in the Middle East, which is the one area of the world where it's least established. There's no CSCE convention in the Middle East. The rulers there can do -- have been able to do pretty much whatever they want to their own citizens. There are no conventions that bind them. There is a dispute between civil justice and the sharia. All of that is one way or another is play in this trial. It's a huge opportunity for you after the United States and for American leadership to set the right tone in the region, not just in Iraq. But, we have to do it in a thoughtful way. We need to be consulting with allies, the United Nations, international authorities, and, of course, the Iraqis themselves before we rush to prescribe how, where and who's going to do this.

Q: Do you think Saddam's capture is going to, by itself, achieve stability in Iraq and security, or do you have another plan to... what would be your plan to stabilize the security in Iraq?

A: I think there would be surprising if it did. Apparently they found some documents -- of course, I don't have any -- I don't want to call The Pentagon these days and try to wheedle information out of them. I've got my security clearances, but it's not appropriate. And, what I -- I think it's likely that some information was taken with Saddam, and it will probably help, but I think it's unlikely that all of the resistance in Iraq was controlled or motivated by Saddam. We know from news reports that Osama bin Laden told the Taliban that his point of main effort was in Iraq because this makes the Americans so much more accessible. It wasn't the centerpiece on the War on Terror, and it shouldn't be Iraq except that by putting our U.S. troops there in harm's way, it's an opportunity for terrorists to strike us. Capturing Saddam was a necessary, but not sufficient, step. Of course, I hope our troops are going to be safer, and it's likely they will be safer. And, we can't go into Iraq and fail. That would make everybody less safe, and not capturing Saddam would have been a failure. So, it's clear to me that it's a good thing to have captures Saddam, and I'm very proud of the troops that did it. And I don't think there should be any premature celebrations that everything from here is a lay-down hand because there is still enormous stresses inside Iraq that are actually intensifying with the duration of the American occupation. Saddam was crushing sectarianism is Iraq. The Shi'ia are finding their voice now, and, of course, the Kurds still have their own weapons.

Q: (inaudible)...apart from Saddam...(inaudible) trial, what would you do if you were President tomorrow?

A: Well, first I'd find a way to begin turning more and more authority, administrative authority, over to the Iraqis. And I would do it in a way that's very transparent. So, for example, things like oil revenues and schedules for repairs and assessment of priorities for infrastructure development, anticipated dates that telephone service can be provided -- all of these sort of administrative things ought to be... you ought to be able to establish some kind of an indirect democracy, bringing simple organization together, provide them staff, and let them begin to pick up some of the administrative duties that are being done by the occupation of the coalition provisional authority and so-called occupational authority. And I'd be pushing the turnover of sovereignty to the Iraqis just as soon as possible. And then, I would go to NATO, and I would tell John (?Aberzay?), the Commander, "You're now working for NATO. Give them a seat at the table." We've got a lot of NATO troops there already. You got the Poles, you got the Italians, you got a lot of other... You don't have the Germans and the Spanish -- I'm sorry, the Germans and the French -- but it doesn't matter. Let NATO have a special role in monitoring the operation. That's the way you bring them in. And then, I would create...

Q: (six words inaudible)

A: Yeah, U.N. can't do this on the military side. And, when you do NATO, it's the United Nations. It's the United States, anyway, that's doing it. I mean, NATO doesn't have an intelligence system. It relies exclusively on the United... almost exclusively on the United States. But, it puts the diplomatic piece on top. It let's you have hope that you can diminish the U.S. fingerprints on the operation. And then, I'd take and form an Iraqi reconstruction development agency like we did in the Balkans. We call it there "The PIC," the Peace Implementation Committee. You have 35 countries. Every country that wanted to participate got a seat on this table -- around the table. This committee was represented by a man on the ground in Bosnia. It was originally (?Karl Bolt?), and he was known as the high rep, high representative. And, we do the same thing in Iraq. They don't have executive authority over the country. They're there to assist, and let them assist the economic political development and feed U.S. efforts through that international organization. Take Halliburton out of play. Halliburton, by the way, should be taken -- there should be a hearing to determine whether or not they actually violated the law, not just overcharged but willfully violated the law. Normally, when people make those kinds of mistakes on Federal contracts, they get barred from Federal procurement activities.

Q: Should that be a Congressional hearing? Who should give that sort of hearing?

A: I think you've got to do it outside the Executive Branch. It's a huge contract. And, there's a Federal law called a "Competition in Contracting Act," which is really the guiding principle that everybody in DOD runs in fear of. You cannot violate (?CECO?). If you violate (?CECO?) -- (makes noise connoting severance). And there are limited exemptions so that you can go (?sole in for source?) under certain circumstances. As I recall -- and I haven't checked this recently -- but what we did have was with Brown and Root, the Halliburton subsidiary, we has a standing contract where they could do the things that we used to require troops to do. In other words, they could -- you didn't need KPs in the mess hall. They would provide the food. They would hire the local people to wash the dishes. They'd send their own former retired military cooks over there, and they'd put them on their contract. And it was a convenience -- it was both a convenience, and it was a way of minimizing the troops requirements in a foreign country. So, you might see 30,000 troops somewhere, but if you had to do it the old way, it might have been 45,000 troops. Halliburton was taking care of that. That's what we did in Kosovo, and we did it in Bosnia. But, those contracts were much smaller, and they weren't for nation building. The problem here is, this is a company that's not -- they don't have any specific background in nation building. They construct the facilities. They construct them for profit, and they construct them in a remote separation from their headquarters in Houston. So, all of that, the propriety of all of that, the judgment behind all of that, I think, needs to be investigated in terms of looking -- and the first evidence here is the overcharging on the fuel. But there's no telling what else is going on in there.

Q: General, back on NATO -- if the French and the Germans didn't want to join the operation in kind, what makes you think that they would want to do it through the auspices of NATO?

A: Well, I'm not asking them to join the operation. What I'm asking -- go to NATO and ask NATO to take oversight of the operation without taking any more responsibilities for it than they have to now. You can start it in several different ways. I'd like to have it as a full-fledged NATO mission. Colin Powell talked about that. The NATO nations apparently are on the last (?ministerial?) were a little nervous about it and didn't want to do it. They're still trying to rustle up enough troops to really do Afghanistan, (two words inaudible) Kabul in Afghanistan. But, you could establish a reporting channel, so Abizaid reports to NATO. NATO can have an advisory role initially, and you could set a time schedule, which NATO will then take political authority for the operation without supplying other troops to come in. So, you're not asking for French and German troops necessarily. You're just saying, "We'd like to bring you into this. We think Iraq is an important interest for Europe as well as for the United States, and we've (?endured our path?) the inside details on the operation (inaudible).

Q: Let me leap -- just draw back -- Bob (?Mathew?) was President, but I'll fall back a little from that (inaudible) and make the nominee. And...

A: Shucks.

Q: And, so there you are in the debate, Mr. President, and the question of Iraq comes up, and you say to him -- he say, "Well, if General Clark had his way, the (?doctor's / doctrine's?) saying he'd still be in power." That's still oppressing his people. What's your...?

A: If General Clark had his way, we'd have had Osama bin Laden dead or alive two years ago, and the world would have been a lot safer. And then we'd have used the United Nations to go after Saddam Hussein the right way. I don't believe that dramatic visuals are the essence of state (?crafting?). There's nothing more dramatic than Walt Rogers leading the charge with the Third and the Seventh Cav on CNN, and I sat there with Aaron Brown and watched it, and it was a dramatic, incredible video, as well as the pulling down of the statue. But that video doesn't make America safer. What makes America safer is going after the enemies that attacked us. Those enemies are still there in the mountains of western Pakistan.

Q: How would you have gotten Osama bin Laden two years ago?

A: I would have stayed with the mission until we finished it. They had no success strategy for Afghanistan. If fact, this was made clear to me privately, and this is pretty much out in the open now. They had decided to go after Iraq even as we were first moving against Afghanistan. We don't still know exactly why, and I think the American people are owed that answer. But...

Q: You say you would...

A: ...just for a second... There's a variety of reasons it had been advanced. Paul Wolfowitz in a Vanity Fair interview implied that it was the weapons of mass destruction were a least common denominator. -- "Well, can we all agree on this?" -- But, there were a lot of other motivations. There were people saying Afghanistan was too tough, it was too hard to get terrorists. You needed to do something. They think that we're afraid. We just need to go in there and kick their ass -- excuse me for using profanity, but that's probably the way it came out in the meeting. And, so, all of these things were in play, and they settled on this one thing, but it's not the straightforward way of conducing American foreign policy, and it wasn't presented in a straightforward way to the American people. We were mislead. It was hyped with fear. I remember begin on CNN asking -- it must have been September of last year -- saying, "I don't see the smoking gun or the threat." Where's the smoking gun that says, "Take action now. This is more urgent than Saddam Hussein." Where's the threat. A couple of weeks later, we're answered by Condi Rice and then the Vice President saying, "What if the smoking gun is a mushroom could over American cities?" Well, that's no answer. That's just hyping, and it turns out there wasn't any answer to it. It was hype. It was a policy they wanted to execute. They bet on the fact, I guess, that they could produce evidence that would link Saddam to 9/11 or, at least, produce an imminent threat (2-3 words inaudible). There was no linkage so far as we know.

Q: Going back to what you said at the beginning, the events (3 words inaudible) was there's a difference between Saddam and Milosevic in that Milosevic was an imminent threat...

A: Right.

Q: ...Saddam was not. Now, unless this was an imminent threat, it was from the beginning (2 words inaudible), and certainly the European allies didn't acknowledge the imminent threat, at least from (2-3 words inaudible). And once you make (inaudible) that Saddam was an imminent threat...

A: Certainly we (?can / can't?)

Q: ...much more, and in terms of human rights (inaudible) war is a great (2-3 words inaudible). How would you manage that?

A: Well, first of all, there are different types of threats, and the threat that Saddam had in the region first, there was an invasion of Kuwait. We answered that. The previous invasion of Iran we more or less backed as an effort to stabilize and curtail the expansionism of sheer extremists right after Khomeini had taken over. So, those were the two wars that he started. The war in Kuwait we answered. We liberated Kuwait. We smashed 50% of his army, and we had him under control. And, over the last two or three years, he had been working a charm offensive on his Arab neighbors. So, in terms of imminent attack and destabilization of the region, it wasn't there. You can't discount the possibility that at some point, Saddam would have, if you released the sanctions -- would have gone and gotten weapons of mass destruction if he didn't have them. I always believed he had some leftover (?VX?) and maybe come anthrax somewhere. I couldn't believe he was compliant enough to have gotten rid of all of it to the inspection, but maybe he did. But, still, you can't discount the possibility at some point. But, there was no ticking clock there. What you knew was that you had a year, two years, three years, four years, to go against it, and it was a case of executive judgment and leadership as to whether you pursue the people who had attacked you or whether you took this in a sideways diversion that was going to use $150 billion, 460 American lives, etc., etc., to go against Saddam. So, that's the answer on Saddam. On Milosevic, it was a different kind of a threat. He actually wasn't invading other countries. He was destabilizing the region by the ethnic cleansing policies in his own countries. The Germans told me when I first got into the problem in '95 is that we spent $20 billion handling refugees in Germany alone. People were pouring out, and the Albanian destabilization, which would have resulted from ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, would have been the worst because there were already Albanians in Greece where there was a lot of friction. There were 300-400 a night still slipping into Italy, where there was a lot of friction. And it's like -- one of the officers I met -- was in Slovakia -- told me as I was bidding farewell a few months after the war -- he said, "It's a good thing," he said, "that you won this war because we have 5,000 Albanians already here." And, it was destabilization in a different way, and that's what the Europeans wanted to resist. You couldn't move forward with security in economic development in the region. You couldn't knit Europe together as long as you have Milosevic in Serbia. Serbia is the keystone of the Balkans. The river runs through it, the Danube, all the transportation nodes. The power's interconnected, and it's the largest industrial power. So, it was a problem. So, the Europeans saw an imminence to this problem in the spring of '98 as the fighting began to intensify, which, in my view, wasn't there with Saddam Hussein in August of 2002.

Q: You said you have gotten into something like (?dedra lion?) to use to keep it in control. Before 9/11, the most wanted international criminals of the world were (?Ron Makarzics and Malcolm Logiks? Milosevic? Ratko Miladic?) They still haven't been put on trial. You mentioned the photograph of Rumsfeld meeting Saddam back in the early '80's. I've seen photographs of you palling around with Radich, who is certainly a pretty awful war criminal himself, and yet you as (2-3 words inaudible) down to just eight months. Can you explain why there was success in one case and, after all these years, no success in the other one?

A: It's a really important question, and should I be the President or should I be the NATO Commander, or what? How do I answer it, or do I just tell you like it is? Q: Tell me as you understand it.

A: I was a Three-Star when I met with Miladic. I was going over there in an effort to prepare a policy paper, and I talked to a retired Four-Star, who had been an advisor to the State Department. He said, "Make sure you meet with both sides. Meet with Miladic." And, so, I had permission from the State Department to do it -- at least I thought I did. Apparently, they never checked with the ambassador. The ambassador wasn't in the country. He never told me not to do it. And, so, I got a feel from meeting with Miladic that was very useful for me in being able to help negotiate, which won't work with (2 words inaudible), and also useful for me in ultimately going against Slobodan Milosevic. I wish I hadn't taken his hat. It was a mistake. I was trying to do military diplomacy, and I got caught. It wasn't the right thing to have done.

Q: How was (remainder of sentence inaudible)?

A: Rumsfeld was -- when I was meeting with Miladic, I wasn't encouraging the policy. I was trying to get my understanding of what Miladic would do if we pursued a policy of lift and strike. And I was also trying to persuade Miladic to sign the contact group peace plan. I think Rumsfeld's mission was different in terms of meeting with Milosevic -- I'm sorry, of meeting with Saddam -- because he wasn't there on a mission to try to end the war. He was there on a mission to do something else. I've never seen the classified report on precisely what the objectives of the visit were. So, I would be speculating on what that was.

Q: Why are those two still (?held off?). (?What's it say to you?)

A: Because -- I'm having to choose my words because I signed a compartmented intelligence oath when I left the government and read out of the compartment under -- it's a black program, so there's only a limited amount I can tell you. So, let me see if I can work around this. The United States government -- (?Kerritage?) was in the French sector. (?Polly?) is in the French sector. Miladic was mostly not in Bosnia at all. He was mostly in Belgrade, and he was spotted several times there during the time that I was never in command. I can't disclose my efforts to get (?Kerritage?)

End of Side B

A: ...and so, it required a degree of cooperation with other powers that proved difficult for some in the U.S. government to accept. And, there remained rumors that there was some special French connection, rumors that have been denied vigorously by Paris. We haven't yet sorted the truth of this out. My belief is that, with sufficient resolution at the political level, Miladic and (?Kerritage?) can be arrested and that they should be, and that the arrest of Saddam Hussein should be the occasion in which the United States and it allies in Bosnia intensify their efforts to arrest these remaining two highly visible war crime suspects.

Q: Isn't this whole history that you're describing here, which (4 words inaudible) you claim bothers you do to this day -- an argument against making Iraq a NATO mission, making it as internationalized as (remainder of sentence inaudible).

A: No, I don't think so. I don't think so because I think you have to look at the broader implications of what you're doing. What we found in the Kosovo campaign is this. We found that if you work and you use the power of international law diplomacy together with military force, you can accomplish decisive results for the region. The idea that you can go into a country, invade it, spend seven-eight months afterwards, finally arrest its leader, and then occupying and then say, "OK, now you're going to be free." Well, of all the countries in the Middle East, the only one that would have worked with at all is Iraq, and it's proved less easy to do this than the advocates of such a policy anticipated. The idea that you can play a kind of Middle East -- a unilateral Middle East hopscotch using military force to change your region is something that most of the world has rejected, most of the world led by the United States has rejected for the last 50 years. And what we did in the Balkans was we went for the larger good, which was the rule of law, the stabilization of the region, and we accepted the delays and the inefficiencies that are inevitable in alliances.

Q: (inaudible)

A: But on the other hand -- but I have to say this. There's one other thing I have to tell you, and it's this. In my view, this administration hasn't put much effort into going after Miladic and (?Kerratage?) or in remaining in the Balkans. There was an early effort -- well, first of all, before the Administration went into office, when I talked to Condi, it was clear to me she wasn't interested in staying in that mission. Secondly, it was an early effort after they were elected to pull out, an effort that was stopped by those in the State Department who said "we are all in together, we'll all be out together," and they blocked what was an effort then to withdraw U.S. forces. And that after 9/11, the mission has been tertiary or fifth level concern on the part of the United States, and there's an effort now to pull U.S. forces out before the mission's completed. So, this is not a mission that the United States -- that this Administration has wanted much to do with. So, I fought the lack of American leadership, especially since January of 2001, with not having vigorously pursued this rather than the alliance itself.

Q: General, on a more broader basis, back in your description of Iraq with NATO, which was kind of a military response to this situation -- given this country's standing in the world at this point, both diplomatically and in terms of popular opinion, how would you (2 words inaudible). What would you do differently, if anything, on the State Department side of things rather than the Defense Department side of things, to change or redirect this country's position?

A: Well, what I'd do is I'd go to Europe and I'd setup a new Atlantic charter. In fact, I made a speech over at the Netherlands Institute for International Affairs a couple of nights ago and played this idea out. But I think it's time to renew relationships across the Atlantic. I think the United States has to go to Europe and say, we're going to come to you all first, bring security challenges, and in return, we want you to come to us first through NATO, bring security challenges. It's, there's no Soviet threat, but we still want to bind ourselves together. And I think if the United States works in efficient multilateralism through NATO, that we can move the world. Together with Europe, we're 600-700,000,000 people, depending on how you draw the eastern border of Europe. Half the world's GDP, we're three of the five vetoes on UN Security Council, we can prevent crises around the world. It really starts with the conception of what the US base is in the world. They say politics (inaudible). Always got to be (inaudible) you know? For Bush, it's the Christian Right. For the United States, it's Europe. That's our base in the world. Those are the people that are most closely aligned with us in terms of investments, culture, history, background, shared experiences. And we should reinvigorate this trans-Atlantic language. And then use that together to work with the other issues around the world.

Q: I --

A: May I make an observation.

Q: Yeah.

A: We talked, I mean --

Q: I was just about to make the same observation, I bet.

A: Because, you know, I saw one person said that I didn't have passion for domestic policies (laughter).

Q: I was going to try to make a segue, which is that, you know, there is this strategic coincidence of your having had, being a general at a time when America does care deeply about security issues. But, it's been a long time since we've had a general as president. And I'm wondering how your experience as a military man prepares you, or perhaps is a bit of a problem, in the much more delicate political life of negotiating with Congress and being (inaudible) pulpit to America, all of the other roles that the president plays domestically.

A: Yeah, it's a really important question. Everybody in the military's had a different career pattern. And when I went to West Point I was lucky, I was, I had some good mentors there. And I got a very broad-based education. I worked in the Neighborhood Youth Corps, when I graduated from West Point, down in New York City, in south Bronx for a month or so, almost a month, before I went to airborne school. I went to Oxford right out of West Point, couldn't have had two more divergent experiences. I taught three years at West Point, I taught political philosophy, I taught economics and a little bit of international relations, international security things. I coached and participated in intercollegiate debate, which is always about wanton type issues like federal aid to education and what to do about full employment. So I learned about those on the academic side. I was a White House Fellow, I worked in the office of management and budget, looked at all of the domestic-side programs and sat with the director during his director's reviews and preparation of the issues, (inaudible) present in 1975-76 period. Published a book on those collection of sort of issue papers on those issues. And then in my military career I had a chance to sort of practice what I'd learned and what I'd felt, because when you're in the military, a lot of people think that it's about giving orders, but mostly it isn't. You start as a company commander and you go to your first unit, you realize, even though you're the guy that signed the property book and you're responsible for the company, 100 people, $10,000,000 worth of equipment, you go to the first sergeant your first day and say, top, what do you think we ought to be doing today? I mean, it starts at that level, because you recognize that leadership is not about giving orders, it's about working with others, bringing out the best in the people who are working with you, developing their confidence, relying on their expertise, developing your own proficiency, technically. But also using the proficiencies of your associates in the most effective way. And as you, the more senior you become in the armed forces, the less directive you can be. Until, in the positions that I was in, like in NATO, I was, I had I think eight or nine four-star generals who worked for me. I had a British four-star Deputy, a German four-star Chief of Staff under me, of course both of them reported back to their governments on everything I said. I no more said it than it went back to those governments. And that's the way it was setup. And then I had the next level of command down were also four-stars. And so everything was done in a political context and diplomatic context. And I also did a lot with Members of Congress. I testified numerous times, I worked behind the scenes with Senator Nunn, Senator Lugar (sp?), with their staff, with Joe Biden, people like that. And then, when I was a commander, what happens is in the military, the final part of this long answer, but it's, I wouldn't want to say this, so I can't say it on the record, but it's an environment that's a very caring environment, the military. You make it as much a family as you can make it. You know, you don't get anybody to come into the armed forces unless they want to be there. And they won't stay unless you persuade them that they want to stay. 60% of the armed forces are married. And so if the wife doesn't want to stay, the soldier won't stay. So you're in the business of selling your organization to your own people. There's a lot of internal marketing, to put it in a business term, that has to be done. Unlike American corporations, where I've been on the boards of numerous of these corporations and, you know, there's not pricing power for labor in today's market. But there is a pricing power, the analog of that, in the armed forces. Because when a person's reenlistment period or enlistment period is up, they can leave. And they will if they don't like it. So the things I worried about were things like schooling, healthcare, housing, cost of housing, quality of housing, a time off for the soldiers to be with their families. We did things that would be unheard of in the American business community. For example, when I was a Division Commander at Fort Hood, Texas, I had 17 elementary, junior high, and two high schools I was responsible for. And when a student had a teacher's appointment, I gave the order that my soldiers would miss their duty to be with their child to go to that teacher's appointment. First of all, I mean, when people say, well what do you know about domestic policy, I know it because people come to your office, you're responsible for their lives in a way that, that doesn't happen normally in the business community. Business leaders have a different power and I was having this discussion with the publisher of another newspaper, not this one, but we were comparing respective powers, and I was saying in the military you have the power of life and death: you can order somebody to go on a mission that may get them killed. And the business publisher says, "I have more power than you. I can terminate people right away, and you can't do that." (laughter)

Q: Hell of a conversation you were having.

Q: Really.

A: But, you know what it made me think about, because I have seen the outside world, and he was right of course, in the military you can't terminate people right away. But what you do have is you have this --

Q: (inaudible)

Q: No.

(laughter)

Q: Dean Singleton.

A: I couldn't help it. But --

Q: (inaudible) leaders.

A: But it was a -- but what you do have is you have this extraordinary influence over their lives because you control their time. And so, and you control it 24-hours a day, you can call a midnight formation, you can call a sergeant in the middle of the night and say, "get your you-know-what in here right now, your weapon is dirty. I've just been through the arms room, your weapon's not clean." Of course, that's abuse of leadership. You wouldn't want to do that. But there is this extraordinary power. And so, people come to your office, I mean I started this early. My first company commander, I remember I was in command about three days and the, my mess sergeant's wife called me and she said, "my husband, I love him so, but he's got someone else. What am I going to do?" This conversation started, you know, a little after midnight and it went for about 45 minutes, my wife finally woke up, she says, what the hell are you doing? You don't know anything about this, you don't even know this person.

(laughter)

A: And, you know, I remember company, I remember being a company commander and we did letters of indebtedness. In other words, what happens is, if a soldiers incurs debts, the military's responsible for it. We're not a collection agency, but it does reflect adversely on the military so we always did counseling for it. 19 year-old sergeant, 16 year-old wife, they're in debt to the Encyclopedia Britannica salesman. (laugh) And I, you know, I call him in, I call her in, obviously she hasn't graduated from high school and they bought the Encyclopedia Britannica salesman explained how this would be an investment in the future of their child. They had a little baby and this was going to help him, you know, be successful in the future. I said, well why, why would you do this now? He says, my wife liked the cookbook part of the Encyclopedia Britannica. And, you know, you're dealing with these kinds of issues personally, and you know, it goes all the way up through all of the kinds of human problems and tragedies, suicides, family violence, domestic abuse, spouse abuse, child abuse. I was (inaudible) in California and one of my assignments I had an isolated community of 10,000 in the Mojave desert. And I did town hall meetings every two or three months. We'd get all the staff there, we'd bring all the people in the community, the people that couldn't come, we'd have a closed-circuit television. And you'd get to ask all your favorite questions, you know, it was everything from why is it that there's a big line at Burger King to why is it I brought my child over to the hospital, doctors made him stand outside on a loading dock and he had to wait for two hours in 40-degree temperature. And why wasn't he treated well. And there were issue after issue like this. I worked with, I worked with --

Q: (inaudible) if you had military universal healthcare, universal daycare --

A: And I made, and I worked very hard to make sure that it wasn't baby-sitting, it was the child development center (inaudible). I had 44,000 schoolchildren --

Q: Best.

A: I had 44,000 schoolchildren in Europe.

Q: Does that mean that you (inaudible) civilian population (inaudible) military population.

A: As much as I can do.

Q: Universal healthcare?

A: What we said on healthcare is first we want to make it universal for children through the age of 22. And if the parents can't afford this, it's going to be like a driver's license, like automobile insurance. You must insure your child, going to be the law. And if you don't do this, if you do this, then we'll provide you the assistance to make sure it's done right. And then for people above the age of 22 will take the programs offered by, to members of Congress and we'll make them available as the insurance agency of last resort. We'll support state risk pooling, we'll support employer insurance coverage, not trying to do away with that system. But we want to make sure that every adult American has the opportunity to have access to a health insurance plan at a reasonable cost. And so we will buy down the people who are conventionally uninsurable. We'll buy down their premiums to a level that's reasonable and affordable.

Q: What happens if you (inaudible) insurance coverage. What happens (inaudible)?

A: You will be, you will not receive the reimbursement on your tax forms. And we'll try to work it another way. We've got to worked the details of the program. I'm not going to put the parent in jail if you're applying that, (inaudible) traffic ticket for this. But it's an effort to get the child insurance through the school or through some other means so the child is covered by health insurance. And we'll be working this through the same system we use for income tax deductions.

Q: What kind of cost would this entail?

A: What kind of cost?

Q: Yeah.

A: $700,000,000,000 for this program over ten years.

Q: And how would you pay for that?

A: We will pay for that by going to those Americans making more than 200,000 a year and taking back that money, the Bush tax cuts, from 35% back up to 39.6%. It's about $1,000,000,000,000 over a decade.

Q: General, the military's K-12 schools have won kudos, not just for the kind of (inaudible) which you talked about which is very important (inaudible), but also because of the standardized curriculum, so that when a kids' parents get moved from one base to another, (inaudible). Is that something you'd recommend for the country at large, should we have national curriculums?

A: No, I don't recommend that, because I think there's too much variability. First place, it doesn't really work in the military either, because there's, the children themselves are not (inaudible) within the DOD schooling system. In other words, if they're living in Fort Hood, Texas, they're going to civilian community school. Parent gets assigned to Germany, child shows up in a DOD school system. And then there's this curriculum and then they get reassigned to the Washington DC area and they're going to the Fairbanks County school system. So there's no real standardization. In fact, what we had to do is we had to argue against the standardization of curriculum. And one of the things we got rid of in the curriculum when I was there was math land. Math land was a 1970s era California import, set theory, don't memorize multiplication tables, just think about it and we're just going to ask you, you know, five times four, think about it, children, now what would that be. And of course it confused the parents, couldn't understand what the children were learning, why they didn't understand what five times four was. And it confused the teachers because it was supposed to be an introductory trainer kit, you know, with all kinds of teaching aides. The kinds of preparation, when you introduce a program that get lost. And this program has been in the DOD school system for, I don't know, a decade or more in Europe. And in the process of this, we actually had the DOD school system administrator was in Washington. She came over and went through Europe and we'd been warning, I'd been complaining to her regularly. You know, she came through and sassy, well, I'm going to see it myself. And it was one of the, she had these very hostile parent meetings in which, our child, you know, you can't, nothing makes military families more upset than their children's lack of education. And they feel like the child is not getting what they should be getting. And she resigned. I mean, we were pretty tough on getting what we wanted for the kids over there.

Q: And what about the national standards in the No Child Left Behind law. How do you --

A: I don't like those standards.

Q: (inaudible)

A: No, I'm not going to repeat those standards. We've got to have a whole broad array. Got to have soft standards not a hard standard. And as I've gone around and collected a whole list of complaints from educators about these standards. I was in Little Rock and I was being endorsed by the (inaudible) Education Association down here and they were telling me, just the day before, they'd let go dozens of teacher's assistants because, you know, some of them had spent years in the classroom and were extraordinarily effective, they didn't meet the paper qualifications of No Child Left Behind Act. I was in New Hampshire and a woman who has taught 26 years in the school system has a K-8 certification. The letters were sent to the parents. She wasn't well-qualified because she wasn't Middle School qualified. She was qualified K-8 and Social Studies. I mean there are these technicalities that the states are absolutely afraid of. They've quit testing for anything other than math and English in New Hampshire because they can't afford it . IN other places they're pulling away funds for Special Education to try to meet it . The Act's not plundered but the standard's wrong . Those standards came from Houston and we know what happened in Houston. We know that people who were disadvantaged were left behind . They were taken out of school. They weren't promoted. Because I guess the tests were given at tenth grade and the twelfth grade and so they went from ninth grade, ninth grade, some cases ninth grade and eleventh grade. They did everything to avoid them being tested. They've got under this program, if you're disadvantaged, if you're educationally disadvantaged, you're going to have to take the same test and pass the same standard. They're not measuring how much students gain during the year. They're just measuring a flat bar on it. Something's wrong with that. And then you're going to hold schools accountable for it, for things that, in many cases, the schools don't have the resources to and can't fix. I think it's an Act directed at undermining Public Education. It's an Act designed to embarrass Public Education. And I met the sort of the face of this down in Arkansas. When I came down there, I went to work in an investment bank and got involved in a lot of local community things. Scott came up and he says, "General," he says, "You know, we're all in favor of our schools. If our schools were tailored. We need competition for these schools." I said, "What do you mean competition?" "You know, competition. Competition makes things better." "How does it make it better?" "It just does. It's a basic principle." And the guy came up to me just before I announced and he came up to me the way that so many people do. Stick out there and say "General, thank you for your service, sir." So, I knew...that's normally an indicator that he's going to say something else. You know. (laughter) He says, "Well I support President Bush." I said, "Well, that's fine." I said, "But tell me why?" He says, "Because I don't like to pay taxes." I said, "Well, fine." I said, "What do you do?" He says, "I'm a real estate developer." I said, "Well, don't you think that taxes are important and don't you think taxes go to pay for useful things like education. Don't you believe that we should have good public schools?" He says, "I don't believe in public schools. I believe in competition." And then we into a sort of...namely about, what is the competition? Why does it make a school better to have competition. And, of course, there is no answer to it. You've got a lot of very shallow thought out there on this, but a tremendous animus against...it's, it's the sort of Rush Limbaugh animus that's stirred up against Public education. And this country was built on Public Education. We've had great Public Education in this country and if we're going to be a great country, we've got to fix Public Education in this country. It's probably the single most important thing we need to do to stay competitive. We're entering a really difficult period for the United States in the world. And I'm not talking about waste of -- I shouldn't say that. We spent a lot of time on Iraq and Saddam Hussein but I don't...I'm not focusing on that, to be honest with you. I think that you've got to focus on where the country needs to go and if you look at the challenges that are ahead of us, we're going to be facing countries that have larger integrated markets than America. And it's the first time in our history we've ever had to deal with competition like this. We started seeing it late in the 1990's. We felt it enormously right now on this loss of jobs. And I traveled back and forth across this country. I just can't tell you how awful this is. I was down in Entery, South Carolina and some Harvard educated lawyers, I think it's Harvard, but these Harvard-educated lawyers came down at the turn of the century and they built these mills. And three of them on the river and two of them are now closed. The third's gone from 1300 employees to 500. These mills were booming only four or five years ago. They just had a complete round of electronic modernization in the mid-90's. I went through one of the mills -- the one that's still open. I looked at it. It's actually state-of-the-art as far as I know and I've been through a lot of different industrial plants. And it looked really good. Mostly shut down because End of Side B