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Gen. Wesley Clark with Mehdi Hasan (2026): 25 Years On
Every other on-camera telling of Clark's seven-country memo, 2003 to 2026.
Four-Star General ADMITS He Was Paid by Iranian Regime-Change Group · Zeteo · uploaded 2026-09-18 · 44:16
Original: youtube.com/watch?v=yri55EVEmFc · IPFS Qme1SndDanYhfjimera17z8jxb2sATsNDRYSLQ1FkVbj2y
What this video is evidence for
Twenty-five years after 9/11, Mehdi Hasan of Zeteo (interview published September 10, 2026) reads Clark's seven-country account back to him, and Clark stands by it. Asked what he makes of the fact that the United States has since attacked five of the seven countries on the list, Clark answers:
"All the planning in the Pentagon was set up for that scenario. So it was a natural thing that when 9/11 happened, everything [kept going] in that direction."
He adds that "we'd been scheming to find a reason to invade and finish off Saddam Hussein," and recalls a report that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, on the day of 9/11, raised going after Saddam Hussein.
The interview also shows Clark's own position on Iran today. He supports regime change and has spoken at events of the MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq), an Iranian opposition group the US listed as a terrorist organization until 2012. Asked directly, "have you been paid by them to lobby on their behalf?", Clark replies, "Yes, uh huh. Yeah, so I've given many speeches." The video's title ("Four-Star General ADMITS He Was Paid by Iranian Regime-Change Group") is Zeteo's framing. So the most famous witness to the 2001 plan is himself now a paid speaker for Iranian regime change. That makes his account of the memo harder to dismiss as anti-war bias, and it shows how deep the regime-change network runs.
Where this fits: see Pentagon Greater Israel Wars for the full explanation and sources.
Transcript
Machine transcription (apple-speechanalyzer) of the full 00:44:16. It can mishear names and words, so check exact wording against the video before quoting it.
So you go back to, depending in November 2001, and you say to your friend, Are we still going to war with Iraq? And he said, oh, it's worse than that. He said, This is a memo that describes how we're gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran. What is your reaction to being told that the Bush administration is gonna attack seven Middle Eastern countries in response to 9/11? It was clear at the time that we were going to have to do something to Osama bin Laden.
I also knew that we'd been scheming to find a reason to invade and finish off Saddam Hussein. What are you supposed to make of the fact that the United States, over the past 25 years, has attacked five of those seven countries, all the planning in the Pentagon, was set up for that scenario. So it was a natural thing that when 9/11 happened, everything keeping in that direction. Why do you think it is that you and a handful of others were opposed to Iraq that so many in our political, media, and military class were for it? I said the real problem is not Iraq.
It is Iran. We actually empowered Iran. Why are you supporting this disastrous war in Iran when you didn't support the war in Iraq? It's been 25 years since 9/11. That means 25 years of the so called Global War on Terror.
But did you know that in the weeks after the attacks, one of the top U.S. generals went to the Pentagon and was told that the Bush administration was planning to attack seven countries in the Middle East in the span of just five years? Iraq was one of them, as was Iran. That general, retired four star general and former supreme allied commander Europe of NATO, Wesley Clarke, joins me now to break down the past 25 years of post 9/11 war, terror, and regime change.
General Wesley Clarke. Thank you so much for joining me on Mayor the Unfiltered. We are marking the 25th anniversary of the horrific 9/11 attacks. I want to talk about your experience of that day to start with. Do you remember where you were when it happened?
Do you remember what you were thinking, as the news was coming in, thinking about what was gonna happen next? Or was it in Little Rock, Arkansas? I was driving to the office. I was trying to call someone in New York City on my mobile phone and, um, It wasn't going through. It was about, um, little before 8 o'clock central time.
I got to the office in downtown Little Rock. I, uh, walked in and someone said, you should look at this television. And the television was on, and there was a shot of Manhattan, and the skyline, and the smoke streaming out, and it wasn't immediately clear what was happening. Took a few minutes. But we're watching it as, quote, unquote, lay people, you're watching it as a senior general at the time.
What are you thinking in terms of national security military? Are you already thinking to yourself, we're at war? This is gonna be bad. Well, before the second plane hit, yeah. It could have been some kind of a horrible accident.
You know, many years ago, a B 25 bomber ran into the Empire State Building and hit the 79th floor, and I remember that incident. I was in, I think, junior high school at the time, maybe. And that was the 1st thing that came to my mind. And then I saw a lot of smoke and dust and so forth. I thought maybe it was a chemical weapons attack.
And then the 2nd aircraft hit, and it was obviously terrorism, and it was obviously, um, 1st thing that came to my mind was Osama bin Laden. Did you ever think we'd be where we are today, 25 years later? You know, it's always hard to look into the future. Yes. with any clarity.
Um, and, um, it was clear at the time that we were going to have to do something to Osama bin Laden. I also knew that we'd been scheming to find a reason to invade and finish off Saddam Hussein. Yes. Uh, we'll come back to, we'll come back to Iraq. I do want to ask you about Iraq.
But on 911. Obviously people were not prepared for that attack, but there were several warnings. Months before the attacks, anti Taliban leader Ahmed Shah Masoud had won the European Parliament about a large attack on U.S. soil.
The CIA warned the White House of a terrorist attack a month before the attack. The president's daily briefing was famously titled Bin Laden determined to strike in the U.S. There was talk of potential hijackings. Looking back now, or even at the time, even without the benefit of hindsight.
Did you believe, do you believe, this was a gross oversight by an incompetent, by distracted Bush administration? Well, I don't like adjectives like that. But, um, I knew from my discussions with people who were holdovers in the National Security Council, discussions I'd had after the administration changed, discussions, um, in, uh, in the spring of 2001, that the Bush administration had said that, uh, Osama bin Laden, that was a terrorism, uh, that was a that was a Clinton problem. They weren't too worried about it. And I heard this murmuring going on a couple of times during that spring.
And so when I've looked back at the evidence, and I've talked to people, yes, I think it was a significant oversight, mistake, uh, just failure to appreciate the situation. You know, um, these same kind of warnings were present in the Clinton administration. And then Richard Clark, who was the NSC guy at the time responsible for it, called people together and said, put your cards on the table. What do you got? And, uh, you know, people resisted because various intelligence agencies, sources and methods, we can't tell you.
But eventually, they did cough it up, and we stopped the guy coming over the border from Canada. He's going to go to LAX, of course, a big problem at LAX. The same thing probably could have been done to stop what happened on 9-11 if the leadership in Washington, in the White House, had done the right thing. But they didn't. Liking this video?
And don't just watch, hit, like, share, and subscribe, and tap the bell so you never miss a video or live show. But if you want early access to exclusive content, then you have to head to zoteo.com and subscribe now. You'll be supporting fearless independent journalism. On September the 15th, 2001, four days after 11, four days after 9/11, excuse me.
You told CNN, that ideally there would be, quote, no requirement for U.S. military forces, that diplomacy, intelligence, law enforcement could do much of the work. That was my view at the time. I was 22 years old.
I't a general like yourself. In hindsight, should that have been the response to 9/11, rather than this open ended, militarized, global war on terror, which seems to have just given us more war and more terror over the last 25 years? Yes, but, uh, I want to tell you that, uh, in the weekend before 9/11, I was with the former Secretary of State, Colin Powell, he had gone to Iraq, uh, early in his tenure of Secretary of State, he'd come back with a proposal for smart sanctions. And it was blown off by the administration. They weren't interested in smart sanctions against Saddam Hussein.
And, um, they were and had been talking about what to do about Saddam Hussein. And I think they legitimately wanted to finish the job. There had been a proposal, and floated back in the early 1990s by some in the Pentagon, after the 1st Gulf War, that said, maybe, uh, this is a time to use military force, or we can change the equation in the Middle East. The Soviets won't stop us. And so there was that kind of rumbling going around inside the Bush administration before 9/11.
And I think it uh preconditioned. I recall that on the day of 9/11, there was a report that Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld sent a note to the President of the United States saying, uh, This isn't this what we need to go after Saddam Hussein? I got a call, the next day, from a friend of mine who was running a analysis bureau in Canada, saying, you've got to say that this was too big to have been done by anybody without a state sponsor, must have come from Saddam Hussein. I said, I'm certainly willing to say it, but I have to see some evidence before I can say that. Of course, I never saw any evidence of that, and I didn't say it.
So you mentioned that, Cole. You were involved in a lot of conversations at the time. You have told one of the most extraordinary stories of the entire post 911 era, about 10 days after 9/11, you go into the Pentagon, and a general tells you, we've decided to attack Iraq. That conversation, and another conversation you had with the senior military officer at the Pentagon in November of 2001 has been the subject, as you know, General Clark, of a lot of reporting, commentary, some might say, conspiracy theory. 25 years later, what do you remember about those two conversations?
Exactly what I said at the time. I mean, there were clear indications of what the intent was of the administration. Yeah. They later came to me and they asked me, what I thought about things. You know, I had a conversation with Condolisa rise in the summer of 2000 before the election, and it was a nice conversation.
But as she said, you know, you Democrats have screwed everything up, you messed up relations with Russia, and we're gonna move troops to where they're gonna be needed. And I said, well, aren't they needed to, you know, deter conflict in Europe? She said, no, they're needed where they're gonna fight. And that's in the Middle East. So, uh, I look back on that and say, uh, there was, uh, there was this, um, uh, presumption that they would be going to war again in the Middle East to finish the job against Saddam Hussein.
So do you believe, do you believe it was pre planned? Not just on 9/11 or on the 12th of September? Oh, I wouldn't say it was preplanned. But I'd say people were leaning that way. Well, they were looking for an opportunity.
Is that fair? Let me go back even further, okay? Okay. And, um, in 1997 in the Pentagon, we moved from the Pentagon planning document of 2 major regional, nearly simultaneous conflicts, namely, Iraq and Korea as force planning goals to 2 major theaters of war, one being, uh, if Korea moved against us, and the other being Iraq or Iran. And so we really begin to plan on that.
I remember, um, visiting with the army chief of staff when he was in Europe, in, at Christmas time of 1998, and saying, Chief, uh, you know, there's gonna be trouble in Kosova. He said, Oh, said, We don't want that... We don't want to go to war there. We want to go to war in Iraq. I said, Well, do we really want to go to war anywhere?
He said, Well, I guess not. But all the planning in the Pentagon. was set up for that scenario. So it was a natural thing that when 9/11 happened. Everything's moving in that direction.
So you go back to, depending on in November 2001 and you say to your friend, 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 from upstairs, the Secretary of Defense's office. He said, This is a memo that describes how we're gonna take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran. You said, Is it classified?
He said, yes, sir. You said, Well, don't show it to me. Aside from the fact that you didn't want to look at classified intelligence. What is your reaction to being told that the Bush administration is gonna attack seven Middle Eastern countries in response to 9/11? You know, I'd heard this before, um, because in 1991, uh, when I was a one star, I was in the Pentagon one day, in May of 1991, I saw General Powell, and I went upstairs to see the Under Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz, and he sketched out something like a concept like this.
Like, you know, we've got just five or 10 years to take out these old Soviet surrogate regimes until the next, uh, great, uh, uh, empire comes on to take over Middle, the Middle East, and, uh, I'm like, really? We just got finished with one war. We going to go to war again. Who would it be against? Is it China?
He said, well, it could be. I said, We only have 5 to 10 years. Well, nobody knows. And so it was, he was sort of, you know, musing about this. And thinking about it.
I later found out that they had actually drawn up a strategy like this, taking it to General Skokroft, who was national security advisor for President George H. W. Bush. And Scowcroft had said, yeah, okay, but let's wait until the president's reelected before we bring this to him. And so President Bush wasn't reelected.
And it never went anywhere. But Bush Jr. amazing. When I became the J5 and the Pentagon in the spring of 1994, I was tasked by my boss, the chairman of the joint chiefs with writing a national security strategy. And so I talked to people in the Pentagon, civilians, and others.
I said, what about this strategy of this Wolfowitz idea? And nobody knew anything about it. So when I heard it again in November of 2001, the alarm bells went off. Yeah, there it is. Paul Wolfovitz, of course, was Deputy Defense Secretary in 2001 in the Bush administration.
So you see this, you're told, you didn't see it. You're told about this plan to attack seven countries. And obviously, that didn't happen. They didn't attack seven countries in five years, but here we are, General Clark, 25 years later, talking, what are you supposed to make of the fact that the United States, over the past 25 years, has attacked five of those seven countries, and is, in fact, currently attacking the final name on that list, the Islamic Republic of Iran, when you see bombs dropping on Iran, do you think, My God, that was the country that was last on the list that I was told about 25 years ago? We finally got there.
Well, when I testified in front of Congress, in the fall of 2002, about the potential of going to war with Iraq, I was opposed to it. Um, I said the real problem is not Iraq, it is Iran. And, of course, by going after Saddam Hussein and creating all this instability in the region, we actually empowered Iran. Uh, and they became stronger as a result. There was a window, maybe 6 months after we invaded, in the spring of 2003, where Iran was generally worried.
I mean, we could have done diplomacy. Oh, boy, look at these U.S. forces. They just cut through Iraq, and we fought them for seven years and couldn't do a thing.
Yeah. But then, uh, we lost the credibility, when we got bogged down in Iraq, and our own forces became the subject of, uh, of tremendous targeting by the Iranians. So they saw it as a chance to move forward. Iran has been a strategic adversary of the United States, really, since, uh, Ayatollo Holmani came in there. And we've done various things to try to block it and stop it, and so forth, but we were never very successful.
I want to come back... I want to come back to Iran, general. We need to talk about Iran. But just sticking with 2001, 2002, 2002. You mentioned Iraq.
You didn't support the Iraq War. Many of your peers in the military, in the political establishment, in DC, in the Pentagon, did support it, even though there was no intelligence backing the claim that Saddam had worked with Al Qaeda was involved in 9/11. Certainly the WMD intel, as we now know, and some said at the time, was hyped up beyond all recognition. Why do you think it is that you and a handful of others were opposed to Iraq, but so many in our political, media, and military class were for it? Well, I think it puts all of us in a difficult position.
We're all of us in support of the U.S. armed forces. The people that led the armed forces into Iraq, I knew them. Many of them had worked for me at one point.
We trained together. Of course, I wanted them to be successful. But as a strategic move, I was opposed to it. And I was opposed to the fact that we tried to do it with minimum forces on the ground, which led to the subsequent problems of the occupation, and the inability, really, to get a grip on the situation on the ground for a number of years. And, of course, we didn't have a follow on plan after we got to Baghdad.
Not really. It was, I think, a presumption that we'd have another division coming in from the north through Turkey, that didn't work diplomatically, another Army division. And so, we had inadequate forces, but also, there may have been a presumption that we would just roll right into Syria with that. And that didn't happen. That force wasn't there.
So there was a lot of just in time thinking about things. Secretary Rumsfeld, saying that really wasn't an insurgency at that point. There was a bunch of routings in the street. But there's some important lessons here, and I hope you'll get to them. And one of them is, of course, if you're going to war, you have to think through the entire operation.
What is the strategic political objective that the war is about? if it was about getting rid of Saddam Hussein and replacing him with another government? You had to think through that problem. When General Powell, our Secretary of State, presented it to the Pentagon, apparently, Secretary Rumsfeld, didn't really want to focus on that, I can understand that, because you would have seen that it would have cost billions, 100000000s of dollars, and you'd have said, well, why are we doing this? Isn't there another way?
But that was avoided? The other thing you have to do, when you're looking at it, is you have to look at what the other costs are that are involved. And this started, the eventual problem that we're faced with today. This started the quarrel with the Europeans. When we did Kosovo in 1999, we had NATO behind us.
Now, we had the majority of the assets that did the strikes in Kosovo. Only the French had a precision strike. And after the campaign was over, the Europeans got together and said, Boy, those Americans are not gonna tell us what to do again. We're gonna invest, but they didn't quite follow through on that. Yes.
That was okay. In 2001, NATO wanted to help the United States and Afghanistan. But the United States said, No, we're going to handle this ourselves. And then when it came to invading Iraq, There were a lot of questions. So let me jump in on, let me jump in there just on Afghanistan because I just do want to get to Iran, but before I do, you mentioned Afghanistan.
You didn't support Iraq, but you did support the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in 2001. You later argued in the Washington Post that there was, quote, a vital interest in combating Al Qaeda and similar terrorist groups there and across the border in Pakistan. You said, uh, in October of 2001.
You said on CNN, the Taliban power has to be broken. The United States enters Afghanistan in 2001, leaves in 2021 in a pretty humiliating fashion. We arrived with the Taliban in power. We leave with the Taliban in power. America's longest war ended in failure and defeat, did it not?
Well, let's put it this way. We've had a lot of misadventures with the American military. But let's don't blame the military for this, okay? I want to make this very clear. Yeah.
Many of us in the military, and formerly in the military, understood what had to be done. But, you know, we were, first of all, we went into Afghanistan without a clear plan to get Osama bin Laden. Yet, uh, that was, uh, clearly what we needed to do. Then we failed to deal effectively with Pakistan. They played both sides on us.
They did consistently. We were unable to close the border, and if you can't isolate the theater of operations militarily. You can't defeat a force like the Taliban, because they continue to be reinforced and supplied and... So do you accept that we were defeated in Afghanistan? I'm wondering.
Well, I would say, let's just put it this way. We spent a long time there, and we ended up at the political level in the United States deciding to leave. And so we did. And when we got out, chaos ensued. It's what happens in anything, in business or whatever.
When you're in business and you decide to pull the rug out from under a company, by not investing in it, when they need a loan or whatever, and the company collapses, yeah, but there are extenuating circumstances. I guess, I guess, let's be clear. Let's be clear what happened. Over a long period of time, including during the administration of President Trump. The decisions were made that pulled support away from the Afghan National Army.
We not only reduced the U.S. presence there, we reduced what the U.S. forces were doing there, leaving the Afghan National Army on its own.
It was very, very similar to what we did to the Vietnamese in that conflict in 19, early 1970s. And so we had exactly the same outcome. So it's interesting you mentioned Vietnam, and you mentioned a business. Of course, if you're running your own business, you need to invest in it, if it shuts down. The problem is Afghanistan wasn't ours to begin with.
We were foreigners there, many of them, people that didn't want us there, just as many of the Vietnamese didn't want us there. And our counterinsurgency tactics in Vietnam killed a lot of innocent people. We killed a lot of innocent people in Afghanistan. General, according to Brown University's cost of war project. Over 940,000 people were killed in post 911 wars, occupations, drone strikes, between 2001 and 2023, half of those people almost were civilians, and around 3.
6 million people died indirectly, from all sorts of health and public health issues and infrastructure problems. How could anyone justify that level of death and destruction? In response to the outrageous murder of 3,000 Americans. Do you understand why the rest of the world was so frustrated, watching this war on terror, that, yes, the U.S.
suffered a tragedy at home? But that didn't give us the right to kill innocent people abroad. Oh, I know, I know. And I think, oh, it's very clear that all of us were frustrated, including many of the men and women in uniform who went there were very frustrated by this. This is a sort of a dynamic that we have to somehow come to terms with in the 21st century.
And it's a very difficult dynamic to come to terms with. If you look at Gaza today. You know that what Afghanistan happened, what Osama bin Laden wanted to precipitate, was conflict. Uh, maybe he didn't intend to, uh, provoke the invasion of, of Afghanistan, but he certainly wanted to generate a conflict between... Which we gave him.
And the rest of the world, right? And what you have in Gaza today is the same principle. You had Hamas, that knew that if they struck out at Israel, they could expect an incredible reaction. And so, that's part of the geostrategic lessons, what I hope we're going to bring out from this, is what is the right way to respond. Well, Joe, Joe Biden, Joe Biden went to Israel.
Before you go, before you go for, I want to go to a different version on this. You know, the military has to have a planning sequence, and they have to think about what they're going to do in the United States, the United States military, because we don't have a, as of now, we don't have any neighbor next door that's about to invade us. So there's no obvious immediate adversary, like some countries, where you're planning against it, immediately on a day by day basis. So, you size your force, you look at it, you think about things, and you try to make the right strategic judgments. In the United States, the only continuous strategic element, geostrategic element of thought, rests with the United States military, more even in the State Department.
Yeah. It's the United States military. Now, it shouldn't be, what it is. We agree. There are no professional strategists that work elsewhere in the U.
S. government that have command of resources, plans, scenarios, and stuff. Now, you'd like to think there are, but there aren't. Now think about this. If you look at China, If you look at Russia, if you look at North Korea, they have experts.
Boy, they stay engaged with us, they may be in those positions 10, 20, 30, they make a whole career. out of studying the American political system, how to manipulate. And we don't do the same, which is why we end up partly is one of the reasons we end up in these disastrous wars. Let me ask you about Iran. You mentioned earlier, General Clarke.
You said something very wise. You said, you cannot go to war. The lesson of 9/11 and rock is you cannot go to war without a very clear strategic objective. Donald Trump went to war in Iran without a clear strategic objective. He's now reduced to begging the Iranians to keep the Strait of Hormuz open.
That is what he's going to take home as his victory if he gets it. Why are you supporting this disastrous war in Iran when you didn't support the war in Iraq? And Iran seems to be a bigger disaster than Iraq, in some ways. Well, look, when you go to war with, you have many objectives that are possible. But you have to design the strategy and tie the military actions to the desired political outcome, that wasn't done in this case.
The consequences of U.S. failure, however, are gonna be very, very great in the case of the U.S. fight against Iran.
If, um, if it unfolds the way it's continuing to unfold, if the United States decides, well, it's too risky to keep our people in Kuwait or emirates, they could be attacked at any time. We're going to back out to Jordan, we don't want to escalate to really control the Strait of Hormuz, there will be global repercussions. And the value of U.S. deterrence in Europe and in China will be greatly used.
So right now, we're in an active conflict. And, um, yeah, so I want the United States to succeed. Succeeded Walt. Hold on, General. I'll succeed at once.
succeed at one. Succeed at once. I'd like to see, I'd like to see the people of Iran have a choice in their form of government. So you would like regime change, too. To be the goal of the war, not nuclear programs.
They haven't had that choice. But I want to go back. No, hold on, General, you didn't answer my question. What should the goal of the war be? Regime change is what you're saying.
We should go in and topple the government. I'm saying that that was one of the stated goals, but that the administration did not follow through to have the actual means at hand to effect regime change. How would they do that? In many ways, it could have been done. I mean, you said on CNN in July that the U.
S. must gracefully excuse ourselves from combat, or really go in and fight the IRGC. How do you fight the IRGST without killing even more Iranian civilians that we already have? We began the war on February 28th, massacre over 160 children in a school in Minab. Last week, we bombed a wedding celebration in southern Iran, killing four civilians injuring dozens more.
How many civilians do we need to kill to get regime change? How many civilians did the IRG Zzekiel? Hello? Jane worried. A lot.
A lot. But should we add to that at all? Well, we don't know how many. Well, we don't know how many. Thats the problem.
But no, but we do know that we killed. We killed 160 children. Hold on, Jennifer. I say. You invited me on the program.
Please. Yeah, why should I? Somewhere between 30, 40? I've heard as high as 90,000 people. Now, these accidental deaths.
These were deliberate deaths. Do you believe that there's a difference between deliberately killing your life? I 100% agree there's a different... I also believe there's a difference between people detailed. hold on, you asked me a question.
Just a minute. And you're trying to overtalk me before I can make my point. I think there's a profound moral distinction. And a legal distinction in international law, and in any laws of human nature, mankind, or any moral philosophy, of any religion, between killing innocence, by accident, and deliberately killing non combatants, of your own people. So, yes, I would like to see an Iran that's free.
I'd like to see in Iran, in which the people of Iran have a choice in their government. They don't have that choice right now. But before we lose time on this, I want to go to one other important factor, that's a lesson's learned from 9/11 and subsequent events. You know, when the United States government starts rolling in a direction. It's, um, it picks up, it's like a snowball.
And many people jump on. And somehow, after the experience in Iraq. And despite NATO wanting to be helpful, and sending some troops over to Afghanistan, and some NATO troops in Iraq, the United States begin to look to Asia, and begin to say, you know, we're gonna have to really do something in Asia. It's really important. They're growing very rapidly.
And China could be a threat. The fact is, after the Soviet Union fell, we did watch the Chinese military. But we knew in the 1990s that you could either contain China or engage with China. If you contained them, you weren't gonna engage successfully. Yeah.
China wanted us to have during the... I understood. They wanted, they looked at the United States and said, uh, uh, and, and as soon as Shi Jinping came in, it was like, um, why do you Americans have, uh, alliances with these little pipsqueak countries like Singapore? You think the Philippines are gonna help you? Japan, Korea, deal with China.
And so the United States, both parties begin to shift their attention to Asia. And they begin to create. I do need to come back in because we're going to run out of time. I understand that. At that point, you're making.
Yeah, finish? I finish? They begin to create doubt among the Europeans, and among the Russians, that the United States would really be there. If conflict started in Europe. So, when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, not much happened, Sarko Z went over and got a ceasefire, but Russia still has a quarter of Georgia.
In 2013, when the Ukrainians begin to reject association with Russia, and in 2014, they went into the Madon, and Russia reacted, and the government fell in Ukraine, and new came in. Russia decided to seize Crimea, and invade Donbos. Yep. I I understand that. Can I come in, general?
Can I... You made a lot of points to talk about the lessons. I understand. So on that note, talk about the lesson. So on that news, the lessons.
Okay. Here's the list. We had continued through the Obama administration, into the Trump administration, into the Biden administration, and now into the Trump administration, 2nd administration, to be drawing back from Europe. And opening the door to Russian aggression. And just this weekend.
What you had was conflicting messages from the administration. On the one hand, people are saying, oh, we're gonna put more troops out of Europe, or we can't afford it. We don't have troops, et cetera. We don't have enough air defense to give them anything, and we're going to make the Europeans pay for everything that we've ever given to Ukraine. And on the one hand, that's...
Unfortunately, we don't have time to get into the whole Ukraine debate, and you probably, you and I probably agree on this Trump administration's deal. do need to go back to what you said about Iran. You said, is there a moral distinction between killing people deliberately and accidentally? I agree with you. Their 100% is a moral distinction.
I would add to that, there is a moral distinction between the people we kill and the people who other people kill. The Iranian government has done horrible things to his people, as have many governments, including our allies, but we killed people in that school. And we went to war with Iran. You mentioned international law. There was no UN resolution, no act of self defense that justified it, no act of Congress.
It's a completely illegal war. And so, General, going back to 9/11 and lessons, you opposed the Iraq war, you criticized the Bush administration for going into Iraq without a plan, without proper preparation, lying about WMDs, but now you're supporting a Trump war on Iran, with no plan, no preparation, and Trump lied about the nuclear threat there, too. So what's the difference? Well, you haven't asked me all my criticisms of the war in Iran. Um, I've just given you a number of them.
But, as I said, the case with Iraq, once the U.S. armed forces are engaged, yes, we want them to be successful. Why not call for it, wrapping up a while, that's a failure? Why?
And let me tell you why we want the United States armed forces to succeed. Because much of the world's stability, progress, economic growth, bringing billions of people out of poverty, has been built on a foundation of U.S. international leadership. But prolonging this war is undermining all of those things.
But prolonging this war is undermining all of those things. No, no, no. Just a minute. That international leadership has been built on two foundations. One, actually, three foundations.
One is the strength of the American dollar and the American economy. Second is the strength of the US armed forces, and especially our strategic nuclear deterrent. And the third is the credibility, reliability, and consistency of American policy in the post World War II era. And so, today, we're hurting on one and maybe part of another of those 3 fundamental building blocks. I don't want to see us lose the 3rd building block, which is the strength provided by the American armed forces.
So, I can't do anything about the inconsistency of policy of the administration. I'm not in politics. I'm not running for office. I'm advising and making comments as a military analyst. Yes.
That's what I'm making comments on. And from the military standpoint, I want to see the United States succeed. I'm concerned about the economy. And I ask, again, general... What is the definition of success in Iran?
The long term, as a long term bond, uh, prices, uh... general. I ask again, what is the definition of success? general, right? I got a problem.
I gotta ask, viewers want to know. You said that multiple times. What is your definition of success, just in a sentence? What is, you keep saying America should succeed? What is the definition of success in Iran?
In Iran, first of all, get the Strait of Ramuz open. That takes away the strategic bargaining leverage of the Iranian IRGC. Once that straight is opened, and I think you've got a good chance of going in, getting an agreement, starting Stop the fighting. But remember, you have Russia and China, supporting Iran actively and openly, defying U.S.
sanctions, and providing military support, technical advice, and targeting. So they have a material profound interest in seeing the American military fail in Iran. Oh, I agree with that, which is why we've never gone in in the first place. And it's funny that opening the Strait of Hormuz is now seen as a success, because it was obviously open before we started the war. It's interesting, general, you mentioned regime change and supporting a new government in Iran.
In recent years, I have to ask, you've spoken at events organized by the MEK, the Mech, which is a pro regime change Iranian opposition group. It was listed as a terrorist group by the U.S. government up until 2012. They worked with Saddam Hussein against Iran during the '80s.
They killed Americans, apparently in the '70s. You called them a vital force for freedom and democracy. General, this is a group that's considered a cult, where the husband and wife leaders, the Rajavis who you've praised, command absolute devotion. There's reports that members of the Mech have to get divorced, have to be celibate, their children are taken from them. Why would you support this group?
I know you want to support Iranians, but why support this group? I think it's the most persuasive group, based on what their charter and their leadership, to be able to open up Iran and give the Iranian people a choice in their future government. Human rights groups say it's a cult, and members have been tortured. Have you looked into that? Some people say it's a cult, but I haven't seen the evidence of that, and some people say it was a terrorist organization, but, you know...
Well, some people, the U.S. government. General Clark... Hold on.
The U.S. government say it was a terrorist. Of you, of Iranian diplomacy, with the United States, what you find is that we're very, we've been very inconsistent in dealing with the Iranian regime. Yes.
On the one hand, they did drive the truck bomb in, killed 280 Marines in Lebanon, and also blew up the French group there. They did kill our airmen in Kobar Towers in 1996 with the bombing there in Saudi Arabia. They did try to seize Mecca in 1979. This is not a friendly group of people, and they are definitely a terrorist organization. But in trying to deal with them, the United States has been torn.
On the one hand, we never wanted to go to war with Iran. He just, they wanted to go to war with us. We never wanted to go to war with Iran. And we've tried to deal with them. Well, alternatively, they were diplomatically, they were sanctions.
Diplomatically, with sanctions. And one of the things they required, when we dealt with them diplomatically, said, Well, you have to take that mech, and you have to say that they're terrorists. And so in 19, I think it was 1997, under the Clinton administration, the Clinton administration to advanced diplomacy, said, okay, okay, okay. They're terrorists. At the time, they were terrorists against the Iranian regime, not against Saddam Hussein.
No, they weren't... they weren't... General Cloud. We learned, at that point, that they were actually not supporting Saddam. They were there.
to go after Iran. So, uh, as recently as 2000, um, 21, they were moved out of Iran into... General, there are a lot of there are no general, hold on. There are lots of Nobel laureates, Iradians who hate the government. There are dissidents, as you know, around the world, who have won Nobel Prizes, who campaign for run.
They don't like the MEK. You could support any of them. Why would you support this group that's considered by many reporters, human rights groups, as a cult, human rights watch, have done a big report on them? A lot of American politicians have spoken at Mech events, praised the Rajavis, these weird leaders. They've been paid a lot of money by Mac.
Have you been paid by Mech to speak at their groups, events? I think what you've got to do is ask those other distant groups to come to me. Let them come to me. I want to hear from them. I'm happy to support any of them.
But you didn't answer my question. Have you been paid by this Iranian group? To make the case for regime change? I've gone through airports and heard Iranians come up to me and they say, General Clark, uh, Kendall, when can Iran be free? And I asked him, Are you willing to go there and fight?
They say, Well, no, no, no, I'm a dentist in California. So that's why you support? That's why you support MEK because they're a group of action. Is that what you're saying? I'm saying they seem to be the only group around which can be coalesced, the forces that will bring an end to the terrorist regime.
Iran experts say nobody in Iran supports them. It's a bad group to support. Just one more time, but have you been paid by them to lobby on their behalf? Yes, uh huh. Yeah, so I've given many speeches.
Okay. General, before we wrap, a different subject, last question, I appreciate your time. Defense Secretary Pete Hexeth has been purging the U.S. military that you so adore and were part of.
He stopped a lot of high ranking members, women, people of color, in particular, from being promoted. Do you believe this is just about racism or sexism on the part of the Trump administration? Or is it scarier than that? Is this an attempt by the current government to really politicize the top ranks of the military? So when, if slash when, the shit hits the fan in the future, Trump will have his own set of generals who are loyal to him and not the Constitution?
Yeah, it's a big question. I'm not inside the military. I'm not talking to people who are inside the top ranks of the military, but I know there's a lot of concern about this. Starting, really, with the remarks that the secretary made to the senior leadership last year. The number of generals that have been fired and no excuse, no explanation is given.
Um, he does, uh, seem to be taking the military in a direction that's antithetical to the basic principles of the military we've grown up with since the end of the Cold War. We always believed we were an apolitical military. Didn't matter if you were a Democrat or Republican, did what the commander in chief said, and the commander in chief was going to act in the best interests of the United States. And that was the formula that held us all together, that encouraged people to commit their lives and their welfare and their families to the service of the country. It is a worrying time.
General Wesley Clot, we appreciate you taking time out for us. Thank you for taking my questions. You're welcome. Did you like this video? Don't forget to subscribe to this YouTube channel and turn on notifications.
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Last Updated: 2026-09-27