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Gen. Wesley Clark: Seven Countries in Five Years
Gen. Wesley Clark says a Pentagon general told him right after 9/11 that the plan was to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq and finishing with Iran.
1. Gen. Wesley Clark, Democracy Now! interview, 2007 · jerepah · uploaded 2013-06-27 · 14:59
Original: youtube.com/watch?v=bSL3JqorkdU · IPFS QmaRSLMqxaM2TJ3YphDdNP47TcjBA2ongMCsfmgztYaknh
What this video is evidence for
Retired four-star General Wesley Clark, the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! (interview recorded at New York's 92nd Street Y, broadcast March 2, 2007) that about ten days after 9/11 a general on the Joint Staff told him the decision to go to war with Iraq had already been made. When he came back a few weeks later, Clark says, the same officer showed him a classified memo "down from upstairs," from the Secretary of Defense's office:
"This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out 7 countries in 5 years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran."
This is Clark's first-hand account. He has never named the officer, and the memo itself has never been made public. The point for this investigation: Iran was named as the final target of a list drawn up inside the Pentagon in 2001, long before any of today's claims about the Iranian nuclear program.
Where this fits: see Pentagon Greater Israel Wars for the full explanation and sources.
Transcript
Machine transcription (apple-speechanalyzer) of the full 00:14:59. It can mishear names and words, so check exact wording against the video before quoting it.
Well, for the rest of the hour, we'll hear General Wesley Clark, in his own words, on the possibility of a U.S. attack on Iran, the impeachment of President Bush, the use of cluster bombs, the bombing of radio, television, Serbia during the Kosovo war under his command, and much more. I interviewed General Clark on Tuesday at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Now, let's talk about Iran.
You have a whole website devoted to stopping war. www.stop iranwar.com. Do you see a replay of what happened in the lead up to the war with Iraq, the allegations of the weapons of mass destruction, the media leaping onto the bandwagon?
Well, in a way, but, but, you know, history doesn't repeat itself exactly twice. What I did warn about when I testified in front of Congress in 2002, I said, If you want to worry about a state, it shouldn't be Iraq, it should be Iran. But this government, our administration, wanted to worry about Iraq, not Iran. I knew why, because I'd been through the Pentagon right after 9/11. About 10 days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon, and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz.
I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the joint staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, sir, you gotta come in, you gotta come in and talk to me a second. I said, well, you're too busy. He said, no, no. He says, we've made the decision.
We're going to war with Iraq. This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, we're going to war with Iraq. Why? He said, I don't know.
He said, I guess they don't know what else to do. So I said, well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to Al Qaeda? He said, no, no. He says, there's nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.
He said, I guess it's like, we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments. And he said, I guess if the only 2 we have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail. So I came back to see him a few weeks later. And by that time, we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, are we still going to war with Iraq?
And he said, oh, it's worse than that. He said, he reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece of paper, and he said, I just, he said, I just got this down from upstairs, meeting the Secretary of Defense's office today, and he said, this is a memo that describes how we're going to take out 7 countries in 5 years, starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran. I said, is it classified? He said, yes, sir. I said, I said, well, don't show it to me.
And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, you remember that? He said, sorry, I didn't show you that memo. I didn't show it to you. I'm sorry. What did you say?
His name was? I'm not gonna give you his name. So go through the countries again. Well, starting with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, then Libya, then Somalia, and Sudan, and then back to Iran. So, when you look at Iran, he says it at a replay, it's not exactly replay, but here's the truth, that Iran from the beginning has seen that the presence of the United States in Iraq was a threat.
A blessing because we took out Saddam Hussein and the Bathists. They couldn't handle them. We took care of it for them, but also a threat because they knew that they were next on the Hit list. And so, of course, they got engaged. They lost a million people during the war with Iraq.
And they got a long and unprotectable, unsecurable border. So it was in their vital interest to be deeply involved inside Iraq. Um, They tolerated our attacks on the Vathas. They were happy we captured Saddam Hussein, but they're building up their own network of influence, and to cement it, they occasionally give some military assistance and training and advice, either directly or indirectly, to both the insurgents and to the militias. And In that sense, it's not exactly parallel, because there has been, I believe, continuous Iranian engagement.
Some of it legitimate, some of it illegitimate. I mean, you can hardly fault Iran because they're offering to do eye operations for Iraqis who need medical attention. That's not an offense that you can go to war over, perhaps. But it is an effort to gain influence. And the administration has stubbornly refused to talk with Iran about their perception.
in part because they don't want to pay the price with their domestic, our U.S. domestic political base, the right wing base, but also because they don't want to legitimate a government that they've been trying to overthrow. If you were Iran, you'd probably believe that you were mostly already at war with the United States anyway, since we've asserted that their government needs regime change. So, uh, and we've asked Congress to appropriate $75 million to do it, and we are supporting terrorist groups, apparently, who are infiltrating and blowing up things inside Iraq, Iran.
And if we're not doing it, let's put it this way, we're probably cognizant of it and encouraging it. So, it's not surprising that we're moving to a point of confrontation crisis with Iran. My point on this is not that the Iranians are good guys, they're not, but that you shouldn't use force except as a last, last, last resort. There is a military option, but it's a bad one. I wanted to get your response to Seymour Hirsch's piece in the New Yorker to two key points this week, reporting the Pentagon's established a special planning group within the office of the Joint Chief of Staff to plan a bombing attack on Iran.
that this is coming, as the Bush administration and Saudi Arabia are pumping money for covert operations into many areas of the Middle East, including Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, in an effort to strengthen Saudi supported Sunni Islam groups, and weaken Iranian backed Shias. Some of the covert money has been given to jihadist groups in Lebanon with ties to Al Qaeda. Fighting the Shias by funding with Prince Bandar, and then with U.S. money not approved by Congress, funding the Sunnis connected to Al Qaeda.
Well, I don't have any direct information to confirm it or deny it. It's certainly plausible. The Saudis have taken a more active role. You know, the Saudis... You were just in Saudi, right?
You just came back from Saudi? Yeah, well, the Saudis have basically recognized that they have an enormous stake in the outcome in Iraq, and they don't particularly trust the judgment of the United States in this area. We haven't exactly proved our competence in Iraq. So they're trying to take matters into their own hands. The real danger is, and one of the reasons this is so complicated is because let's say we did follow the desires of some people who say, just pull out and pull out now.
Well, yeah, we could mechanically do that. It would be ugly, and it might take three or four months, but you could line up the battalions on the road, one by one, and you could put the gunners in the Humvees and cock, load and cock their weapons and shoot their way out of Iraq. You'd have a few roadside bombs, but if you line everybody up, there won't be any roadside bombs, maybe some sniping, you can fly helicopters over, do your air cover, you probably get safely out of there. But When you leave, The Saudis have got to find someone to fight the Shias. Who are they gonna find?
Al Qaeda. Because the groups of Sunnis who would be extremists and willing to fight would probably be the groups connected to Al Qaeda. So one of the weird inconsistencies in this is that were we to get out early, we'd be intensifying the threat against us of a super powerful Sunni extremist group, which was now legitimated by overt Saudi funding in an effort to hang onto a toehold inside Iraq and block Iranian expansionism. And interestingly, today, John Negroponte has just become the number two man, resigning his post as National Intelligence director, to go to the State Department. Seymour Hirsch says, because of his discomfort that the administration's covert actions in the Middle East so closely echo the Iran contra scandal of the 1980s, and Negra Ponte was involved with that.
Well, I'm sure there are a lot of reasons why John would go back to the state department. John's a good man. But, you know, the question is, in government, is, can you, are you bigger than your job? Because if you're not bigger than your job, you get trapped by the pressures of events and processes into going along with actions that you know you shouldn't. And I don't know.
I don't know why he left the national intelligence director's position. He started in the State Department. Maybe he's got a fondness to return and finish off his career in state. Can you talk about, do you know who the generals are, who are threatening to resign? No, I don't.
If the United States... I don't wanna know. Do you agree with them? Well, I'll put it this way. In, uh, on Labor Day weekend of 1994.
When I was the J5. I was a three star general. I was in the Pentagon, and it was a Saturday morning, and so I was in the office, Walt Cross was the director of the joint staff, and he was in the office, and I think it was either Hal Westis or Jack Sheehan, who was the J3 at the time. The three of us, I think it was Jack still in the job for the last couple of days. And the three of us were in Shali Kashvili's office about 11 o'clock in the morning, on a Saturday morning, and he had just come back from a White House meeting, and he was all fired up, and the way that Shali could be, and he said, So, he said, we will see who will be the real soldiers this weekend.
There is much work to be done. This operation on Haiti has to be completed. The planning must be done correctly, and it must be done this weekend. So we will see who ours are real soldiers. And then the phone buzzed, and he got up from this little round table.
The 4 of us were sitting at to take the call from the White House. We sort of look at each other. He said, guys, I wonder where this came from. I mean, we were all getting ready to check out of the building in an hour or so. We finished off the messages and paperwork, and we just usually got together because there was normally a crisis every Saturday anyway.
And so we normally would come in for the Saturday morning crisis. And so Shelly came back and so I said to him, I said, well, sir, we've been talking amongst ourselves, and we're happy to work all weekend to get all this done. But this is just a drill right on Haiti. He looked at me and he said, Wes, he said, this is no drill. He said, I'm not authorized to tell you this, but he said, the decision has been made.
And the United States will invade Haiti. The date is the 20th, I think it was his date, of the 20th of September, and the planning must be done, and it must be done now. And if any of you have reservations about this, This is the time to leave. So I looked at Jack, and I looked at Walt. They looked at me and, I mean, we kind of shrugged our shoulders and said, okay, if you want to invade Haiti, I mean, it's not illegal, it's not the country we'd most like to invade, the opposition there consists of five armored vehicles.
But sure, I mean, if the president says to do it, yeah, we're not gonna resign over it. And so we didn't resign, nobody resigned. But Charlie was a very smart man. He knew. He knew he was bigger than his job.
And he knew that you had to ask yourself the moral legal and ethical questions first. And so I'm encouraged by the fact that some of these generals have said this about Iran. They should be asking these questions first. General Wesley Clark. He says he thinks about running for president, again, every day, will come back to my interview with him in a minute.
He's five foot two and he's six feet four He fights with missiles and with spears He's all 31 And he's only 17 He's been a soldier for a thousand years He's a Catholic A Hindu, an atheist, a James, a bonus, and a Baptist, and a Jew And he knows he shouldn't kill. And he knows he always will kill you. For me, my friend and me for you. And he's fighting for Canada. He's fighting for France He's fighting for the U.
S. And he's fighting for the Russians and he's fighting for Japan. And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way. And he's fighting for democracy... Buffy St.
Marie. Universal Soldier, here on democracy now, democracy now.org, the War and Peace Report. I Amy Goodman. As we go back to my interview with General Wesley Clarke.
Last Updated: 2026-09-27