Glenn Greenwald: Is Obama Fulfilling the Neocon Dream of Mass Regime Change
in Muslim World?
30/11/2011
Political blogger Glenn Greenwald recently wrote about retired General
Wesley Clark's recollection of an officer telling him in the weeks after the
Sept. 11 attacks that the then U.S. Secretary of Defense had issued a memo
outlining a plan for regime change within five years in Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran. We play an excerpt of Clark's
comments and ask Greenwald to respond. "What struck me in listening to that
video ... is that if you go down that list of seven countries that he said
the neocons had planned to basically change the governments of, you pretty
much see that that vision, despite the perception that we have a Democratic
president and therefore the neo-conservative movement is powerless, is
pretty much being fulfilled," Greenwald says. [Includes rush transcript]
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<
http://www.salon.com/2011/11/26/wes_clark_and_the_neocon_dream/singleton/>
"Wes Clark and the Neocon Dream," By Glenn Greenwald (Salon.com, Nov. 26,
2011)
AMY GOODMAN: Glenn Greenwald, in your latest piece, you wrote about the
Project for New American Century or PNAC, and started talking about neocon,
neoconservative, foreign policy as it relates to the Obama administration.
Explain.
GLENN GREENWALD: There was this speech that General Wesley Clark gave in
2007 to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in which he recounted
meetings that he had at the Pentagon with people with whom he had close
relationships - meetings he had at the Pentagon with people with whom he had
close relationships in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and he talked about
how, as he had done before, that he was told within a week or two after 9/11
that the Pentagon intended to attack Iraq even though no one thought that
they were involved in the 9/11 attack. And he described an incident where he
went back to the Pentagon a few weeks after he was told this, in October and
November of 2001, and he asked his source, well, it looks like we're going
to attack Afghanistan, you told me we were going to attack Iraq. Are we
still going to attack Iraq? And the source told him, oh, General, it's
actually much worse than this.
AMY GOODMAN: We're going to play the clip of Wesley Clark.
GLENN GREENWALD: OK, good.
WESLEY CLARK: What happened in 9/11, IS we didn't have a strategy, we didn't
have bipartisan agreement, we didn't have American understanding of it. And
we had, instead, a policy coup in this country, a coup, a policy coup. Some
hard-nosed people took over the direction of American policy and they never
bothered to inform the rest of us. I went through the Pentagon 10 days after
9/11. I couldn't stay away from mother army. I went back there to see Don
Rumsfeld. I had worked for him as a white house fellow in the 1970's. All
this is in the book. I said, am I doing OK on CNN? He said, yeah, yeah,
yeah, fine. He said, I'm thinking about--I read your book. And he said--this
is the book that talks about the Kosovo campaign--and he said, I just want
to tell you, he said, nobody's going to tell us where or when we can bomb,
nobody. He said, I'm thinking of calling this a floating coalition. What do
you think about that? I said, well sir, thanks for reading my book, and
well... He said, thanks, that is all the time I have got. Really. I went
downstairs leaving the Pentagon and an officer from the Joint Staff called
me into the office and said, I want you to know, sir, we're going to attack
Iraq. I said, why? He said, we don't know. I said, well did they tie Saddam
to 9/11? He said, no, he said, but I guess they do not know what to do about
terrorism and so the--but they can attack states and they want to look
strong. So, I guess they think if they take down a state it will intimidate
the terrorists. It's like that old saying, he said, that if the only tool
you have is a hammer, then every problem has to be a nail. Well, I walked
out of there pretty upset, and then we attacked Afghanistan. I was pretty
happy about that. We should have. And then I came back to the Pentagon about
six weeks later. I saw the same officer. I said, why haven't we attacked
Iraq? We still going to attack Iraq? He said, oh, sir, it's worse than that.
He pulled up a piece of paper off his desk. He said, I just got this memo
from the Secretary of Defense's office, says we're going to attack and
destroy the governments in seven countries in five years. We're going to
start with Iraq and then we're going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya,
Somalia, Sudan and Iran.
AMY GOODMAN: That was General Wesley Clark. Glenn Greenwald, the
significance of what he said?
GLENN GREENWALD: So, that seems like a fairly radical plan, and he's talking
about, what he calls, this neocon cabal that had implemented this extremist
militaristic vision justified on the basis of 9/11. He actually goes on to
describe how Paul Wolfowitz, ten years earlier, was talking about these
things well before 9/11. But, what struck me in listening to that video just
a couple of days ago is that if you go down that list of Seven countries
that he said the neocons had planned to basically change the governments of,
you pretty much see that vision, despite the perception that we have a
Democratic president and therefore the neoconservative movement is
powerless, is pretty much being fulfilled. I mean, the governments of Iraq
and Libya and Lebanon, three of those countries, have been changed,
including Libya this year by military force. You then look at Somalia and
Sudan where the Obama administration in Somalia has, according to The
Washington Post just this weekend, massively escalated it's proxy fighting
and drone attacks, we're involved in trying to subvert and control Somalia
in all sorts of ways. We have a modest deployment to the south part of
Sudan. But, that's another country where we're now militarily active and
trying to control. And then the most important countries on that list, Iran
and Syria, are clearly the target of all sorts of covert regime change
efforts on the part of the United States and Israel. That is clearly the
goal the U.S. government has adopted for itself, is to get rid of the
Iranian laws and the Assad regime in Syria. And so, if you look at what
Clark described in a way that he intended to be very frightening an
extremist, that the neocons wanted to do in these seven countries, it seems
pretty clear to me that although we may not be doing it with as much of an
overt war as the neocons would like, it's just a slightly more subtle and
different means of achieving the same end.
AMY GOODMAN: And the significance of the drone strikes and fitting it in
with the Project for a New American Century, what's happened Pakistan now,
Pakistan saying the U.S. has to clear out of a base that is believed to be
being used by the United States to launch drone strikes, but drone strikes
not only in Pakistan?
GLENN GREENWALD: Well, this is what's so amazing to me. If you look back at
what the Congress did in the wake of 9/11 when it enacted the authorization
to use military force, if you look at that authorization, it's incredibly
narrow, as it turns out. If you go and actually read it, it says the
President is authorized to use military force against those who perpetrated
the 9/11 attack and those countries who harbored those individuals. That's
it, that's the only authorized use of military force. Well, here we are more
than a decade later, and there was an article in The Washington Post from a
week ago where U.S. officials anonymously are saying that, in essence, Al
Qaeda, the group that perpetrated the 9/11 attack according to the
government, is now dead. There's only two leaders left they say in that
entire region. It already rendered "effectively inoperable". There is no
more Al Qaeda left in Afghanistan or Pakistan according to the U.S.
government. The group that perpetrated 9/11, according to it is no longer
even existing. And yet, here we are engaged in extraordinarily broad
military efforts, constantly escalating in numerous parts of the world.
There's six different countries in which the U.S. is actively using drones;
in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya and Yemen, against groups
that didn't even exist at the time that 9/11 was perpetrated. And
constantly, what you find is we are killing all sorts of civilians. There
was just a story, a horrible story from four days ago where a U.S.
air-strike in Afghanistan slaughtered an entire family of children, six
children between the ages of 4 and 12. What we're doing in essence is not
only going way beyond what we were supposed to be doing when the Congress
authorized military force, but what we're really doing is we're constantly
manufacturing the causes of our war. Everywhere we go, every time we kill
Pakistani troops or kill children in Yemen or in Afghanistan, we're
generating more and more anti-American sentiment and violence, and
therefore, guaranteeing we will always have more people to fight.
AMY GOODMAN: We're talking to Glenn Greenwald. Constitutional law attorney,
political blogger for <
http://www.salon.com> Salon.com. When we come back,
Glenn, we want to ask you about about Wikileaks winning the equivalent of
the Pulitzer Prize, this is in Australia. Stay with us.
<
http://www.democracynow.org/appearances/glenn_greenwald> Glenn Greenwald,
constitutional law attorney and political and legal blogger for Salon.com.
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Received on Wed Nov 30 2011 - 16:27:56 EST