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Wesley Clark March 23, 2003

You've referred to the campaign against Iraq as "elective surgery"; I imagine that means that you support disarming Saddam in principle, just not with the same urgency the Bush administration feels.

WC. My view on it was and has been that at some point you're going to need to take actions to deal with the problem of Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. But those actions didn't have to necessarily be military and they didn't have to be now. It's the administration that chose to do this set of actions at this time. And the reason they've had problems persuading people of the necessity for doing it has been because they couldn't address the urgency.
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Of the people who are running this war, from Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld and Powell on down, in terms of the political appointees, are there are any who you particularly like who you would work with again, hypothetically, in some ...?

WC. I like all the people who are there. I've worked with them before. I was a White House Fellow in the Ford administration when Secretary Rumsfeld was White House chief of staff and later Secretary of Defense, and Dick Cheney was the deputy chief of staff at the White House and later the chief.

[Deputy Secretary of Defense] Paul Wolfowitz I've known for many, many years. [Deputy National Security Advisor] Steve Hadley at the White House is an old friend. [Under Secretary of Defense for Policy] Doug Feith I worked with very intensively during the time we negotiated the Dayton Peace Agreement; he was representing the Bosnian Muslims then, along with [Pentagon advisor] Richard Perle. So I like these people a lot. They're not strangers. They're old colleagues.
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Well, bearing that in mind, how do you think the war on terror is going?

WC. I think it's gone reasonably well, recognizing that we were never against the KGB. These guys were lucky but they were largely inept. And for all the talk about their sophistication and so forth, I think people were giving themselves a large measure of credit for being able to deal with the issue.

But the actual fact is, just like they said when they broke the code on Khalid Mohammed's laptop, it wasn't a very sophisticated code. It may have been encoded but it wasn't very sophisticated and they easily broke it. This is not the KGB we've been up against. So I don't want to diminish anything we've done, I think it's gone reasonably well -- we haven't been attacked again, and that's the way it should have been. I always felt that if we did things right we wouldn't be attacked again.