Reply #19: another excellent excerpt [View All]

Knoy: How does being shot at in battle like that shape the way that you see the world afterwards?

Gen. Clark: I think you always understand what it's like to be at the pointed end of American foreign policy. And you come out of an experience like that proud of having served but determined not to put other people through it unless it's necessary as an absolute last resort — absolute last resort. You know I woke up the other morning I looked at that picture of that helicopter that crashed. I was broken hearted. Especially seeing it shot down. I was broken hearted. I thought about the troops, I thought about what they must have felt like, I thought about the families, I thought about the notification process. I may have known some of the people in the helicopter. I know all the commanders there, they all served with me at one point or another. They're all good men, they're doing everything they can do.

Gen. Clark: But war is ultimately — it's about tragedy. It's about accidents, and incidents, and people who die, and most of the deaths are unnecessary, and . . . war creates its own intensity of hatred. We saw it in Viet Nam and some of the acts perpetrated by American forces. And there was no doubt they were reciprocated, or even initiated by the Viet Kong themselves. There were terrible things done to American troops who were captured: mutilated, tortured, cut to pieces. We knew that. I knew that before I went over there. And in Iraq, there's no doubt the reciprocal acts of violence create a mounting intensity of hatred and dislike between the partisans. It's why it's so very hard to change people's minds by force and why you don't want to use force unless it's an absolute last resort.

Gen. Clark: It was a fiction, the idea that we could somehow come into Iraq, overrun the country, take it over and kill a bunch of people and they'd welcome us as liberators. They weren't occupied the way France was occupied by Germany in World War II, and we weren't their cousins the way the Americans were the cousins of the French. And so it was nothing but a fiction . . . sort of a dream, a longing to create — to look backwards and create, to recreate a moment of national greatness that was somehow different in scene and hindsight. We need to look ahead and create our own national greatness in the future. We don't have to go back and try to recreate what the greatest generation did. We should honor them, but we've got a great generation here in America today and I don't want to see a single more . . . an additional soldier die in Iraq as part of that generation, over a misguided dream.