GENERAL WESLEY CLARK: Well, the truth is that most Muslims- I shouldn't say this, but I will. You know, do we have any Catholics here? (laughter) Okay. Do you know how, not to get too personal, but you know how some people only go to mass on Easter and Christmas Eve? You know what I'm talking about? There are a lot of people of the Muslim faith, I don't mean to insult anybody, but there are many who don't, they don't really actively work for the coming of the 12th Imam. In fact, as one of the people told me when I was in, going through one of the states in the Middle East, he said, "You Americans, you are so stupid," he said. "What you have done in Iraq is unbelievable." He said, "Iraq is a tribal, it's a tribal country. The tribes have all the power, and," he said, "members of these tribes overlap the borders and everything, and they're mixed between Sunnis and Shias." He said, "We've tried for over 100 years to take the power away from these crazy Mullahs, and the first thing you do is give them power and authority. You don't understand the first thing about Iraq," he said.
So, there are a lot of people there who don't want the Mullahs to have all that power. There are a lot of people in the Middle East who don't see it the way, a- as a religious conflict. These are people who lived in the United States, send their children here for education, own homes in the United States. They dress like Westerners. They talk like Westerners. They speak fluent English. They get stopped when they go through Kennedy Airport in New York for six hours, and they don't like it. But they want the same thing for their families that we want for ours.
Surely we've learned something beyond the 12th century. I know. Look, the way it works in the world is: People don't start fights mostly for ideas. They mostly start fights for other reasons, and then they drag on ideas to try to give them support. This war didn't begin as an Is- a war of Islam. Osama Bin Laden was angry at the Saudi government, because they stripped him of his citizenship. And then Ayman Al-Zawahiri was angry at the Egyptian government. And so, out of frustration because they couldn't get anything going against the Saudi or Egyptian governments, they joined forces and decided, 'Heck, if you're going to do this, why not go for the big banana. Let's go attack America.' They issued a fatwa in 1998 saying it was okay to kill Americans and now they've dragged in all this religious baggage. It was never there to begin with, and we shouldn't look for it.
I have no doubt that we can have a clash of civilizations and a refight of the Crusades if we want to, because we're proud of who we are. They're proud of who they are. It's natural. It's in the human heart. It's because you love your momma and daddy. You grow up that way. It's part of your family. It's what you believe in. It's why you're- you love the Crimson Tide and know the War Eagles, they're not nothing, (laughter) as we say in Arkansas. But we don't have to have that fight between Christianity and Islam, and we ought to do everything to prevent it.
And we must talk to Iran. The Iranian leader, he's got a real bad mouth on him. He's real ugly. He plays to his right-wing. When he talks tough to America, he gets lots of people saying, 'Way to go Ahmadinejad! You the man!' And when President Bush threatens him, people come in and pat him on the back and say, 'We're behind you. Keep talking tough. We're with you.' It's the way politics works, and he's a political leader. He was actually, you may remember, elected. So, why is it that we can't talk to Iran? Maybe find some common interests. They probably don't want a big war in Iraq either. Now, they want what they want, which may not be what we want, but how are we going to know that if we don't talk to them?
We've got to use our power to build relationships. To win the war on terror you have to have more friends than enemies in the world. There are 50,000 people out there who support Osama bin Laden. That's about two and a half time more than signed up with him on 9/11. That's a pretty good indicator we're not winning, but on the other hand, there's not a single country that supports Osama Bin Laden, not one. So, why is it again that we don't want to work with these other countries? I'll tell you what Osama bin Laden's strategy is. He want's to encourage us to invade Iran and Syria. He wants war. His strategy calls for the creation of zones of chaos and savagery. He wants more Iraqs, where there is no government, no police, and where he can go in and mastermind civil conflict and beheadings, because he thinks from that chaos that he can emerge with leadership. Why do we want to play his game when it's totally against our interests?
What we need is a new strategy that puts us right in the world, that looks at what's important for America's future. We want to back out of Iraq, talk directly to the people we disagree with who are governments, work together with those governments using information exchange, law enforcement, economic development and, only as a last resort, military force to eliminate the hardcore terrorists who can't see the light and come over to our side. It's fundamentally a battle of ideas, and we've got great ideas and theirs, theirs are throwbacks. Most people don't support them. There's probably, there's 6.4 billion people in the world. There's probably 3, 3 billion people who know about the United States of America and there's hardly any of those who don't say they agree with what we stand for, which is protection of the individual, right to have a family, to raise your children to do better. Surely we can win this battle of ideas against 50,000 hardcore fanatics who want to take the world back to the seventh century. Surely that's doable. It's not even a major object of American strategy.
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