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GENERAL CLARK: And as I went back and looked at the issues as they began to unfold, I remembered the conversation I had had right after 9/11, when an officer had told me that the decision had been made to strike Iraq regardless of whether Iraq was involved in 9/11. And then I began to see the other indicators and I realized that what we had was an administration which was determined to take us to war in Iraq, almost no matter what. That’s misleading, it’s wrong, it shouldn’t be permitted, and that administration has to be held accountable. And that’s one of the reasons I’m running.
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GEN. CLARK: I hope we will, but I hope we’ll ask a deeper question than that, because I don’t think this goes simply to the intelligence agencies. I think it goes to the heart of the decision-making process of this administration. I think they owe the American people an explanation. Why, when we were struck by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda—why did we determine to attack Iraq? Why did we distract ourselves from the war on terror? Why are we spending $150 billion on Iraq?
MR. RUSSERT: What’s the answer?
GEN. CLARK: I think the answer is that it was going to be very difficult to go after al-Qaeda. It required a new way of thought, new organizations. And this was an administration that was concerned about its image, concerned about reassuring the public, and had a predisposition to believe that somehow it could use military force to clean up the Middle East during this period after the fall of the Soviet Union and before the rise of the “next great power.”
MR. RUSSERT: You went...
GEN. CLARK: So I think there were mixed motives on this. But the administration needs to come clean with the American people and not just blame the intelligence community.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/994273.asp?cp1=1