Wesley Clark
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General Wesley Clark is a retired U.S. Army four-star general and former Clinton administration adviser. Per John Kiriakou: "He was a Clinton administration adviser and a very good guy." Kiriakou knows him personally and rates him unusually highly: "I love Wesley Clark... he's one of the very, very few people at that level." He has been citing Clark's story since at least 2018, and calls the recording of it "a famous video."

The "seven countries" account

The version Kiriakou gives most often is compressed: "The week of 9/11, the Pentagon was ordered to come up with a long-term plan. And the long-term plan was to overthrow seven governments, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, and I forget the other one, with the idea being that they were like dominoes: that once the first one fell all the others would fall right away." Clark, himself a four-star general, asked other four-star generals whether it was classified, and was told: "Yes, it's classified, but they're nuts. These people in the White House are nuts. They think that this is actually doable." Elsewhere he gives it the tighter formulation the story is usually known by, seven governments in five years, and calls the scale of it "astonishing when you really think about it."

His fullest retelling reproduces Clark's two visits to the Pentagon as a dialogue. On the first, Clark asked why the United States was going to war with Iraq and was told nobody knew: "I guess they don't know what else to do." Asked whether new intelligence had connected Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda, the answer was "no, no, there's nothing new that way. They've just made the decision to go to war with Iraq." The reasoning, as relayed, was that "we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments", which prompted the line Kiriakou repeats as the moral of the whole episode: "I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail."

Clark returned a few weeks later, by which time Afghanistan was being bombed, and asked whether the Iraq plan was still on. "Oh, it's worse than that." The officer reached across the desk, picked up a piece of paper, said he had "just got this down from upstairs", meaning the Secretary of Defense's office, and told him it was a memo describing how seven countries were to be taken out.

A separate telling dates Clark's discovery to the days immediately after 9/11 and differs on the count. In it, Clark, retired, and therefore no longer cleared, offered his help to the Pentagon; former subordinates now sitting on the Joint Chiefs of Staff told him "General Clark, you've got to see this memo" and handed him a classified document from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld proposing to attack nine countries, among them Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Syria and Libya. Kiriakou notes that showing it to him was probably a security violation. Clark reportedly asked whether it was a joke; the generals said it was not. A further account of Clark's, given on Democracy Now, is cited by Kiriakou for the puzzlement rather than the list: nobody could explain why.

Kiriakou attributes the underlying plan to Israeli policy interests: "It was the Israeli plan, 100%. They were marketing it at the same time. The Israelis love when the Americans will do their dirty work." He makes the same point in general terms elsewhere, naming Clark as one of the people whose testimony establishes how far Israeli preferences drove American policy in the region.

Kiriakou's corroboration

Kiriakou does not present Clark's account as hearsay he happens to find plausible. His response to it is "every word of that is true", followed by a story of his own that he says belongs in the same context.

Promoted on the strength of the capture of Abu Zubaydah and named executive assistant to the CIA's deputy director for operations, a job with access to "literally everything that the CIA is doing around the world", he arrived eager on his first day and was told he could not be briefed until he had been to security and signed his secrecy agreements. Six of them were laid out on a table waiting for him. He signed all six and then asked the security officer, whom he knew and had served with, what was going on.

The answer was that "next year we're going to invade Iraq. We're going to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and we're going to open the world's largest air force base in southern Iraq. We're going to remove all of our air assets from Saudi Arabia and send them to Iraq so that we can deprive Osama bin Laden of the ability to say that we are polluting the land of the two holy mosques." The date Kiriakou gives is 6 May 2002, ten months before the invasion was announced, and while the CIA, in his description, wanted only to kill bin Laden and take al-Qaeda apart piece by piece.

He also uses Clark's interview as the hinge into the principals committee meeting held the night before the attack on Iraq, at which he sat behind George Tenet as his notetaker and found the meeting chaired not by the president but by Dick Cheney. On the war's real cause he is brief: he has always believed it was revenge, from the first Gulf War, father to son, "I really believe that it was that simple." The same sequence appears again in a later interview under a different show name.

See also

- Principals committee meeting
- Donald Rumsfeld
- Iraq WMD intelligence
- George Tenet
- John Kiriakou
