Partisan politics, the Bush administration's mishandling of national crises and Wall Street's recent woes have left the country in need of new leadership and new policies, Gen. Wesley Clark said Monday night.
"This is a really tough time for America," the former NATO Supreme Allied Commander of Europe told more than 300 students in a speech in Leverone Hall.
In a speech that harshly criticized President George W. Bush and his policies, Clark, who ran for the 2004 Democratic nomination for president, also lamented partisanship in politics, saying new ideas are necessary to move past the divides of the past eight years.
The speech, sponsored by College Democrats, revisited themes from Clark's memoir, "A Time to Lead: For Duty, Honor and Country," published in 2007, including the general's dissatisfaction with the Bush administration's strategies in Iraq.
"Everything changed in 2001 and the attack on the United States," he said. "(We had) a president who really had no national security strategy and took us into Iraq in a war we didn't need to fight."
Clark criticized the White House for going into Iraq without enough troops or a "strategy using diplomacy and politics."
"Iraq has been an incredible military catastrophe for the United States," Clark said. "I don't think the American people would have believed how incompetent the government was until they saw it firsthand with (Hurricane) Katrina."
In addition to Iraq and the aftermath of Katrina, the Bush administration failed to resolve or prevent any of the other major crises to occur in the past eight years, including the war in Afghanistan and a several trillion dollar deficit, Clark said. He attributed the administration's failure to a loss of a national strategy after the Cold War, an overreliance on financial services and excessive deregulation of the U.S. economy.
But Clark also said that partisanship has made today's politics ineffective when it comes to solving the country's economic and military concerns. The retired general publicly endorsed Sen. Barack Obama last June, but told the audience to objectively listen to Obama and Republican nominee John McCain in the presidential debates.
"It's convenient to blame Bush, (former Secretary of State Donald) Rumsfeld and (Vice President Dick) Cheney, but they're operating on a set of ideas that were mostly invalid," he said. "We need new ideas. We need a government to really take a lead in giving America a new strategy and purpose in the world. We need to stop dividing America into Republicans and Democrats ... We need to pull this country together."
Following his speech, Clark took questions from the audience and autographed copies of his book.
Many students said Clark covered a variety of important topics.
"It was really interesting to hear him discuss the interaction between the economy and the military and issues that really affect us now," said Weinberg freshman Jake Rosner.
College Democrats President Lily Becker said she hoped Clark's speech would encourage students to engage in further discussion about current events and election issues.
"I thought he did a great job," Becker said. "He outlined all of his ideas on issues pertaining to the economy and foreign policy and spoke about a lot of different topics that pertain especially to young people."
ntadena@u.northwestern.edu
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