that a 19th century capitalist would have envied. what comes out is oil, along with oil development. >> you're watching american history tv. to join the conversation, like us on facebook. >> next on "the presidency," members of president clinton's foreign policy cabinet discussed rwanda, the middle east, and the search for osama bin laden. the clinton presidential center and the miller center of public affairs hosted the event.

>> ladies and gentlemen, please welcome editor and chief and copresident of the "atlantic," james bennett and the foreign policy panel. [applause] >> good morning, everybody. welcome. we have five very strong panelists here, whom i am going to introduce you to in a moment and a really long list of potential initiatives and crises that we could talk about this morning. i am sure we will hit a number of them this morning, including

the pursuit of peace in the middle east and ireland, bosnia, the twists and turns in a bosnia, nato expansion, the struggle against terrorism, and that is before we even get to haiti, rwanda, vietnam india pakistan, so on, and any one of these subjects could consume any number of panel discussions, and my hope is that we won't get into these subjects too deeply but we will drive toward an understanding of principles that evolved from them and evolved considerable trial and maybe occasional trial and error. how did the president reconcile the hallmarks of his approach to peacemaking? how most broadly did he envision

a new global architecture in this suddenly fluid. after the berlin wall came down? -- fluid period after the berlin wall came down? i hope you will react to each other's points and argue a little bit too if it is appropriate. to bring this to as fine a point as possible at the end, i was hoping to do a lightning round with our panelists and hoping to see what they would think is bill clinton's legacy in global affairs. the audience as well will have an opportunity to ask questions so start thinking of the good questions that i will fail to ask. let me introduce our panelists and they will talk a little bit to provide context. to my left is sandy berger and

is a global consulting, and he is involved in a number of projects worldwide with a particular focus in asia russia, and the middle east. he served with bill clinton and his of ministration during the middle east, and he was a national security advisor in the first term before becoming of a national security advisor in the second term. to his left is general wesley clark, who retired in 2000 from military service after a 38 year career that culminated in his achieving four-star rank and the role of nato supreme allied commander of europe. he has received numerous awards, from the purple heart to the silver star to the presidential medal of freedom. he is now at the center for international relations at ucla. to his left is mara rudman

where she was chief counsel with the foreign affairs committee. at the white house she was the deputy assistant at the white house for foreign affairs come much of her quest was for middle east peace, and she continued stubbornly into the current administration, where she served as the deputy chief of staff answered as envoy for the middle east peace of state, and now a visiting fellow at the institute for national strategic studies. nancy soderberg also joined the clinton administration from the hill where she was senior foreign-policy adviser to ted kennedy. during the clinton years, she served on the nfc for national security affairs, and also served as an alternate representative to the u.n..

ambassador soderbergh is now president and ceo of soderbergh solutions, nash ambassador soderberg -- ambassador soderberg is now president and ceo of soderberg solutions. finally, we have russell riley who is the author of numerous articles and books on residential decision-making. i think sandy we turn it over to you to begin your own and better summation of your biography. >> what i did in the administration as well as my background? >> yes. >> i was the deputy security advisor in the first term, the

national security advisor in the second term, having been the foreign-policy adviser in the campaign. i often thought of national security advisers' jobs as being able to write on the elephant and then having to clean up after the elephant. [laughter] it is really multiple jobs. you write on the elephant because you are one of three or four printable advisers to the president along with the secretary of state, secretary of defense, director of the cia you clean up after it because you essentially are the chief of staff for foreign policy. the national security staff which is about 150 men footnote, 400 now has to ensure

the president is ready for whatever he is doing. the speeches. the meetings. the trips. the phone calls. all of that work is done by the nsc staff. the third job of the national security advisor and maybe one of the most important, is to run an interagency process i which -- by which the president is ultimately given the best options to decide hard problems. easy problems don't get to the president. the hard problems. the better process is one that has real bret -- breadth. we started at the assistant level, across the board, and

these people were really up to their elbows in problems, they knew it really well, they lived it, and they would come up with a series of problems,. and analysis, and options. that would go up to the deputies -- problems, analysis, and options. that would go up to the deputy secretaries, and then that would go up to the next step and they would define it to the principles, and i always felt if the principles could agree to 80%, that was a good thing, and the rest would be taken to the president. and the national security advisor sometimes was the one present in the options. you had to present them to the president and a fairway. -- in a fair way.

i wanted to present madeleine's options in a way as if she were standing next to me and that she could believe that i had fairly stated her options. and in the fourth function is to make sure the president's policies are in demented. -- are implemented. you make these options, and the state has its own view, and it is quite easy for the policy to be unrecognizable, so the national security advisor has to continue to push and prod to make sure that that policy is carried out. i would say that the last role and by far the most important role, and i said this to each of my successors, advisers, both republican and democrat, who have asked me about the job, is

that you have to be able to tell the president the truth. you need to. all of the president's senior advisers tell the president the truth. but it is the truth from a diplomatic perspective, if you are a secretary of state. it is the truth from the military perspective if you are the defense minister, or it is the truth from the intelligence perspective if you are the head of the cia. you are looking at this from the president's perspective. you need to be able to tell the president how you see the situation how you see his actions and activities in that situation, even when you think he is not doing the right thing and what you think the real options are. i often did that.

a few time i got -- times i got my head snapped off. sometimes the president would be reading his crossword puzzle as i was talking, which meant that he was listening. [laughter] then i would go on my merry way. but that is the highest -- those simply are the truth tellers to the president from outside the bubble, outside the four walls of the administration. you are doing your job. >> general clark, can you tell us a little bit about the role that you came to play in pursuing for a policy for this administration? and i'm also curious, how did you get to know the president? you are from arkansas and i don't know how far back? >> it is a humble, humble story and a lot lower what said he has

described, i had four positions during the clinton administration. i was the head of the calvary division at fort hood, texas, we had apache helicopters and 43 courses -- 43 horses, that i can to washington in the spring of 94 and in that job, i was part of the thousands of people that were part of the process. my job was to maintain the connectivity between military activities and the diplomatic and residential directives at the staff levels. so i had to prepare the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff to work with principals and deputies and that we had to function in the interagency working groups.

it was like a total firehose of hundreds of actions going on, from international arms transfers, narcotics, the summit of the americas, north korean negotiations, rwanda, haiti, bosnia, it ran the gambit, so it was a wonderful job, and eye-opening job and i was across the river usually twice a day into the white house or the state department or both, sitting in on meetings or sometimes been the principal at a meeting representing the pentagon. i became a four-star general and i became the commander in chief of the u.s. southern command's, so -- commands, so i had to have regional responsibility in europe. so we were on the execution and some 1996-2000. how did i meet the president?

good question. i was at writing a horse one morning at forward, texas, as there were 13 flag officers at fort hood, and the used my horses, so every saturday morning, we had a flag ride, and we rode for three or four hours and we talked about the day, and my boss was a three-star down there, and he looked down at me from the saddle one day and he said, in the spring of 1993, and he said, are you a friend of president's clinton -- president clinton? and i said, sir, i have known him for a long, long time. he was up at west point, he said, and he said you are one of his friends. i just wanted to know. so he had a long shadow. i had actually met bill clinton when he was, i went to georgetown university for the conference on atlantic

discussions, and i was a first glassman at west point, and i had gone down there, and it was the last -- first glassman -- classman at west point, and i had gone down there, and it was the last thing is going to do before becoming a rhodes scholar, and this girl said our you from arkansas, and i said yes, and she said there is somebody here from arkansas, and he is bill clinton. and i sit idle think he is from arkansas, and she said he is from arkansas because he talks about watermelons and stuff like this. [laughter] you are in high school and things like that and you know people who are good enough to get to a school like georgetown so an hour later this young guy comes up to me and he is escorted by a young lady on each arm and he says, i am bill

clinton, i am from hope, arkansas, and we talked for about an hour, and i was incredibly impressed. afterwards we talked again, and he said, what are you going to do? and i said i would trail for roads -- try out for rhodes, and then if that does not work i'm going to go to vietnam. and he said i would to try out for rhodes too. he was in hot springs and i was in little rock, and i followed his incredible career, and i asked him as we left that day, and i was leaving for georgetown to go back to west point, and i said, to you ever think you might do something in politics? and he said, well, i have thought about it. [laughter] so we went back a long way and i always admired his drive and he got into arkansas politics early, and he made a huge difference in this state.

i do so many of you out here have followed his growth and leadership and have benefited from it in norm is a -- from it in norm is for that -- from it e-mail lists -- enormously. >> and tell us your story. >> i came from capitol hill, and my job at the national security council, and i had a few jobs there, and the most important one was the chief of staff at the national security council so i was working for the national security council, but for sandy there, but without being too repetitive of what he described, while i did end up focusing a fair amount of time substantively on the middle east, i would say the main way that i saw my job was to in many

ways clear away the underbrush to make it as easy as possible for sandy and the other deputy to take care of the number of things that sandy has described because you can see how the complex -- how complex the coordination job was. if you are doing right behind the presidency in that job, what does that mean? what it meant for me under sandy's direction was to figure out a way as we were working to shape and -- shapen and get this decisions made to ensure that we had a plan for implementing them and that they were going to be followed through on in the most effective way possible. so that meant that you had the money for them. and that you were going to follow the money all the way through. that you had a way to make sure

that you are making those decisions and that the agencies had the right guidance and that you are following up, and sometimes the agencies that you are making the right decision but they would follow you from the beginning to the end all the way through. and congress felt of the decision, but it was part of the decedent -- part of the genius quite friendly, that the president was with us on every foreign trip that we took, and i was responsible at various points of managing members of congress on those foreign trips. i think it was critically important for getting by in -- buy-ins. that was when you had republican controlled both the house and the senate and there were very challenging trips, including the trip to the west bank and gaza and members of congress went on every leg of that trip, members

of congress went to the west bank and gaza. they went to bosnia and i went on a trip when i was on the hill as well, which was part of the clinton administration strategy to bring along members. so money congress, the mystically internationally specifically how you get the i in -- the buy-in, and the decision-making, how you peel away the curtain. if you have a big thought or a big policy, what do you do to make it happen? not necessarily the drama, but the important gears behind it to make sure it is sustainable. >> i was going to say i remember american flags all over also

during that trip, which is something we have not seen since. nancy? >> thank you very much, thank you to the miller center for this scholarly edition i remember well doing my own interview, and i cannot remember what i said, so i will have to check that out. mara and i have almost exactly the same career, i would to the hill, we had him of the same job, and then i went to the united nations and how i differentiate between previous white house occupants is that i teach now and if you want to get a boost to your career, pick the next president of the united states and spend the next eight months with him as he runs for president. if it does not work, you are immediately unemployed, which happened to me two times before i worked for bill clinton but i worked on the dukakis campaign

with gene sperling and george stephanopoulos and learned how not to run a campaign, and then he called me and said, would you like to work for bill clinton? and i was working for ted kennedy at the time, and i said, you know, i have done to losing campaigns -- two losing campaigns, and george w. bush is -- george h.w. bush is at 90% in the polls, and there is this problem with clinton not inhaling and i thought that ted kennedy was the most brilliant politician ever, and he said you should do it. and i said, why? three times and you are out. and he said, because he is going to win. so i said, you are a hopeless romantic. [laughter] he said because the economy is

what it is all about. so i did, and i met sandy and tony lake, and i fell in love with them, and i move here to little rock in june of 1992, drove my car down from washington, which got awarded the worst car in the white house parking lot when i got there but i made it back, and we were in a building right around here that is now a charter school, which was an old publishing newspaper, and we just set to work trying to unseat the sitting president of the united states who was actually quite popular, who had just won the first gulf war. i was the director of foreign policy, which really meant i was in the office here on the phone with sandy nearly every day, saying, you should do this. but president clinton was viewed as not having a lot of foreign policy experience, which was

actually not true. he was traveling all his life, he had been living in london as a rhodes scholar, and so he had dealt with the international community quite a it, -- quite a bit, and with sandy's great help in 19 anyone at georgetown, we essentially laid out his philosophy, which was then and lamented as president very much. to win a presidency, to take a presidency from an incoming president who has just won the gulf war is no easy task, but we talked about the economy and the famous war room, and it is the economy stupid, so we set about challenging george bush on a couple of foreign policy issues haiti, bosnia, the need to engage in the collapse of the

soviet union more effectively to support the independence of the countries who were trying to join the west, and laid out a visionary speech that was my job as campaign director here to make sure that we put out statements and inserted that into various debates on the campaign. and of course, the election really was more about the economy, but he had laid the foundation during the campaign for a presidency that would actually have to put those into office. when we won, it was fabulous, i still remember looking at the statehouse and we were all watching the big scene 20 years ago, and all of a sudden reality set in. first of all, i thought i was going home, and sandy said, you are staying there, and he said, you are staying there, and he said you are going to a new do this, and it was the next three month and they were the best. of my life. and then the sky said we are

here, and it was the cia briefing team, and -- this guy said we are here, and it was the cia reaping team, and they had set up themselves into a hotel nearby, and they said the haitians have come to clinton's inauguration so literally 400,000 haitians were ripping the roofs off their house and building boats to come to the inauguration, and most of them would have done, -- most of them would have died, and so that was her first campaign flip-flop but we ended up if limiting every single one of them, but in some cases took a few years. the other was thanksgiving day i was taking a day off in theory, on thanksgiving day, and we got a phone call that we were sending 25,000 troops to somalia, which was of announced to me, so i called of the national security adviser at the time, and he said, don't worry,

they will be out when you get here. it was very extraordinary, and my role when i got to the white house was the same position that mara had, and it was essentially to not play the soccer ball. when there is a crisis everybody is going here, but you have to step back and make sure that other things are getting thought about as well. also, to ask the question of why not? why is that -- why is it that we don't involve ourselves in the question of northern ireland which is what we got involved in doing, why not get involved in bosnia, and those kinds of things became questions, but i will end with the need to avoid kind of what sandy was saying, the game of telephone, where you put out the present's policies, and then all of a sudden it goes to this person, to this person to this person, to this agency,

to this agency, and then it turns out to look like nothing the way it started, and then you have to find a way for it to be intimate, so i will stop there and thank you. >> russell riley, maybe you can set the table for the rest of the discussion? >> thank you i had no association with the clinton administration but over the years i had a long association with the presidential oral history project from the carter administration through now. those polled in norman's leave valuable material to me and two other scholars -- those hold enormously valuable material to me and as well to other scholars. the clinton administration in terms of foreign policy is

nestled in this very interesting. we just celebrated the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the berlin wall -- very interesting period, we just celebrated the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the berlin wall. we were the most powerful nation in the world, we had the largest economy, we had a culture that had influence and impact all around the globe we have the world's most able military forces, and in case anyone did not know that, the first gulf war give them a demonstration. we were in many ways an enormously -- in an enormously advantageous position. the end of the cold war made

challenges for the clinton administration greater. let me just mention a few of the obvious ones. after the cold war, the large nuclear arsenals that we had built no longer mattered in the same way they had in the past. as a matter-of-fact, the leftover nuclear material in the soviet union turned out to be a huge liability and a complicated set of problems that had to be solved. those in the united states -- the united states was a powerful nation without an enemy of to -- without an anatomy -- without an enemy. this is, again, an interesting and challenging. -- challenging period, and i

hope the panel will talk about how they managed and maneuvered through it. >> thank you all very much. sandy, maybe we should begin at the beginning? as professor strong said you studied history very carefully. you said clinton's operating style was to solicit advice from people from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences, but it occurs to me that you all to some degree, were deprived of the lessons of history as you came to office, at least the foreign policymaking and the cold war era was potentially no longer relevant to the world that you are suddenly faced with. or perhaps it was. i wonder what intellectual

traditions you found yourself drawing on? >> was great, i think we were nestled between two events that were closer to us. one was the end of the cold where -- cold war and the collapse of the soviet union, which had shaped america upon role in the world for 45 years. the allocations of our resources, the weight -- the way we viewed other countries, the way we dealt with the caribbean, the way we dealt with that whole set of burdens that were no longer on her shoulders, and it enabled us to look at the world in a different way. what we were entering, and president clinton saw it before any other leader understood it,

was the beginning of a new reality. and that is an increasing rapidity of the flow of goods services, and ideas from around the world, and the increasing rapidity of our interdependence globalization. that is the moment, i think, in which we become, in which president clinton becomes president. i think that confluence very much defines the base of the presidency. he was charged with dealing with completion of the cold war, the aftermath, and what came after that. for example, nuclear.

we got all of the former nuclear weapons -- all of the weapons out of the former soviet union. we got all of the weapons out of kazakhstan. we got soviet union to sign the ballistics treaty and the chemical weapons treaty, so we had a lot of business done on the nuclear agenda. there was a lot going on in the closing down of the old chapter. on the globalization side, which was merging, i think president clinton got that and understood that much earlier than other leaders and better than many of us to it and he understood that that globalization, at one point, he said globalization train has left the station, but

we don't know what the destination is, and the only way we can determine the destination is to lead. so whether it was 300 trade agreements, including getting china a nuclear nonproliferation treaty for the world, across a broad spectrum, he saw building on that interdependence as a priority, and he also saw, the last thing i'm going to say, the dangers of globalization. what he would call the dark side of globalization. all of those forces that enabled good things to happen also enabled bad things to happen. the same computer that allowed some scientists in russia to

help map the human genome also could help them hack into a power system in the united states and close it down. so we also begin the process of trying to protect our critical infrastructure, deal with terrorism, and i think that is the wedge into which president clinton begins his presidency and way before 9/11, it seems that was a frame. -- that was the frame. >> i was thinking about the layering and the work that was going on, for example, while you are doing the work on nuclear weapons, you had nato enlargement, and the freedom support acts.

i was on the hill at that time see you had a norma's amounts of money being generated on the public side -- had enormous amounts of money being generated on the public side, so it was layering and doing everything you can and maximizing the opportunity, and at the same time, you are taking care of the precautions on the counterterrorism side so that it is taking care of working on the positive side and doing the protective work as well on the globalization points that said he was mentioning. i was just try to wrap through my head trying to think of those things going along as he was talking. >> in 1993-19 94, the world was a pretty confusing place, a lot of things were happening and there was not an organizing -- 1003-1994, the world was a

pretty confusing place, a lot of things were happening and there was not an organizing idea. there was enormous problem with refugees coming out of haiti and we put an economic embargo in place there was the north korean challenge with nuclear weapons, saddam hussein was still in charge in a rock and people were asking, what is the strategy -- in iraq, and people were asking, what is the strategy? so i was called in by my boss to figure out what the strategy was, i thought it was a test question, i did not know what the strategy was, i thought he knew the answer. so sandy and tony and all of us worked on a strategy and it is

on the web right now, it is the national security web of engagement, and it involved nafta, the world trade organization could be seen, and we were going to engage in promoting democracy all over the world, we were going to use our armed forces constructively, and we recognized threats. today when you look back at that document, which was published in the spring of 1995 when it came out, but it took more than a year in being written, it said there were four principal challenges, regional instability, it has certainly been the case, proliferation of nuclear and chemical, biological weaponry, that is certainly a problem, transnational threats like organize crime and trafficking and terrorism, that i certainly been a problem, and the fourth was, there could be a

case in which there was a resurgent russian threat in the world, and so i look back at that 20 years ago, and i think, there must've been some pretty smart people on the national security council staff to get that document going, because i think it has stood the test of time and amazingly well. >> let me ask you, general, to talk a little about applying that framework in the world, and maybe we should take the example of bosnia, where during the campaign, james baker had said, we don't have a dog in that fight, not enough american interest to get involved there so there was the idea to do something about the humanitarian catastrophe, and what you said it was the set of organizing principles with how the ministration thought about this. before you could arrive at a

peace agreement, you had to decide what the policy was going to be, and nato took action in its own history to do something about that complex. can you talk about that struggle to actually put those principles into action? or sandy? whoever would like to take this one? >> is very frustrate problem for the first couple of years, as net is in europe, europeans saw it i merrily as a humanitarian -- saw it primarily as a humanitarian mission. europe was ambitious. in the beginning, we believed that we should lift the arms embargo, which only applied to the albanian muslims, because of the serbs had weapons from serbia, and strike the serbs if they bombed.

warren christopher went to europe to sell that, and came back with his tail between his legs. it went nowhere. the europeans a said, no, no, no, this is a humanitarian mission, we could not do those things by ourselves, we could not activate nato by ourselves we could not bomb by ourselves. so for two years, we were in an extraordinarily frustrating. , we try to have some peace negotiations but it became more and more -- frustrating period, we tried to have a some peace negotiations, but it became more and more frustrating. eventually the president said enough. the president was at a putting green, and a couple of days

before jacque chirac, who was a bit of a grandstand or, he said he was going to have a rapid force, and that was a very bad french accent, and i'm going to send 10,000 soldiers anyplace if there is a threat in bosnia, it meant nothing. it was just rhetorical. if schrock -- if chirac can do this, why do you give me new ideas? well it with parallel to that and we were working on a new idea inside the ncs tony and myself and nancy, and simply, basically, it was that we would present to milosevic a take it or leave it package. if he did not take it, we would bomb.

we would go to the europeans and we would say, we are going to do this. we would like to do it together, but if we are not together we're going to do it ourselves. the president liked it. it was consistent with his own, i think predilections, not everyone in the event a station liked it, i think there were very few people who liked it within the restriction. [laughter] but we had a constituency of one who really liked it. [laughter] but the state, and the pentagon, the military did not like it but the chairman of our joint chiefs really liked it, he was an eastern european by birth and he understood the dynamic of this situation. we went to europe, the europeans started sweating, when they thought, my god, the americans are going to end the war in

bosnia and we are going to look like wolfsburg so they signed on and we went to milosevic, we had a bombing campaign, and it lasted 77 days. at one point this fine judgment, who did a fine job as the ellet commander of that war, said i will do this as long as i have to, but i am not sure -- who did a fine job as the elite commander of that war, said i will do this as long as i have to, but i'm not sure it will work. one day i get a call from the white house, and they said, i think i need 90 days. [laughter] that means we had about two weeks to make a decision.

and i sat in my office one night, writing a memo to the president, saying, basically here is your choice. we either give up or we go in on the ground. and my recommendation was that we cannot lose. which i think was the president's thought as well. an hour later i got a phone call , and it was milosevic and the russians in scandinavia, and blows of which -- and milosevic has surrendered. the president took an indoor miss -- took an enormous gamble. he did not have a lot of congressional support, but he believed that we could not allow ethnic cleansing in europe at

the end of the 20th century. and i think he deserves a lot of credit for that. >> nancy i would also love to hear the question where you saw a risk of ground forces all along, or if you thought that was something that really presented itself late in the game? >> let me just jump in on the balkan scenario that said he just laid out, and to me, that was the pinnacle of president clinton recognizing what the right role in the united states was in the post-cold war era was. that action was tell, don't ask, if you remember the ask, don't tell regarding gays in the military fiasco, and so this was a flip, the president of the united states is telling the world that we are going to tell and not ask the world. we came in with europeans taking

the lead partly because they had no dog in this fight comment with secretary baker, but also a new president that did not want to challenge of the bat and there was a probe and they were trying to figure out what works, and we had one fiasco after another, somalia, haiti, bosnia, and nothing seemed to be working, which of course meant sandy was the brunt of the putting green that later explosions of why we are not fixing these problems, but it really came down to not understanding in the early part of the administration what was appropriate use of force and diplomacy as the lone superpower in the world. and the bosnia decision fundamentally changed the way the president uses his powers of office on a foreign policy and what he did was lead so that you had competence -- had confidence from the rest of the world that the united states was on the

right side of history in trying to solve problems, confidence on the part of our partners so that we did not have to do anything alone as a superpower, and it made america a respected power in the world which enabled us to promote our agenda much more easily. to me that was the right role of the united states in the post-cold war air on, and it was more important than fighting the war on terror, i think we got off track on that with some of his successor, but i think that was the turning point in the administration in the two and a half years and then he laid the groundwork for a very successful foreign policy. and you have this card in your packet, and i was just looking at this and thinking that every one of these things was monumentally historic, none of these things would have happened without bill clinton and his legacy.

take some time and ponder this card because every one of those was an enormously difficult thing to achieve and is a very impressive. on your point of ground troops there is no tougher decision that a president has then to decide to send our most treasured resources into harms way -- harm's way. you know some of them are going to die, just in accident, things happen, so it is always dangerous to do that but you have to weigh the benefit for the country and you have to be able to look the mom and dad in the eye and say, look, your son or daughter's life was absolutely worth it, especially when it is not the big bad soviet union that you are combating. is it really worth it to try and feed somalia? is it really worth it to restore aristide to power their?

-- power there? we knew that the soviet union could attack eastern europe, and we could be there, so it took a while for the president to be able to make that case, and it came down to, yes, we actually do have interest in that area, but if we do it, we have leverage with other people. at the end of the presidency, one in 10 soldiers in the balkans was not american, in contrast to after the first term of george w. bush, the numbers are flipped, almost every soldier in iraq was. so he figured a how to leverage diplomacy and leadership to share the burden as well, which made that decision easier. >> general clark? >> you can have a whole conference on civil military relations, but i don't think you could have this situation again

so what i remember from the. was that general powell was the first -- from this period was that general powell was the first commander coming he had benny national security advisor under reagan. he believed in, and we wrote it at the time, in 1983 decisive overwhelming force, and we applied in grenada in 1983, and it later became caspar weinberger's document of overwhelming force, so when these early questions of the use of force came up, general powell and the military, who had just come off a very successful campaign in iraq, the military was lionized, we had 700,000 american soldiers, sailors, and marines in the gulf, it was an overwhelming force, and then now a new present -- president comes

in, he does not have the military behind him, he is a democrat and not a republican, democrats were known as a wishy-washy, so i can only imagine how difficult this problem must have looked to president clinton when he looked down at it. he got a general who really had an appreciation for the difficulties in europe and a man who was incredibly adroit at finding ways to keeping the military supportive of the president's directions. so i saw a lot working under him as he would listen to what the president wanted and then take the military response, whether it was on comprehensive test ban treaty or something else, and move it toward something else toward the president's priorities without damaging the military's interests. when it came to the balkans in

particular this was an anonymous problem in particular, because it europe was not designated as one of the two major theaters of war. the military came out of the gulf war, and we were all geared up to finish the job against saddam hussein, one senior officer said to me, it was the war we wanted to fight. what he told the in september of 1998 he did not want to fight in kosovo or in europe, and i said, chief, where do you want to fight? and he said, iraq, and i said, do we want to fight anywhere, do we? so there was this assumption and sandy was talking about anxiety. first there was this thing about putting peacekeeping forces on the ground in somalia, and there was a joke about real men not doing military operations other than war, they just do real war

and here was the clinton administration and the president directing us to use military force in very unconventional ways. and then came the problem in kosovo, where what started as an air campaign, we could not be sure. as winter approach, we had to have another alternative to sibley sain, g, mr. president, we have run out of targets, and we could just want dirt or surrender -- as winter approach we had to have another alternative to simply saying gee, mr. president, we have run out of targets, so we could just on the dirt, or surrender? so we have to head into comic because this was incredibly difficult politically. >> i want to move this to a

different set of -- >> i want to have a quick,, we have said that there was national unity during the cold war. , but there were also hugely divisive issues -- cold war period but there were also hugely divisive issues, there was also southeast asia and vietnam, it divided american society and divided the aquatic party. -- the democratic party. in the interviews, madeleine albright mentioned that during the reagan and bush administrations, she frequently had dinners at her home with people who worked on democratic campaigns, people who were interested in foreign policy and they talked about what we would do if we were in power. she said the hardest thing for them to agree on was when should we use force? and that is because it is an

inherently difficult issue, that it is also a politically difficult issue for democrats after the vietnam experience. >> it was madeleine albright who famously confronted general powell on the question, what is the point of having such a great army if you never use it right? >> that is the question, and i think after the cold war, it was more polarizing, because there was a huge move on the isolationism and the economy was very weak, and nobody understood in a broader public why we couldn't just put up the walls and come home and rebuild america. and i think one of the toughest challenges that president clinton did brilliantly was explain why it had to involve u.s. leadership in meeting these challenges or american prosperity would suffer. >> i think we need to pull the spec to bill clinton, which is why we are here, president --

poll this back to bill clinton which is why we are here. president clinton did not serve in the military, and more importantly, he had been opposed to the vietnam war. he protested the war. during the campaign, he was called a draft dodger in new hampshire. so he comes into office, from the military's point of view, quite suspect. and he knows that very well. and he very deliberately embarks upon a systematic effort to win the confidence of the military. this has some relevance today. i won't be any more precise than that. [laughter] during the 80 years -- the eight

years, he visited 100 military sites, bases parades submarines, almost every place that we went militarily. at almost no point when we committed forces, did he not go over to the pentagon, and sit in the tank where the generals make decisions for three hours or four hours and listen to every general present their view of things. he invited the commanders to the white house for dinner. for social occasions. over time, first they begin to like him, and then they begin to respect him, and he made some decisions that they realize were hard decisions to make. he decided not to accept the land mine, which was very controversy all because the

military said we had no alternative in korea, so he said find an alternative over the next 10 years, and i won't sign. the decisions certainly bosnia and cozumel, they were respected very much. by the second term he was very highly regarded by military leadership and across the board. >> i should have said a while ago that cards and pens have been distributed. please start submitting your own questions. so far we covered bosnia. it surfaced a lot of interesting tehmes -- themes about the use of force. it would be interesting to hear you all talk about whether the pendulum has swung too far. i would like to move to another area in a potentially different

set of themes were the clinton administration was not necessarily reacting to a crii sis. i would love to hear you compare ireland and middle east, and whether -- the facts are vastly different in the two cases, but can you distill some hallmarks of bill clinton's approach to making peace in those two cases that would serve as a case study , and what was the difference in the end? why did it work in one case and not in the other? >> both are possible. in the middle east, he inherited a process that had begun a few years earlier with the madrid conference, where the plo and

israelis had gotten together on their own and launched what was supposed to be a 10-year process. they made some progress, and when they got at some point where they were addressing existentialism defining israel, we are defining houston hands -- palestinians' right of return, they got lots. the president personally got deeply involved. the president was george mitchell in the middle east. by the time we get to camp david, the end of the administration, the president is on the ground looking at maps with arafat and barack, talking about whether it's alignment

between five miles in this direction, how would that work. it was completely up to his eyeballs because the leadership would only deal with him. barack and arafat would only deal with him. from their perspective, it had to come from the president of the united states. he'd won their complete confidence. a lot of history behind that rabin, etc. we got quite close at camp david. what happened at camp david was the contours of an agreement were shaped. if there ever is an agreement it will be along the lines of camp david.

he made some comments in the campaign which were forward-leaning. nancy begins one of her "why not" campaigns on northern ireland, and he makes a decision to give a visa to gerry adams. it was associated with the ira. >> do you mind if i pause you? >> one of the interesting things that is the way bill clinton thought about people, they were easily dismissed as bad guys and could have been locked out. he conferred a great deal of legitimacy. >> is overall -- his overall view was that part of his role

as a great power, a country with substantial power, was to try to get people and governments to give up old grievances and move to common ground and i think you could see that across a wide range. he said it in dairy -- derry which is a city in northern ireland -- huge rally. ask the question, do you want to live your life around what you are against or what you are for? it's the same question he asked yeltin -- yeltsin, the same question he asked frequently.

sinclair should he asked of milosevic -- same question he asked of milosevic. we are in the unique position to try to get people to break out of their old patterns and moved to a different place. >> just to follow up on that point in the beginning of the obama administration round on the middle east and i've worked closely with these middle eastern actors, palestinian and israeli, in more iterations than i care to a knowledge at this point, but i am. i think one of the things that is unique about president clinton possibility -- clinton's ability is the ability to work

so directly with these individuals and be able to make each of them feel like he absolutely knows what they are going through. in the all politics is local, he knows their political dilemmas as well, and he can figure out -- help them figure out what their political roots might be. that is part of each of them -- the pluses and minuses, each of them feeling they need to deal only and directly with him. so certainly in the middle east, with the palestinians and israelis and obviously he's a genius at figuring out the roots for them. the one amendment i make, to sandy's point it was six months post-camp david that we really got countours at a speech that clinton gave in 2001. if you can look back to what he

laid out now in terms of talking about basic parameters for what would be the scope of solutions between israelis and palestinians. i think that president clinton being able to not only figure out how to bridge the gap for anybody's politics that anybody is in any given situation and get it right, but have the other guy or the other gal know that he can do that, and feel that degree of confidence about it in these incredibly precarious situations where literally their lives are at stake if the politics aren't right. that is what is called for in these situations. the challenge for israeli-palestinian stuff is that is what is called for plus a whole lot more. >> i would add one final point to that.

the role of the united states in both of these conflicts or almost any peace process is to be the honest broker between the two. the trust is so broken down between the two that they don't hear what they are saying, even if the other side is telling them something new and different and bold, they don't believe it or trusted. i can't tell you the number of times in the irish peace process were the british would call me and say, can you guarantee that gerry adams will do x? i said no, but this is what he told us. gerry adams the same thing, can you guarantee me the british will do this? no. and the same with the palestinians. the trust building that has so deteriorated in these conflict situations that only the united states can provide, and bill clinton, in spades. [indiscernible] >> president clinton's

negotiating style -- first of all, having sat through innumerable negotiations, he is absolutely calm and steady through these negotiations and no matter what the provocation is in circumstances where i would have thrown the lamp, and he uses an outburst of anger very strategically. therefore, it has a huge effect. at camp david at one point, the palestinians put on the table some maps, then took a step back -- that took a step back. he picked up the papers and said, you expect me to waste my time, if you are going to go backwards?

he walked out the door. it shook up negotiations. the other thing i have seen a lot, to keep a dialogue going so it states their point of view -- i agree that that empowers people to keep the conversation going. it doesn't mean you've got a deal, it's a way of unappealing where they are coming from. >> can i ask members to speculate, what would have happen if rabin had not been killed? >> there would be peace now. >> the night that rabin was

killed, that young man knew exactly what he was doing. >> a good segue to a question from the audience, and i'm afraid this may be the only one we have time for but it's a very good question, addressed to you, general clark. the questioner thanks you for your extraordinary service and ask, speak to your sense in the 1990's about the islamic fundamentalist threat that has so dominated our foreign policy post-9/11. was today's situation imaginable? >> we saw the threat from osama bin laden early on and we put an effort out to get osama bin laden, but there are other terrorist forces in the world at the time that towards the same as osama bin laden. there were palestinian

terrorists, intuition islamic jihad, people in albania that were terrorists, iranian terrorists in bosnia. it had not coalesced quite as clearly as it has today. when i look at it today, what i feel like is when we invaded iraq in 2003, we basically unleashed a much clearer demarcation that coupled sectarian rivalries in islam with great power rivalries in the middle east, and used terrorism as the weapon. when it comes down to now is when you talk to people in the middle east, the only ones who are willing to fight and die are terrorists so they are being used for state purposes in the middle east. i did not see that at the time.

we upped the intelligence collection. we struck back, but we also improved our defenses. we knew a lot about what was happening in the 1990's. that was from the military perspective. sandy and nancy and mark can you do a better perspective from the presidential level of what this looked like. >> the president, it was in 1995 that he called terrorism the defining threats of our times and there were a number of actions, missile strikes in 1998 . to get bin laden, you parked submarine's office pakistan -- submarines off pakistan. there was a frustration that you were not able to do more. john harrison's biography of bill clinton says that you sent

him a memo towards the end of the presidency summarizing all the steps taken against al qaeda , and it came back with his scrawl at the top saying unsatisfactory. there is the sense that you get that you guys were trying, but you could not get the government to focus on this threat. >> at the point where our embassies were bombed in africa mozambique, and angola, this really did become a priority. and we were seriously focused on it. we had very good cooperation for the agency and fbi.

we build a lot of things across the board to try to find and destroy bin laden. i could go through and recite them. we had some limitations. there were no drones, for example. think about what role drones play. we were trying to find somebody someplace in afghanistan. we often do where he had been. he moved around a lot. we rarely knew where he was. we started a drone program, but that wasn't available to us. it was very frustrating. we stopped a lot of terrorists' incidents in the united states

but it was the most frustrating thing to me when i left during the transition period. i said to condy rice, terrorism generally and al qaeda specifically is the number one issue you are going to have to deal with. when we did all the briefings of issues the only one i attended was this one to emphasize how important it is. we did not succeed. obviously after 9/11, everything changed. the resources that were applied to this exploded. it was very frustrating. >> even after the resources had tripled, even under our

administration -- >> is hard to catch one man -- it's hard to catch one man. it took us a decade to find and kill bin laden. president clinton got the terrorist threat through everything he had at it. the only way he could've stopped 9/11 would have been to invade afghanistan. it was inching towards that way, given the defiance of the taliban, handed it over to the next administration, which stopped the ball. -- dropped the ball. >> it wasn't part of your theory the middle east peacemaking would help draw the poison? >> 9/11 was planned when bill clinton was putting his entire presidency in to try to solve the palestinian-israeli conflict. that is a handy narrative that helps recruits, but it's not the recruit cause of 9/11. >> let me go back and look at this from a longer perspective.

when the united states became an energy-importing oil-importing country, and even before that, when we made the agreement with saudi arabia that we would provide for their security provided they took care of the world oil markets and made sure we were taken care of we have been through a lot of ups and downs in the saudi relationship. none of us at the time would have foreseen how far and how damaging the spread of extremist thought has been, and what the consequences have been today. this will be an enormous study fraught with all kinds of nasty politics as we go back through it. i'm talking not during the clinton administration. i'm talking from years before, and the responses to 9/11.

have we made the problem worse, did we actually feed this monster year after year after year because now when we watch the news today, what we see is that not only is isis using the saudi philosophy, it was funded in part by saudi leadership, and now it is heading right towards the saudi royal family. it is a bizarre turn of events. >> with one minute left to do an unfair thing, i would like to hear each of you use the few seconds to try to define the legacy here of bill clinton's foreign policy. i will throw it to you. >> i think president clinton tried to use the power the united states had at this moment to end old conflicts

and move people away from old grievances, to a more peaceful coexistence, and i think he understood globalization and tried to harness it for america's benefit and deal with its darker side. >> i think president clinton took advantage of a window of opportunity builds on technology, his own personal study and experiences, and his leadership ability, to really open up the world for growth and prosperity, but he did it in a way when he used american power that was -- that acknowledged other people's humanity.

it acknowledged the diversity and it had a humility about it which offset at least, to most people around the world the extraordinary fact of america's emergence as a global superpower. >> i would say that at a time when it was very much open to question president clinton answered with certainty that the united states was going to lead alone where we needed to, but together with the rest of the world everywhere that we could. >> i would echo the previous three. he understood the power of the american ideal leadership, economic, military and moral and knew how to deploy and leverage it to make america and the world safer. in segue to the next panel, this sounds like a cliche, but he really does bleed that the --

believe that the foreign and economic policy are two sides of the same coin. all the did on trade rebuilding the united states, without america's home, it can't lead abroad. he brought all that together brilliantly. >> do you think he succeeded to that degree? >> i think so. i briefly worked in university administration, which is nothing like national leadership -- >> harder, if i remember. >> the facts -- advice i was given, no matter what you do, the faculty will hate you. do what is right. and the clinton administration if you look at the list of things i got right -- haiti bosnia, kosovo, we did not even mention the mexican currency

bailout -- lots of issues not everyone, but lots of issues came out well. >> thank you very much to our panel. [applause] [captioning performed by the national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] >> every sunday at 8:00 p.m. and midnight eastern, learn from leading historians about presidents and first ladies, their policies and legacies here on "the presidency." to watch our programs or check our schedule, visit www.c-span.org/history. you are watching american history tv, every weekend on c-span3. >> the political landscape has changed with the 114th congress. not only are