Retired U.S. Army Gen. Wesley Clark said at his lecture Tuesday night that the college-age generation faces three major problem areas with America in the future: the continuing war on terrorism, the economy and the environment.
At the Issues Committee-sponsored talk in the Alumni Memorial Building’s Cox Auditorium, in regards to the economy, Clark compared his generation’s approach to going into the job market with the modern mentality of entering the workforce.
“When I was a young person and getting out of college, everybody automatically expected they’d do better than their parents, but today I find young people going back to live with their parents after they finish college,” Clark said.
While America excels at building military equipment, Clark said the nation should focus more on building wind turbines, industrial equipment and electric automobiles in order to bolster the economy.
“Any of these things we could be good at,” Clark said. “We are the most ingenious, technically confident, savvy people in the world. There’s $2 trillion dollars of money sitting in Wall Street, waiting to invest in American companies. They can’t find a way to make a profit, and it’s going to China or Vietnam or Brazil.”
He said if America does not produce, the country will not create jobs.
“All of us cannot have work as shipping clerks at Wal-Mart,” he said.
As it pertains to the environment, Clark said that, regardless of local feelings about the weather, global warming persists.
“2009 was the second-warmest year on record, despite the fact that our part of the country — yours and mine — we got a lot of rain and a fairly cold summer,” he said.

Military strategy

Taking a stand against the war in Iraq, Clark questioned why America’s deterrence strategy during the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s, which he cited as successful in winning the Cold War against the Soviet Union, was abandoned afterward.
“I was a three-star general back in the 1990s,” he said. “I came to Washington, and there was no strategy. We didn’t know why we had a military. We didn’t know whether there was any threat at all.”
With no strategy, Clark helped to write one, which took about 18 months to complete after revisions and approvals.
“It was called, ‘Engagement and Enlargement,’” Clark said. “If you read the title, you probably thought it was an advertisement for a men’s pharmaceutical product.”
But Clark said the strategy never caught on, which caused hysteria in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“The media was beating the drum for the invasion of Iraq,” he said.
While some reported that perhaps weapons of mass destruction did not exist or perhaps there was another course of action besides the war in Iraq, Clark said these stories were largely ignored by those reporters’ peers in the press.
Likewise, Clark suggested the nation back away from the war in Afghanistan.
“You can’t kill enough people in Afghanistan under the current operation to defeat your enemies,” he said. “It’s a nation of 31 million people, and we have 100,000 troops there, and we’re trying not to kill people. And that’s not our part of the world.”

Infantry in the audience

In the question-and-answer session after the speech, Carlos Diaz, a Ph.D student at UT, said, as an infantry officer in 2004 as the nation eyed the war in Iraq, he faced an ethical dilemma.
“I made a moral decision, as an infantry officer,” he said. “I couldn’t do my job in a country that didn’t attack us on Sept. 11, (2001).”
He asked why more in the military did not take a similar stand and speak out. Clark said the military was not allowed to, and military personnel might feel uncertainty about questioning authority on moral decisions in the Army.
Clark reiterated that his generation is now passing on the three major problems the country faces — the war on terror, the economy and the environment — to the next generation.
“None of these is a simple problem,” he said. “My generation gave it all to you. Your generation, you got to fix it.”