AMY GOODMAN: That was NATO leader and Democratic candidate for President, General Wesley Clark. The bombing, of course, ordered by President Clinton. Sidney Blumenthal, your response, and then we'll take it forward to Iraq and possibly future attacks like Iran. Go ahead.

SID BLUMENTHAL: Well, Wes Clark appears to have the most knowledge about the details. He was the commander responsible, and his account, undoubtedly, is accurate there.

AMY GOODMAN: Norman Solomon.

NORMAN SOLOMON: In my book, War Made Easy, I quote some dispatches from Serbia as a result of the U.S.-led NATO bombing that took place, and I think a couple of brief ones are germane. The San Francisco Chronicle reporting: “In a street leading from the market, dismembered bodies were strewn among carrots and other vegetables in pools of blood, a dead woman, her body covered with a sheet, was still clutching a shopping bag filled with carrots.” And then reporting from Belgrade, the BBC correspondent John Simpson said, quote, “Used against human beings, cluster bombs are some of the most savage weapons of the modern warfare.” Just again raises the perennial question: Are we going to have a single standard of decency coming out of the White House, no matter what the party of the President?

AMY GOODMAN: Norman Solomon, you just came back from Iran.

NORMAN SOLOMON: Yeah, I fear, based on the evidence, that there's agenda building underway for ratcheting up pressure on Iran. I believe while the U.S. military is stretched in terms of personnel, it's quite plausible to believe that a missile attack could be forthcoming in the next 12 or 18 months. And I'm really concerned that there's a kind of an exceptionalism that's been carved out by many leading Democrats that what happened in the attack in Iraq was unusual and extraordinary and that the baseline of justifying missile strikes and other military attacks could come into play, and so I guess it all boils down to again: Will members of Congress and the Democratic Party and others at the grassroots -- how will they respond to an attack on Iran? Are they willing now, and I wonder if my co-guest here, Sid Blumenthal, would be willing to say straight out, clearly now, we are opposed to a U.S. missile strike on Iran?

AMY GOODMAN: Sidney Blumenthal?

SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL: I think that would, obviously, it would be very counter productive, and furthermore, I don't think that it could ever really get to -- if -- if Iran is developing nuclear weapons and using its nuclear capacity to do so, it would have -- the justification for bombing is in itself self-undermining, because we don't know where everything is.

AMY GOODMAN: What about --

SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL: So you could bomb, and you wouldn't necessarily find anything. I think that there are other problems -- and I think this is all very, very, very speculative.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me --

SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL: Nor do I think these are the principle issues facing us on Iran right now. I think principle issues are our continued involvement with the European Union negotiators with Iran in keeping Iran within the confines of the N.P.T., the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

AMY GOODMAN: Sid Blumenthal, let me end the show with now. Are you for an immediate pullout of U.S. troops from Iraq?

SIDNEY BLUMENTHAL: Am I for it? My views on this are utterly irrelevant. No one would ever take them seriously. I think that there's -- I think that U.S. policymakers on this matter need to consider whether or not the U.S. occupation itself is a source of much of the problem in Iraq right now.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, just this point, which is what the whole conversation has revolved around: Did the Democrats enable the Republicans to do this in Iraq? The issue of weapons of mass destruction; the Presidential election of 2004, where the leading Democratic candidate, the Presidential Democratic candidate, John Kerry, even after it was exposed there were no WMDs, said if he knew then what he knew now, he would still vote to authorize the invasion.

NORMAN SOLOMON: Well, it goes to the point of that you can’t be against militarism effectively on Tuesdays, Thursday and alternate Saturdays or depending on the way the polls run. And I want to note that a few years ago it was considered and proclaimed to be speculative – we were told that it was speculative that there might be an attack on Iraq, and we see what happened.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there. I thank you both for spending the hour. Norman Solomon, author of War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, and Sidney Blumenthal, former senior advisor to President Clinton, his book called The Clinton Wars.

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