Stanford in Government and the ASSU Speakers Bureau deserve credit for landing a very solid performance by this year’s spring speaker, Gen. Wesley Clark (ret.). The 2004 presidential hopeful’s speech brought attention to important issues that will need to be addressed in the 2008 election.

After warming up the crowd with an anecdote about why he liked the enthusiasm of Stanford students and saying he was looking forward to a dialogue, Clark began by discussing his time in the military, and the loss of purpose that he said affected the armed forces after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The military was still searching for a strategy in the post-Cold War world, Clark said, and was unready to adjust to crises in Haiti and the Balkans. In his mind, these earlier struggles were roots of some of the issues encountered in Iraq today, and the military still needs to be revised and recharged.

In the case of Rwanda, Clark said, the military could not act at all, but not because it was lacking capacity. In a revealing moment, Clark bitterly recalled how he was commissioned to write a plan for deploying troops into Rwanda while serving as a strategic planning official in the Pentagon, only to be told by his commander that it was politically impossible. “That’s haunted me,” he said, adding that the experienced helped fuel his commitment to taking action in Darfur. Clark currently serves on the board of the International Crisis Group, one of the main advocates for international intervention in the Sudanese genocide. When asked what he would do to resolve the situation, he nailed the response, declaring that he’d have already deployed NATO troops on the ground.

In what seemed to be the more formulaic, campaign part of the speech, Clark outlined a three-tiered plan for the future of the United States. He highlighted the need to get out of Iraq gracefully in order to rebuild U.S. legitimacy, invest in healthcare and education to keep the U.S. competitive, and start rebuilding international institutions and relationships with allies that have been damaged.

Perhaps Clark’s most important message — and one worth taking to heart — is that “we’re going to solve the national security question.” In other words, Al-Qaeda is not the existential threat to the U.S. that the Bush administration has portrayed. The United States was able not only to survive, he argued, but to prosper during the Cold War decades that saw thousands of nuclear missiles aimed at the country every day. “We weren’t petrified by it, we weren’t cowed by it, we weren’t intimidated by it,” he said. Acknowledging terrorism as a challenge, Clark argued that paranoia is unhelpful and unnecessary. “We’ve lived five years under the threat of fear, and the threat has been manipulated.”

Even if Clark is not ultimately a presidential hopeful this cycle, the other candidates would do well to integrate some of his points into their own campaign platforms. He may not have the massive fundraising necessary to be a serious candidate, but the Rhodes Scholar and decorated former general is worth listening to closely. If nothing else, Clark’s speech at Stanford showed that any eventual winner, from either party, could benefit from his advice.