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Monday, June 21, 2004

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  “[I] thought the president had an absolute responsibility to go to the U.N. and say, ‘Look, guys, after 9/11, you have got to demand that Saddam Hussein lets us finish the inspection process.’ You couldn’t responsibly ignore [the possibility that] a tyrant had these stocks,” Clinton disclosed in the interview – part of the media blitz hyping his new book “My Life,” due out Tuesday.

Clinton added that Bush’s first priority was to keep al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks from obtaining “chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material.”

“That’s why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for,” Clinton said, referring to U.N. weapons inspectors leaving the country in 1998.

"I never really thought” Hussein would use his weapons but did worry that Iraqi weapons might be sold or given away, Clinton added.

Clinton also opined to Time that President Bush was under the sway of Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz:

"We went in there because he bought the Wolfowitz-Cheney analysis that the Iraqis would be better off, we could shake up the authoritarian Arab regimes in the Middle East, and our leverage to make peace between the Palestinians and Israelis would be increased.”

As to whether the war has been worth the cost:

The results have been mixed so far, he said. “I think right now, getting rid of Saddam’s tyranny, ironically, has made Iraq more vulnerable to terrorism coming from in the outside. But any open society is going to be more vulnerable than any tyranny to that.”

“I want it to have been worth it, even though I didn’t agree with the timing of the attack,” Clinton added.

As to the Abu Ghraib prison abuses, Clinton blamed that on poorly trained National Guard personnel and higher-ups in the Bush administration, saying he was not surprised by the abuses committed by U.S. forces at Abu Ghraib but that he was surprised by their extent.

“There is no excuse for that,” Clinton said. “The more we learn about it, the more it seems that some people fairly high up, at least, thought that this was the way it ought to be done.... No. 1, we can’t pull stunts like that, and No. 2, when we do, whoever is responsible has to pay.”

Editor's note: