It was an error to have
attacked Iraq before the completion of UN weapons inspection
– Clinton
By Sun News
Tuesday, July 13, 2004
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Bill Clinton
Photo by Sun News Publishing |
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First of all, thank you very much for joining us on CNN.
I want to ask you first about Iraq. In one of your farewell
interviews as president you told an interviewer that one of
your most difficult and challenging issues as president was
Iraq.
A quote, I think, "The most difficult thing, the hardest
decision was making the decision when to bomb and when not
to bomb in Iraq."
In retrospect, do you wish you had mustered a large invasion
force like President Bush? And, if not, do you think the threat
you faced from Iraq is any different than the threat that
President Bush faced from Iraq?
The answer to the first question is no. I basically believe
that the policy that I inherited, which was to keep Saddam
Hussein in a box and under sanctions, unless and until he
fully complied with all the U.N. resolutions, was the right
policy. It wasn't so great for the Iraqis, but he didn't present
a substantial threat to anyone else. That's my belief based
on the intelligence that I saw.
I have no way of knowing how much of his weapons of mass destruction
capacity was destroyed when the U.K. and the U.S. bombed him
for four days in '98. But I think, I'm satisfied that we did
the right thing.
I think that after the [Persian] Gulf War it was a mistake
to leave the Marsh Arabs, the Shiites in the southeast of
Iraq, unprotected, and I think the international coalition
made a mistake to do that. But I don't believe I made a mistake
not to invade him. I think that we had more pressing security
priorities. And we didn't have at the time an effective opposition.
And there was certainly no international support for doing
that.
Do you think the threat currently, or in the last two years,
is any different than the threat you faced?
I don't, I have no information that would support that it
is, but I don't, you know, I haven't seen any intelligence
in the last three years, so I don't know about that.
I know what I know -- it seems to be hotly disputed what Vice
President [Dick] Cheney alleges and what others allege. I
can only tell you that when September 11, occurred and the
President went back to the United Nations to ask for a resolution
which essentially said, Iraq has got to open up for weapons
inspections again, I strongly supported that, because there
was a substantial amount of botulinim, aflotoxin, VX and ricin
unaccounted for. That, I want to be very careful about the
language. We didn't know they had it or not. We just knew
that at the time the inspectors were kicked out in '98 it
was unaccounted for.
So I thought the inspections should start again. So, apparently,
did everyone in the world. Everybody voted for that. Then
I thought the Congress was on solid ground in giving the president
the authority to use force because it was represented that
the force would be used if Saddam Hussein did not cooperate.
Then we launched the attack before the U.N. inspections were
through. That, I thought, was an error.
But they had other reasons for wanting to overthrow Saddam,
they thought he was an inherent threat to the region. They
thought if we could have a representative, pluralistic government
in Iraq, it would destabilize and force change in other autocratic
regimes in the Middle East and that it might even help us
make peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians.
That's what the Bush people thought. And so now, it seems
to me we all have a stake in the success of the enterprise.
And do you believe given where it is right now, that peace
in the Middle East, as you just mentioned, leads through Baghdad?
No.
Or indeed ...
I think peace in the Middle East leads through resolving the
differences between the Palestinians and the Israelis. And
giving the Israelis a rock-solid guarantee of security and
normal relations with its neighbors and giving the Palestinians
their own country on the West Bank and Gaza with their capital
in the eastern part of Jerusalem as we provided before in
the peace proposal I made. And giving an economic future to
the Palestinians who are so poor there. And who've been oppressed
for so long.
I think that that will do more than anything else to reduce
the impulse of terror around the world and especially in the
region, and give the Middle East a peaceful future.
I'm going to come back to the Middle East, but I want to ask
you another question on Iraq. You intervened eventually in
Bosnia, and early in Kosovo, to stop a genocide. And the war
was also coupled with a very robust postwar plan with very
heavy, armored, U.S.-led military forces and a political plan.
Given the instability in Iraq, past the formal war there,
what do you think could and should have been done differently
to stabilize Iraq in much the same way as either Bosnia or
Kosovo were after the war?
Well, first we had a very different situation, because NATO
wasn't with us in Iraq, and the Russians didn't come into
Iraq. Keep in mind the Russians nominally opposed what we
in NATO did in both Bosnia and Kosovo, but they knew we were
right, and they came in and helped us with the postwar planning.
So, we lost a lot of soldiers there after the mission was
declared accomplished in Iraq. Hundreds of them.
And it made [former Army Chief of Staff] General [Eric] Shinseki,
whose military career was cut short because he committed candor
in testifying that we needed more troops before the Congress,
it made General Shinseki look like a seer. Like he knew what
he was predicting. So you can say we needed more troops there.
But it was a constant to and fro, because we had other troops
in other places in the rest of the world. We already were
down to 15,000 troops in Afghanistan, which is clearly not
enough for us with any confidence to look like we're going
to help stabilize the whole country or find bin Laden or his
top lieutenants. So we got 15,000 there, and 140,000 or more
in Iraq already.
I think the main thing is we should have moved more quickly
to internationalize it. And that would have required us early
on letting the United Nations have a say in the political
decisions, opening the contracts up to people other than Americans
and their allies, and just basically trying to say, "OK,
Saddam's gone, we need everybody's help to make it right."
That is what's going on now, and so I say again, whether I
agree with everything that's been done or not, all Americans
and just about everybody in the world has a stake now in the
success of this Iraqi enterprise.
And President Bush has gone back to the U.N. now, we do have
a U.N. resolution. And I hope that once we show good faith
in the United States, if we show good faith in observing sovereignty,
giving up monopoly on contracts, working with the U.N., I
think in due time, perhaps not before very long, we could
get more help from the NATO allies.
You think that will happen? Because there's nothing been forthcoming.
I think it will happen if they see that we're serious. That,
you know, it's a sharing thing. Look at Bosnia and Kosovo,
where we carried the lion's share of the military load during
the conflict, because we had the capability to do it. But
they were with us.
Then, when we moved into the peacekeeping phase of Bosnia
and Kosovo, we assumed a minority role because they had the
ability to do that, our allies. So I think that we can use
this to re-establish the vitality of NATO. We've trained a
lot of these NATO forces for these kinds of missions now.
I think we can get it back once we show good faith.
I just think right now that the politics between the United
States and some of these European countries is so bad. Not
just so much in the leaders but just the people in the streets
-- you know it better than I do, you cover it all the time.
We just need to let some time pass, let the European public
as well as the leaders see that the United States has moved
away from unilateralism in Iraq, and that it's a legitimate,
pluralistic government. And we need their help and want their
help. I think that we'll get it.
You brought it up, I was going to ask you later: America has
become very much feared and loathed in many parts of the world,
not among the usual suspects but among people who are usually
America's friends and who want to like America. What needs
to be done to stop that very dangerous state of affairs?
Well, in our country the popular assumption is that it's all
about Iraq. And it's not all about Iraq. I think most everybody
in the world understands that most Americans were more hawkish
on Iraq than they were. Including me -- I mean we bombed them
two or three times. We always worried more about Saddam Hussein
than they did.
But what made the Iraq thing so bitterly controversial was
that it occurred in the aftermath of September 11, when the
whole world wanted to be with us. And they wanted America
to lead a more united world in a united front against terror
and a united front to make a world with more partners and
fewer terrorists. It was a phenomenal opportunity. And instead
we chose the path of unilateralism, not just in Iraq.
We got out of the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto
Climate Change Treaty, the antiballistic-missile treaty, before
we knew our missile defenses would work. We got out of the
comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty regime, which every
Republican president since Eisenhower was for. Every president,
both parties.
Something almost no Americans know: we changed the nuclear
doctrine of the United States. Ever since World War II we
had never said we might use nuclear weapons first. Now the
new nuclear doctrine is we are trying to develop two small
nuclear weapons, one for battle, one to break underground
bunkers. And we might use them first. Even though it's already
been conceded that if we had dropped such a bunker buster
on Baghdad it would have taken out half the city.
So Americans need to understand that it's not just about Iraq,
it's about an attitude. They think now, the rest of the world
thinks that we are gonna act and do whatever we want, whatever
we can, and cooperate only when we have to, when we have tried
every other alternative. And that's what has got us in trouble.
We would have been treated, I think, much more differently
on Iraq if it hadn't been for all the rest of this unilateralism.
It's the cumulative impact that's alienated a lot of the world.
To be continued
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