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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
The former president blasts the Bush-Cheney rush to war, explains why Gore lost in 2000 and tells how Kerry can win in 2004.
Jun 25, 2004 | At several points in "My Life," Bill Clinton chastises himself appropriately for the reckless selfishness and dishonesty of his affair with Monica Lewinsky. He writes that he was disgusted by his own misconduct and appalled by the consequences to his family, friends, his country and his reputation.
None of this should come as news to the media, which has devoted ample attention to that episode and its aftermath for the past six years.
Yet publication of his exhaustive memoir has been treated as the occasion to renew that same old obsession while matters of substance are neglected or ignored. "Everything has changed" since Sept. 11, or so the portentous slogan goes, but some things haven't changed at all.
As might be expected, Clinton is less preoccupied with the subject of sex than Oprah, Larry King, and Michiko Kakutani. He is perfectly willing to address other questions, including those for which he has no glib reply.
On Thursday afternoon, he spoke with Salon about his administration's "inexcusable" failure to intervene militarily against the 1994 genocide, which cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and about his own responsibility for the rise of a "dangerous" Republican hegemony in Washington. But he also had remarkably harsh words for the Bush administration's dubious claims about Iraq, the "broken pottery" left by its unilateral foreign policy and the president's curious nonchalance about the exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame. He was frank about why he thinks Al Gore won but lost the 2000 campaign ("The NRA ... hurt us bad") and what John Kerry has to do to win in November.
For a man often accused of worrying too much and too publicly about his legacy, the former president sounds relaxed and confident. While he confesses to lapses of wisdom and courage, he cannot quite conceal the sense that almost every day, the extremism and incompetence of the Bush administration make his controversial tenure look better by contrast. After years of mostly refraining from overt criticism of his successor, Clinton evidently feels free to be more candid from now on. If his book tour offers his political adversaries a fresh opportunity to attack him, it also provides him a national platform to speak his mind about them.
"We were in better shape when I left office than we are now," he said. He was talking about the number of Americans who lack health insurance -- but the unavoidable inference went much further.
Al Gore gave a speech in Washington Thursday about the Bush administration's attempts to link Iraq and al-Qaida. Do you agree with him that the administration misled the country about those alleged links?
The whole time I was there [in the White House], I knew of no links. Now, I don't think you can say for sure that there was never an al-Qaida member that was inside Iraq, but in terms of them being operational partners, I didn't know anything about that. I also never had any doubt that Iraq was not behind 9/11, because they didn't have the terrorist capacity to do it.
I supported -- as the whole world did -- resuming the weapons inspections inside Iraq, for a simple reason. When any kind of tyranny is running out of steam -- as Iraq seemed to be -- I was afraid if they still did have any of those chemical or biological agents, somebody might sell them or give them away, or they might be stolen. But in terms of [Iraq and al-Qaida] working together, I never saw any evidence of it. And I have not seen any evidence since -- from what's been in the press -- that supports that contention. And apparently the 9/11 commission doesn't agree [with the allegation that Iraq worked with al-Qaida] either.
Now I hear Vice President Cheney continuing to assert that there is a connection, but there's a difference between assertion and evidence. If they have some kind of evidence, they can come forward with it, but I haven't seen any yet.
The administration and its supporters have often cited statements from you and your administration about Saddam Hussein's regime to justify the decision to go to war in Iraq. I have heard you say recently that the invasion was too precipitous -- and that the president should have waited until the inspections were completed, at least. Do you believe the war was justified?
Well, I believed at the time that it was far more important to win a complete victory in Afghanistan, do everything we could to try to find Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida's leadership, and help Hamid Karzai be the president of the whole country and not just Kabul. Now it seems to be moving in the right direction anyway because Karzai has proved to be a very able man and because we beefed up our support a little bit and the rest of the world came in a little bit. I thought at the time that we should take care of our Afghan obligations first. I thought it was curious -- given who did 9/11 and what the big terrorist threat was -- that we were sending 150,000 troops to Iraq and had only between 12,000 and 15,000 in Afghanistan.
But Paul Wolfowitz always had a theory that if they got rid of Saddam Hussein they could build a democracy in the Middle East that would shake up the other authoritarian Arab regimes, and that would give them greater leverage in making peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis. The only legal justification they had for going to war was Saddam Hussein's failure to comply with the U.N. resolutions [requiring his regime to destroy its illicit arsenal].
And I didn't see how we had triggered that by substituting our judgment for that of [chief U.N. weapons inspector] Hans Blix. If Blix had said this guy won't cooperate, he's bad, and we ought to take him out, then I would have favored military action. But had that happened, then whether the Security Council voted for it or not, we would have had many more allies and far fewer enemies, and no one would have thought we had a different agenda.
