You've said that Prime Minister Tony Blair was caught in a dilemma between our government's position on Iraq and the European viewpoint, and that he understandably tried to maximize his leverage with his decision to go forward with President Bush ...

Remember that Blair first tried to pass another [Security Council] resolution that the Bush administration didn't want. He tried to get a resolution through that would have extended the inspection time by another four to six weeks. The Chileans and the Mexicans in the end decided not to vote for it because they thought the Russians would veto it anyway ...

But did Blair make the right decision in the end?

I think he made the decision he thought was right. You know, I'm not the British prime minister. He believed, as I did, that there was at least a strong chance that there were some chemical and biological stocks still there. We didn't know how much we had destroyed in the 1998 bombing. He believed that having gone as far as he did, to turn around and go back to the continental European position would have undermined his ability over the long run to maintain the transatlantic alliance. I think that's what he was thinking -- and I think it was a defensible position given the fact that the Bush administration played such a hard hand and he couldn't get anybody to vote for his U.N. resolution. He had two bad alternatives ...

What I thought the evidence showed was apparently different from what they thought, too. To me, the evidence was more limited than what Vice President Cheney said. There were unaccounted-for stocks of chemical and biological agents; a few unaccounted-for missiles that could be loaded with chemical and biological agents; and some quite limited laboratory capacity to do very preliminary work toward nuclear weapons. That's what we knew. I never knew of any yellowcake from Niger or any of that stuff.

My view was that it would be good if we could account for all that. And if we had a corollary benefit of installing a more representative, less tyrannical government in Iraq, that would be a good thing. But I thought we didn't want to start the doctrine of preventive war there, because we had a lot of fish to fry with bin Laden and al-Qaida and Afghanistan.

My view was somewhere, I guess, between where Al Gore's was and where Bush and Blair were. I never liked Saddam Hussein and I wasn't sure he didn't have some of that chemical and biological weaponry left. So I was left without a home for my policy when Hans Blix wasn't allowed to finish his job. Blix was plainly an honest and competent man who wasn't rolling over for Saddam Hussein. He was tough on the Iraqis when they didn't help him. He tried to totally play it straight.

Speaking of yellowcake, how would you have handled the "outing" of a CIA agent such as Valerie Plame Wilson by officials in your administration? Do you think that Bush's response was adequate?

Well, I'm not sure what he did. I would have done my best to find out who did it, fire them, and make sure they had to live with the consequences ... I know Joe Wilson. He was a career diplomat, a straight-up professional guy who did a lot of valuable work for me and for America in Africa. What happened to his wife was unforgivable as well as illegal -- and potentially dangerous, and damaging to our intelligence networks. And it plainly came from someone who didn't like the fact that Joe didn't give the accepted line [on Iraq]. So it's hard for me to believe they can't find out who outed her. And I would have gone to extraordinary lengths to find that out, and then taken the appropriate steps.

In your book, you describe the American and allied failure to intervene in Rwanda in 1994 as one of your worst errors. How did you reach that decision to do nothing while the genocide was going on there?

That's one of the most regrettable things about it. It's not like we had a decision. I don't know that we ever had a high-level meeting on it. At that time I think the whole foreign policy apparatus, including me, was geared to getting into Bosnia as quickly as possible. We knew we were going to have a problem in Haiti. We were still reeling from what had happened in Somalia. And I think even though there were a lot of indications that Rwanda was going to be quite bad, I'm not sure anybody focused on the fact that 10 percent of a country, 700,000 or 800,000 people, could be killed in 90 days with machetes ...

If we'd moved right away, we might have been able to save a couple of hundred thousand people. They still could have killed a lot of people before we could have deployed in acceptable numbers there. [Later] we went into the camps and we kept a lot of people alive, both safe from violence and also rehydrating kids ... We saved tens of thousands of lives, but we could have saved a couple of hundred thousand more if we'd moved more quickly. We hadn't really developed a clear doctrine of when we would go in and when we wouldn't. There was a lot of sentiment against such intervention in the Congress. And the worst thing about it was that we didn't have a meeting with an options paper where we said yes, no, or maybe. We didn't even do that. And before we knew it, they were lying dead.

It was inexcusable. We didn't even seriously consider it, and I feel terrible about it. It's very interesting though: the only people who have never excoriated me for it are the Rwandans. When I went there and apologized to them, their response was, "You're the only person that ever even said you were sorry. There were other people who could have helped us, too."

The Bush administration has sharply criticized the deal you made with North Korea as a failure, because it was revealed that they have begun to clandestinely reprocess uranium and built at least a couple of nuclear weapons. What is your response to that criticism? How should the United States deal with North Korea?

I disagree with that, and if you look at the press reports from the past few days it seems that the Bush administration is coming back to our policy again. Let's get the facts out first. When I became president, it became obvious that North Korea was moving toward the capacity to build several nuclear weapons a year ... I was determined not to let that happen. We had a very tense set of negotiations with North Korea, which got quite tense when they kicked the U.N. inspectors out ... Eventually, we made a deal after we told them that under no circumstances would we allow them the capacity to make several nuclear weapons a year. So the deal we made was that we, along with the Japanese, South Koreans, and other interested parties, would provide them with food and [energy aid] if they would put all the nuclear fuel rods in a place where they could be inspected. That agreement worked and on its own terms was not violated. In 1998 we reached an agreement where they agreed to stop testing their long-range missiles. In 2000, we nearly reached an agreement where they nearly agreed to stop producing and selling those missiles.

After I left office, the Bush administration discovered, and briefed me about it, that in 1998 the North Koreans had started a much smaller program in a lab with highly enriched uranium -- enough to produce perhaps a weapon or two. Does that mean my policy was a failure? No, because if we hadn't stopped their reactor program [in 1994], they could have been producing not one or two nuclear weapons but maybe six to 10 a year. Colin Powell said they would have had dozens of weapons by this time, and the State Department in the Bush administration has supported our Korea policy.

What should be done now? North Korea wants three things. They don't want to disappear. They want to eat and stay warm, and they can't grow food or afford power. And they want to be treated as an important country that deals with the U.S. and other countries in their region. They want some sort of official recognition from us.

They're not going to bomb South Korea or Japan. The danger is that a country that builds world-class bombs but can't feed itself or stay warm will sell them ... What we need to try to do is to get an agreement, with the Chinese, the Russians, the Japanese and the South Koreans, where they finally end all those nuclear and missile programs, and we arrange for them to get food and energy. And we continue to support the rapprochement between North and South Korea. Now it looks to me as if the Bush administration is in the right place and moving in the right direction.

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