Bill Clinton supports the war; he only differs with Bush in that he thinks it would have been better to wait a little longer before invading. In a June 2004 interview he told Time magazine, “I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left on Iraq ... I don't believe he went in there for oil. We didn't go in there for imperialist or financial reasons” and that “You couldn't responsibly ignore [the possibility that] a tyrant had these [weapons of mass destruction] stocks. I never really thought he'd [use them]. What I was far more worried about was that he'd sell this stuff or give it away. ... So that's why I thought Bush did the right thing to go back. When you're the President, and your country has just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for.” He also claimed after the weapons inspectors left Iraq in 1998:
“there were substantial quantities of botulinum and aflatoxin, as I recall, some bioagents, I believe there were those, and VX and ricin, chemical agents, unaccounted for. Keep in mind, that's all we ever had to work on. We also thought there were a few missiles, some warheads, and maybe a very limited amount of nuclear laboratory capacity.
After 9/11, let's be fair here, if you had been President, you'd think, well, this fellow bin Laden just turned these three airplanes full of fuel into weapons of mass destruction, right? Arguably they were super-powerful chemical weapons. Think about it that way. So, you're sitting there as President, you're reeling in the aftermath of this, so, yeah, you want to go get bin Laden and do Afghanistan and all that. But you also have to say, well, my first responsibility now is to try everything possible to make sure that this terrorist network and other terrorist networks cannot reach chemical and biological weapons or small amounts of fissile material. I've got to do that.
That's why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for.”
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