Walter Isaacson: What would you personally do on Iraq now?
President Clinton: Well first of all let me say I have a position that is typically not fish or foul. If I had been in the Senate I would have voted for the resolution that would have given the President the authority to use force. Because he gave a speech in Cincinnati that a lot of people have forgotten that was a very compelling speech saying that the intelligence — I think he overstated it a bit, but when I was President, let me tell you what the intelligence showed — showed that there was a substantial amount of unaccounted for, that is we don’t know what happened to it, biological and chemical agents and that there was some limited laboratory capacity and a nuclear deal. But I never thought he had a serious nuclear program. I did think there was unaccounted for substantial amounts of botchulinum, alpha toxin, bx, and ricin chemical agent. What that means is that at the end of the first Gulf War, we had an inventory when the UN inspections started. Then as things were found and destroyed, they were taken off the inventory. In ’95, when two of Saddam’s son-in-laws defected to Jordan, one of them was in charge of the WMD program, and he said, “This is what we’ve got, this is where it is.” We confronted the Iraqis, and they said, “Well, the boys are telling the truth. We’ve been lying to you all along. Here it is.” We went and got it and destroyed it. That’s by far the most stuff that had been destroyed, even more than in the first Gulf War. After that was destroyed, if you subtracted it from what was in the report, there were still unaccounted for stocks. So, Saddam Hussein never did anything he wasn’t forced to do.
So I supported the President, had I been a senator I’d have voted for it. The only difference is I didn’t think we had to be in a big hurry because once the inspectors got in, Saddam wasn’t going to do anything. First, his military was less than half the strength it was in the first Gulf War, and secondly, if he did anything he’d get immediately zapped. So what I worried about was overcommitment in Iraq before we finished cleaning out al Qaeda in Afghanistan. That was my position. That was not the position the administration agreed with, and as far as I know, everyone in Israel agreed with them because I always thought they were overpanicked about Iraq too. Every Israeli politician I knew, from left to right, wanted us to just go have a preemptive attack on Iraq, which is what we did. But, nonetheless, we are where we are, we have lost 1,700 fine people, we have had thousands of people wounded. This is not Vietnam, that’s the first thing I want to tell you. I don’t believe it is.
Walter Isaacson: Not a quagmire you mean?
President Clinton: It might be a quagmire, but it won’t be for the reason it was in Vietnam. Our problem was we didn’t have a legitimate government to back us, even though there were a lot of heroic Vietnamese soldiers and Vietnamese people who did not want to be communist and did fight. The government itself never had enough confidence to stand up, so the Vietnamese army had 1.7 million members, it was the fourth or fifth biggest army in the world, and ten days after President Ford completed the final pull out they folded like Dick’s hatband. These people are dying in big numbers, these Iraqis, and 58 percent of them voted. That’s a bigger turnout than we had. We were patting ourselves on the back for the humungous turnout we had in 2004. They turned out more than we did, with their lives threatened and all those problems.
So I wouldn’t say this is a legitimate government yet, because they don’t have enough Sunni representation, but it’s clearly a legitimate process. And the people want it to work. So I think we should try to make it work. So what I would do is — there are military experts I know you have coming here that know a whole lot more than I do — but the key thing is to put them in a position to defend themselves and protect their gains as quickly as possible. Because the more they more they are capable of defending themselves, the less they’ll able to look like an American-British takeover. You know all that stuff they use against us. The less there will be sympathy for terrorists coming in from the outside. And the more incentive there will be for the various Sunni factions to join the government and be full participants. So increasing the capacity of the Iraqis to defend themselves through the security forces is the number one thing. And it would be good if we could send more people there, but I just don’t know that we can right now.
We are having trouble sustaining our recruitment. We’ve had to offer bigger and bigger businesses — and again, you have members of Congress here who can tell more than I can. I don’t know if they’ve had the capacity, but I saw the other day that the Pentagon was rethinking its strategy, which has been there since I was there, which I approved, which was to fight two regional wars simultaneously. It may be that we need to reconfigure the whole thing to do a lot of little things. But we made a decision, whether you agree with it or not, and I believe we should have gone on and finished in Afghanistan and have more troops in Afghanistan first, and if we have bigger problems with al Qaeda, which has now adopted — as the London thing shows — an entirely different strategy as we have taken out the infrastructure and taken out a lot of cells. You know that’s a moot question. We are where we are. There is a government that people have supported. They did go out and vote, and they are dying beside us in the service of what they hope will be an independent country. That will be better governed and less terroristic than Saddam was. So I wouldn’t give it up yet. I would stick in there and try to make it work and I wouldn’t set a deadline either, I think that’s a mistake. I agree with the President on this. If we set a deadline now, they will believe that all they gotta do is wait. So unless you can take out all these insurgents who are coming in from other countries, and you can beat the domestic Sunni insurgents by date certain, you shouldn’t set a deadline, otherwise they will wait us out. And it will be demoralizing for the Iraqis. That’s what I think.
aspeninstitute.org
And even Hillary seems to understand that we have to stay in Iraq until they are stable enough to preserve their own internal and economic security:
She advocated that the United States stay in Iraq until the Iraqi people show that they can run their own country and maintain the peace. This commitment, she said, is part of this country's "long struggle against terrorism."
aspentimes.com |
