Gerald Ford Speaks From The Grave, Criticizes Bush On Iraq
Gerald Ford’s death turns political as the big news today is about an interview of the former President by Bob Woodward conducted in 2004 with the understanding that it would be embargoed until after Ford’s death.
Here’s the crux of Ford’s comments about Iraq:
Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. “I don’t think I would have gone to war,” he said a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford’s own administration.
In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford “very strongly” disagreed with the current president’s justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney — Ford’s White House chief of staff — and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford’s chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief. “Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction,” Ford said. “And now, I’ve never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do.”
I’d point out that it is very easy for Ford to say something like this some 17 months after the invasion of Iraq was complete and the truth about Saddam’s weapons capabilities was known as a fact. It is very easy to say that you would have handled something a certain way when you know all the facts about that something after the fact. Hindsight is, after all, 20/20.
Ford also had this to say about Bush’s rhetoric concerning the liberation of oppressed people around the world:
In a conversation that veered between the current realities of a war in the Middle East and the old complexities of the war in Vietnam whose bitter end he presided over as president, Ford took issue with the notion of the United States entering a conflict in service of the idea of spreading democracy.
“Well, I can understand the theory of wanting to free people,” Ford said, referring to Bush’s assertion that the United States has a “duty to free people.” But the former president said he was skeptical “whether you can detach that from the obligation number one, of what’s in our national interest.” He added: “And I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security.”
I think Ford either fails to understand fully Bush’s decision to go to Iraq or is engaging in a bit of willful ignorance here. Invading Iraq to liberate the people there was a part of why we invaded. The other, more important part was that we believed (thanks to intelligence we now know to be faulty) Iraq to be a threat to the security of this country. And in so far as Iraq was sponsoring international terrorism and harboring terrorists involved in plotting attacks against the west, Saddam’s regime was a threat. President Bush’s statement concerning America’s “duty to free people” doesn’t necessarily mean the use of our military to topple dictators and other cruel regimes around the world. I think Secretary Rice put it better when she said that American policy should “support the aspirations of all free people.” This means, simply, that America should refuse to cooperate or even tolerate regimes that are totalitarian or oppressive in nature and that we should fight against them with diplomacy, and military power if necessary.
I really have to wonder if Ford, put in the same situation Bush was in after 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan with the director of the CIA saying that Iraq had WMD’s and was a threat to the U.S., wouldn’t have made the same decision Bush did. Which is the whole problem with this interview in the first place. I’m not a real big fan of former Presidents undermining the policies of current Presidents in the media, and I especially don’t like it when they do it from “beyond the grave” like this. It seems...almost cowardly to level this sort of criticism with the understanding that it won’t be made public until after you’re gone and are unable to answer for it or expand on it.
Seems like a cheap, parting shot. Certainly something unworthy of a former President.
Update: The New York Daily News’ Thomas DeFrank has a different take on Ford’s opinion of the war in Iraq:
Ford was a few weeks shy of his 93rd birthday as we chatted for about 45 minutes. He’d been visited by President Bush three weeks earlier and said he’d told Bush he supported the war in Iraq but that the 43rd President had erred by staking the invasion on weapons of mass destruction.
“Saddam Hussein was an evil person and there was justification to get rid of him,” he observed, “but we shouldn’t have put the basis on weapons of mass destruction. That was a bad mistake. Where does [Bush] get his advice?”
This was actually a question I was going to raise earlier given this Ford quote from the Post article quoted above:
“Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction,” Ford said. “And now, I’ve never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do.”
That sounds pretty clear to me like Ford was disagreeing with the way the Bush administration sold the war to the public and the world, not necessarily the reasoning for going to war itself.
Graeme
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