Bush rushed into Iraq invasion: Clinton
Last Updated Fri, 06 Aug 2004 10:14:01 EDT
TORONTO - Former U.S. president Bill Clinton said Thursday he would have taken the word of United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix over U.S. intelligence reports about evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
"It's not a question of believing [blix] over the intelligence agencies, but the intelligence was ambiguous on the point," Clinton said in an interview with CBC's The National.
Blix led the UN weapons inspections in the months leading up to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
His teams found little to support the pre-war assertions by the United States that Saddam Hussein's regime was actively developing and stockpiling chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.
"I certainly would have believed it enough to put [the war] off and try to build more support," said Clinton, referring to building a consensus among the international community before invading Iraq.
"I mean, what was the hurry?" asked Clinton, who was in Toronto to sign copies of his best-selling memoir My Life.
Recently, a U.S. Senate committee report criticized pre-war intelligence reports claiming Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction for being wrong and overstated.
Clinton criticized the Bush administration for rushing into war with Iraq, saying the country posed a lesser threat to the U.S. compared with four other international hotspots.
He accused the Bush administration of putting too much focus on Iraq, saying it diverted resources from the top threat to the U.S.: al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden.
As an example, he spoke about the recent terror alert indicating a possible threat, based in part on four-year-old intelligence, to five financial institutions in the U.S.
"Who's the threat from? Iraq? Saddam Hussein? No, from bin Laden and al-Qaeda," he said, adding that the U.S. only learned of the threat from Pakistani intelligence.
"Why did we put our number 1 security threat in the hands of the Pakistanis with us playing a supporting role, and put all of our military resources in Iraq, which I think at best was our number 5 security threat?
"How did we get to the point where we got 130,000 troops in Iraq and 15,000 in Afghanistan?"
Clinton said the absence of a peace process in the Middle East, the conflict between India and Pakistan and their ties to the Taliban, and North Korea and its nuclear program all posed greater threats than Iraq.
