Transcript for Sept. 24

MR. CLINTON: Well, I—here’s what I would do. I would figure out what the, what the generally accepted definitions of the Geneva Convention are, and I would honor them. I would also talk to people who do this kind of work about what is generally most effective, and they will—they’re almost always not advocate of torture, and I wouldn’t do anything that would put our own people at risk.

Now, the thing that drives—that, that gives the president’s position a little edge is that every one of us can imagine the following scenario: We get lucky, we get the number three guy in al-Qaeda, and we know there’s a big bomb going off in America in three days and we know this guy knows where it is.  Don’t we have the right and the responsibility to beat it out of him? But keep in mind, in 99 percent of the interrogations, you don’t know those things.

Now, it happens like even in the military regulations, in a case like that, they do have the power to use extreme force because there is an imminent threat to the United States, and then to live with the consequences. The president—they could set up a law where the president could make a finding or could guarantee a pardon or could guarantee the submission of that sort of thing ex post facto to the intelligence court, just like we do now with wire taps.

So I, I don’t think that hard case justifies the sweeping authority for waterboarding and all the other stuff that, that was sought in this legislation. And I think, you know, if that circumstance comes up—we all know what we’d do to keep our country from going through another 9/11 if we could. But to—but to claim in advance the right to do this whenever someone takes a notion to engage in conduct that plainly violates the Geneva Convention, that, I think, is a mistake.

MR. RUSSERT: Two weeks ago, Vice President Cheney was on this program, and I said to him that we’ve spent $300 billion on Iraq. Now in hindsight, could that money, that $300 billion, been spent more effectively in other places?

MR. CLINTON: Well, if you mean could it—could it have strengthened us in a war against terror if spent elsewhere, I think there’s no question that’s true. I think it could have been spent more effectively in Iraq, I mean, we still don’t, don’t know what happened to about 9 billion of it, I think.

But if you—if, if you look at what we could have done, we could have had more troops in Afghanistan to secure a moderate Muslim, pro-American, pro-Western government; it could have kept the Taliban from coming back across the border; it could have intensified the hunt for bin Laden; it could have paid for all the 9/11 recommendations on homeland security; and it could have helped us build a world with more partners and fewer terrorists by, you know, investing in education in Pakistan so that kids go to public schools instead of the madrassas, and thousand other things we could do.

But what’s done is done and I, I, I still think it’s important to recognize that if this Iraq experiment could be made to work now, it would be better than if it can’t. No one knows yet whether it can. But I believe you can’t make a serious case that that’s the best, most effective way to spend $300 billion to fight terror or make a world with fewer terrorists.

TEXT:On Iraq

“It was a mistake.”

Former President Bill Clinton

New Yorker magazine

September 18, 2006

MR. RUSSERT: You said the Iraq—Iraq was a mistake. Why?

MR. CLINTON: He did.

MR. RUSSERT: You did.

MR. CLINTON: I did. No, I—here’s what I believe: I think it’s fine to get rid of Saddam and I think it’s fine to try to build a multi-party democracy.  I, I spoke to President Talabani today. I think the Kurds are doing pretty well as it is. What I believe was an error was for us to unilaterally invade before the United Nations had finished its inspections. Because we said the reason the Congress was asked to vote to approve this was to give teeth to the U.N. inspections and then to use the authority to invade if he flunked the inspections. I’m glad he’s gone, but I think we have to realize every time you’re someplace, you’re not someplace else; every dollar you spend here, you don’t spend it there. So—but we are where we are now, and since we have broken this egg, as General Powell used to say, we got to try and make an omelet. I think that, that whether this succeeds or fails now depends more on Iraqis than Americans.

I think most of the really big political and military mistakes made by the American forces in the aftermath of the fall of Saddam have been learned from and corrected. I think that now it’s just a question of whether the various Shiite factions and the Sunni can make a political accommodation sufficient to overcome the insurrection. And I think that, for us, we have to try to keep our footprint as low as possible so as not to inflame things, but our impact as high as possible.

And I think that—there’s only—the best piece of news I’ve seen coming out of there lately was that, after we said from our point of view we couldn’t win in Anbar anymore—that’s what at least a Marine intelligence officer said—because we had to send our troops to Baghdad, then 25 of 31 tribal leaders in Anbar got together and said, “We will throw the foreign jihadists out.” So I hope it works. I hope the thing can be made to work. But I think we would have been better off had we finished the job in Afghanistan against bin Laden first, done the homeland security recommendations first and gotten more global support. That’s what I believe.

MR. RUSSERT: You say, “We may have to decide it’s a lost cause.” How close are we to declaring it a lost cause?

MR. CLINTON: You know, I would have to know more than I actually know. I, I, I must tell you I was very profoundly impressed by Thomas Ricks’ book “Fiasco,” the chief Pentagon correspondent of The Washington Post. But I do not—I am not conversant enough with the facts on the ground to know. But I know this is like every insurgency ever, where there is an outside force attempting to provide stability. The good news is we’re not the, you know, we’re not the French, we have no colonial, imperialist, permanent ambitions, but the fact is we’re still guys who are not from there. And therefore, we have to remember that the people are always the prize.

That’s another point I didn’t make on this torture business. It’s one thing if you’re talking about bin Laden and an attempted attack in America. But if you look at Iraq, any time we do something that makes 50 more enemies, even if we catch one bad guy, that may be a, that may be a net bad thing. We could win every single battle and lose the war, because the people are the prize here.

So I, I think that we know what to do, and we—I am not yet prepared to say it can’t prevail, but I, I don’t know that I have enough information to know when we should cut the cord. I just think that we should not yet give up on it. I think there’s still a chance that these political leaders will be able to make a deal.

MR. RUSSERT: After the 2002 midterm elections, you said that Democrats “failed to offer a convincing case that they could manage national security during difficult times.” Do you think the Democrats have made the case in 2006?

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