- The following are excerpts from the March 2003 issue
of The Atlantic Monthly James Fallows' interview of Bill Clinton, in
which the previous president enunciates some significant admissions regarding
the Iraq situation, from which the adjacent "spin" has been omitted.
Notice how closely some of these are to so-called "conspiracy"
allegations made by so-called conspiracy "theorists"...
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- * We have a lot to answer for, and he [Saddam Hussein]
is basically partly our creature.
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- * [Saddam] is the only guy to use chemical weapons on
his own people. Yeah he did it, and the Reagan Administration was for him
when he did it. Nobody raised a peep then, because he was against Iran.
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- * We now know that he got his anthrax strain from an
American company while we looked the other way.
-
- * We also know that, or at least a British journalist
has alleged, that Casey [the head of the CIA under Reagan] tried to give
him cluster bombs.
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- * I think they [the original Bush Administration] feel
badly about abandoning the Shiites.
-
- * I'd like it if it [an invasion] happened. On the other
hand, if it happened as a result of our initiative, it would be a very
high price to pay.
-
- * I don't think you can treat the UN like a shrine. It
is an institution that is still becoming; it's not where we want it to
be. We, and others, sometimes cast our veto votes in ways that are more
about us than about the global interests. So I think we have to try to
give the sanctions one more chance.
-
- * He's not going to live forever, there are options for
regime change short of bombing the living daylights out of them. And we
know that...that the inspectors have gotten a ton of stuff out of there.
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- * So that what I want is, if we have to take military
action, I will support the President if I believe he has done everything
reasonably possible...not only to build a broader coalition but to do it
within a framework of trying to strengthen the UN. Even if in the end in
the Security Council there's a veto.
-
- * The '91 authority gave them [the current Bush Administration]
authority to take military action. But they can't do it now because we're
under these '98 restrictions on the inspections, which had been accepted.
-
- * Now, on the occupation thing... My view is that we
ought to be there but it really ought to be as internationalized as possible.
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- * We knew when we did the bombing in '98 that we hit
all the known or suspected sites based on the intelligence we had, from
all the people that were doing that work there.
-
- * We do have a deterrence operating now. He [Saddam]
knows it. If he uses or gives away these weapons, he'd be in terrible shape.
If we come after him, since he knows the outcome is certain, he has maximum
incentive to use them. ... And then ten days later the CIA said the same
thing I did.
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- * I think that part of [Bush] does want to do it [invade
unilaterally].
-
- * George Bush [41] had to promise not to march on Baghdad
to get the Arab support. ... [I]t's not fair to criticize former President
Bush, because he couldn't have had the international coalition if he'd
done it.
-
- * I also think...that they [the Bush administration]
gotta have an enemy, keep America thinking about it all the time.
-
- * It's just that we can't go around deposing people without
global support. We just can't do it.
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- Read the full interview here...
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- http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/03/clinton.htm
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