His Side of The Story

Our voters decided they wanted to win. So they said, We need to pick the person we think has got the best chance to win, and this guy looks like a President, talks like a President, he's got a good military record, good security and economic background. He's the one. So John Kerry wins, and by the way, I don't think the voters are wrong. My own experience with him is, just from the psychological factors, I think he would be a successful President.

On Democrats' concerns that his book will draw attention away from Kerry

I must say that's insulting to the voters. That's like saying the voters can't walk and chew gum at the same time. They can't read about the past and draw any conclusions about the presidential elections until they digest my book. I mean, come on. I don't buy that.

On terrorism

We're in a new era where nobody seriously thinks humankind is going to be destroyed, but in a funny way we all feel more vulnerable because the porousness of freedom and openness makes everybody everywhere subject to terror. And everything has been miniaturized in the digital age, including chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. You get a Girl Scout cookie's worth of fissile material, you put it in Timothy McVeigh's bomb, and you take out 25% of Washington.

So we are in fact, as a race, in far less danger than we were in the early days of the cold war, when both sides had nuclear weapons and before the red telephones and before we really understood each other. But as individuals we are at least, in theory, more vulnerable, because none of us can hide. And that's frightening.

On whether Bush's foreign policy is rooted in missionary zeal

Well, first of all, I think we needed a little missionary zeal after 9/11. But the exercise of power in the grip of any obsession is always a risk. There's a difference between having convictions and obsessions. And by the way, I had to fight this; I was almost obsessed with bin Laden for a long time and the record will reflect that.

You've got a real intellectual debate today in the post-9/11 world--more than a missionary zeal. I take the general approach of the current Administration to be, we should do whatever we can on our own and cooperate when we need to. Whereas our approach was, we should cooperate whenever we can and act on our own when we need to. Very often it led us to the same place. I went out there in Bosnia, Kosovo and Haiti. I didn't join the land-mine treaty because I thought they were being unfair to our soldiers. I waited until 2000 to join the [international] criminal court because I had to get those amendments to make sure that our soldiers wouldn't be used as political pawns.

All I'm saying is I did things unilaterally too. But my view is that in an interdependent world most problems do not lend themselves to unilateral solutions, and that if you live in an environment where you don't control the playing field, then sooner or later you have to make a deal. That's what politics is about. You have to try and create a world in which there are more partners and fewer terrorists.

On America's place in the world