His Side of The Story

That's why I supported the Iraq thing. There was a lot of stuff unaccounted for. So I thought the President had an absolute responsibility to go to the U.N. and say, "Look, guys, after 9/11, you have got to demand that Saddam Hussein lets us finish the inspection process." You couldn't responsibly ignore [the possibility that] a tyrant had these stocks. I never really thought he'd [use them]. What I was far more worried about was that he'd sell this stuff or give it away. Same thing I've always been worried about North Korea's nuclear and missile capacity. I don't expect North Korea to bomb South Korea, because they know it would be the end of their country. But if you can't feed yourself, the temptation to sell this stuff is overwhelming. So that's why I thought Bush did the right thing to go back. When you're the President, and your country has just been through what we had, you want everything to be accounted for.

On whether the Iraq war was worth the costs

It's a judgment that no one can make definitively yet. I would not have done it until after Hans Blix finished his job. Having said that, over 600 of our people have died since the conflict was over. We've got a big stake now in making it work. I want it to have been worth it, even though I didn't agree with the timing of the attack. I think if you have a pluralistic, secure, stable Iraq, the people of Iraq will be better off, and it might help the process of internal reform in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. I think right now, getting rid of Saddam's tyranny, ironically, has made Iraq more vulnerable to terrorism coming in from the outside. But any open society is going to be more vulnerable than any tyranny to that.

On the Abu Ghraib prison scandal

I was surprised when I saw the extent of it. I was not surprised that there were some abuses. And I was afraid that they might become more likely because we had to rely so much on Guard people. It's tense for anybody in Iraq. But if you're a special-forces person, you're more psychologically prepared than [if] one day you're cleaning teeth, or working in a car garage, or selling stuff at the Wal-Mart, and a week later you're riding in a personnel vehicle down a street in Baghdad waiting for a bomb to go off and take your life away. Now, that's like my problems--an explanation is not a justification. There is no justification for that.

The more we learn about it, the more it seems that some people fairly high up, at least, thought that this was the way it ought to be done, and they may have justified it by thinking that that's the way things are done in this region and we want to find out where terrorists and killers are. [For those who wanted us to invade Iraq], it has to be because people choose freedom over repression, and because they believe that we are different from what they don't like. And that means, No. 1, we can't pull stunts like that, and No. 2, when we do, whoever is responsible has to pay. The Arabs will not be impressed if we, like in their culture, decapitate all the little guys and exonerate anybody above a certain level who was responsible.

On whether he'd want a state funeral like Reagan's