Ford Disagreed With Bush About Invading Iraq

When I first heard that Gerald Ford died yesterday, I'm not sure what I could have said that hasn't already been said through the thousands of blogs here. Ford was a moderate conservative who took over the White House under the worst of circumstances with Richard Nixon resigning, the Vietnam War tearing the country apart, and inflation starting to ravage the country. Ford's legacy was the single act of pardoning Richard Nixon for his involvement in the Watergate scandal, as a means to heal the country of this crisis. That is understandable.

Now we get this Washington Post story:

Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. "I don't think I would have gone to war," he said a little more than a year after President Bush launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford's own administration.

In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford "very strongly" disagreed with the current president's justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney -- Ford's White House chief of staff -- and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford's chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.

"Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction," Ford said. "And now, I've never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do."

In a conversation that veered between the current realities of a war in the Middle East and the old complexities of the war in Vietnam whose bitter end he presided over as president, Ford took issue with the notion of the United States entering a conflict in service of the idea of spreading democracy.

"Well, I can understand the theory of wanting to free people," Ford said, referring to Bush's assertion that the United States has a "duty to free people." But the former president said he was skeptical "whether you can detach that from the obligation number one, of what's in our national interest." He added: "And I just don't think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security."

The Ford interview -- and a subsequent lengthy conversation in 2005 -- took place for a future book project, though he said his comments could be published at any time after his death.

If Ford knew that this war was going to be bad for the country, then why didn't he come out and publicly criticize the Bush administration for it? Why did he keep silent, when he knew this would be a disaster for the country? Two of Ford's former White House staffers--Cheney and Rumsfeld--were involved in the beginning on this war. And Ford kept silent on it. Ford may have been a decent president, but he is a failure as a statesman for blindly following this country down the cliff, when he knew better. Republican Party politics before policy--again!