Gerald Ford SeatedThanks to Ron Chusid for drawing our attention to this story from Bob Woodward at The Washington Post:

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.

Ford was definitive in his disagreement with the current administration. Ford stipulated that he would have pursued alternative courses of action, like sanctions, much more vigorously than Bush did.

“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.”

And he made it clear that war was not chosen as a last resort, nor did he believe for an instant the lines about spreading democracy or protecting our national security:

“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.”

Our hope is that this just adds fuel to the fires already burning in the middle and the left, and that the right begins to fume as well. There must be more on the right besides Gerald Ford who disagree with the current policies.? Enough is enough.