Early Show with Harry Smith

As we noted, in a rare television interview over the weekend, President Bush defended his decision to go to war in Iraq, despite questionable intelligence on whether or not Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. So how did the president do? We’ve got two points of view on that. Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editor of The Nation, and Clifford May is from the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. OK. Is he there?

Mr. CLIFFORD MAY (Foundation for the Defense of Democracies): Good morning, Harry.

SMITH: We’ll keep going.

Mr. MAY: I am.

SMITH: Oh, he’s there. All right. Good morning to you both.

Mr. MAY: Hi, Harry. Good morning.

SMITH: All right, let me–let me start with this. David Kay, who’s the chief US weapons inspector, s–quits a couple of weeks ago, he comes back and he says, ‘There were no weapons of mass destruction,’ leaving some Americans to wonder ‘Why did we go to war?’ And this is what the president said on TV yesterday.

President GEORGE W. BUSH: (From “Meet the Press”) I expected to find the weapons. Sitting behind this desk, making a very difficult decision on war and peace, and I based my decision on the best intelligence possible, intelligence that had been gathered over the years, intelligence that not only our analysts thought was valid but in–analysts from other countries thought was valid.

SMITH: Clifford May, let me start with you. Did the president successfully defend his decision yesterday?

Mr. MAY: Yeah, I think he did. I think that at the very least his conviction came through. He believes that at this point in history, after 9/11, we can’t just sit back as we have in the past and wait for rogue dictators and terrorists to come to us. We have to take the war to them. We don’t know what happened to Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. We know he’s had them. He may have hidden them. He may have destroyed them. He may have transferred them. The point is that he was a threat and President Bush concluded that we needed to take the war to him, to do something about this threat. And I think most Americans see that he was correct in that.

SMITH: All right. And we should point out, Clifford, you’ve been for the war. Katrina, you oppose the war. Did you hear anything yesterday that helped you get more information that may–you have–may have been looking for?

Ms. KATRINA vanden HEUVEL (Editor, The Nation): No, and I fear that for–he did a dis–President Bush did a disservice to the American people who deserve to hear the truth from–from their president. He deflected, he denied, he misled again. He was rewriting history. What we need is a truly in–independent investigation, not into the failure of intelligence but into the way key figures in this administration manipulated, cherry-picked, hyped the intelligence to do the gravest disservice to our nation, to mislead a nation into war. I did not hear anything–and, by the way, this notion of Iraq being the central piece in the war against terrorism, the US Army War College, as Cliff knows, released a report just a few weeks ago saying that Iraq was a diversion from that central fight.

SMITH: Clifford May, did–did the president cook the books? Did he use–use the information that he have–had at his disposal, and do we have to–have to–we should, in the interest of full disclosure, many countries around the world, many Democrats said…

Ms. vanden HEUVEL: Absolutely.

SMITH: …this guy’s got weapons of mass destruction. On the eve of the war, the president said he’s got them; they’re there. That’s what people around the world believe to be true. But did he cook the books?

Mr. MAY: Not at all. What we do know is that Saddam Hussein, of course, had weapons of mass destruction. He used them against the Kurds, chemical weapons. We know he had anthrax, the 8,500 liters he had in 1998, which he admitted he had, we still don’t know what he did with those. We still don’t know what happened to those. Nuclear weapons he’s been trying to build for more than 20 years. What David Kay also said was that Saddam Hussein planned to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction as soon as the coast was clear. What David Kay also said was we didn’t have good intelligence but it was actually a more dangerous situation than we understood because the weapons scientists…

SMITH: Because it was so de-stable, but OK, now let me ask you this, though.

Mr. MAY: …because it was de-stable.

SMITH: Was–was the Intelligence Estimate irrelevant in this case?

Ms. vanden HEUVEL: But wait a minute.

Mr. MAY: No, I think the Intelligence…

Ms. vanden HEUVEL: Key–key…

Mr. MAY: …the Intelligence Estimate was…

Ms. vanden HEUVEL: …key–key…

Mr. MAY: …if–if I can just finish this, Katrina. The Intelligence Estimate was very important to this. Our Intelligence Estimate, the British, the French, even what the UN was saying, we all knew that Saddam Hussein was under obligation after the cease-fire of ’91…

SMITH: All right.

Mr. MAY: …to show us his weapons…

SMITH: A…

Mr. MAY: …and destroy them in a verifiable manner.

SMITH: O…

Mr. MAY: He didn’t do so. He constituted a threat. We decided not…

SMITH: All right.

Mr. MAY: …to back down…

SMITH: OK.

Mr. MAY: …but to address that threat.

SMITH: Katrina, go ahead.

Ms. vanden HEUVEL: Let’s–let’s not rewrite history which this administration is doing. It’s shifting rationales for a questionable war. Th–the UN inspections team, European intelligence, intelligence agencies in this very country did not have definitive evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, certainly not that it posed an imminent, grave threat to this country which this administration told Americans, trying to scare…

Mr. MAY: You know…

Ms. vanden HEUVEL: …them into war. So I think…

SMITH: Clifford–Clifford, you have about 10 seconds.

Mr. MAY: You know, the definitive…

SMITH: Last word.

Mr. MAY: OK. Definitive int–telligence information would be wonderful to have. We haven’t had it in the past. That’s why we didn’t know about 9/11. That’s why President Clinton bombed an aspirin factory. It’s why we still don’t know who was behind the ’93 bombing of the World Trade Center. Iraqis were behind it. Who did they work for? None of us can say. We need better intelligence soon.

SMITH: Clifford, thank you.

Ms. vanden HEUVEL: Thank you.

SMITH: Katrina…

Mr. MAY: Thank you.

SMITH: …we’ll see you soon, I’m sure.

Now here’s Rene and Hannah.

RENE SYLER (Co-host): All right, Harry, very good. Thanks.

Up next, will the sparks be flying today at the Martha Stewart trial? We’ll have a preview.

HANNAH STORM (Co-host): And in our next half-hour, an exclusive interview with the father of Michael Jackson’s alleged victim.

This is THE EARLY SHOW on CBS.