GQ interviews the thoughtful Hagel
http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_5326&pageNum=2
[…]
Do you wish you’d voted differently in October of 2002, when Congress
had a chance to authorize or not authorize the invasion?
Have you read that resolution?
I have.
It’s not quite the way it’s been framed by a lot of people, as a
resolution to go to war. That’s not quite what the resolution said.
It said, “to authorize the use of United States Armed Forces against
Iraq.”
In the event that all other options failed. So it’s not as simple as
“I voted for the war.” That wasn’t the resolution.
But there was a decision whether to grant the president that
authority or not.
Exactly right. And if you recall, the White House had announced that
they didn’t need that authority from Congress.
Which they seem to say about a lot of things.
That’s right. Mr. [Alberto] Gonzales was the president’s counsel at
that time, and he wrote a memo to the president saying, “You have all
the powers that you need.” So I called Andy Card, who was then the
chief of staff, and said, “Andy, I don’t think you have a shred of
ground to stand on, but more to the point, why would a president
seriously consider taking a nation to war without Congress being with
him?” So a few of us—Joe Biden, Dick Lugar, and I—were invited into
discussions with the White House.
It’s incredible that you had to ask for that.
It is incredible. That’s what I said to Andy Card. Said it to Powell,
said it to Rice. Might have even said it to the president. And
finally, begrudgingly, they sent over a resolution for Congress to
approve. Well, it was astounding. It said they could go anywhere in
the region.
It wasn’t specific to Iraq?
Oh no. It said the whole region! They could go into Greece or
anywhere. I mean, is Central Asia in the region? I suppose! Sure as
hell it was clear they meant the whole Middle East. It was anything
they wanted. It was literally anything. No boundaries. No restrictions.
They expected Congress to let them start a war anywhere they wanted
in the Middle East?
Yes. Yes. Wide open. We had to rewrite it. Joe Biden, Dick Lugar, and
I stripped the language that the White House had set up, and put our
language in it.
But that should also have triggered alarm bells about what they
really wanted to do.
Well, it did. I’m not defending our votes; I’m just giving a little
history of how this happened. You have to remember the context of
when that resolution was passed. This was about a year after
September 11. The country was still truly off balance. So the
president comes out talking about “weapons of mass destruction” that
this “madman dictator” Saddam Hussein has, and “our intelligence
shows he’s got it,” and “he’s capable of weaponizing,” and so on.
And producing a National Intelligence Estimate that turned out to be
doctored.
Oh yeah. All this stuff was doctored. Absolutely. But that’s what we
were presented with. And I’m not dismissing our responsibility to
look into the thing, because there were senators who said, “I don’t
believe them.” But I was told by the president—we all were—that he
would exhaust every diplomatic effort.
You were told that personally?
I remember specifically bringing it up with the president. I said,
“This has to be like your father did it in 1991. We had every Middle
East nation except one with us in 1991. The United Nations was with us.”
Did he give you that assurance, that he would do the same thing as
his father?
Yep. He said, “That’s what we’re going to do.” But the more I look
back on this, the more I think that the administration knew there was
some real hard question whether he really had any WMD. In January of
2003, if you recall, the inspectors at the IAEA, who knew more about
what Saddam had than anybody, said, “Give us two more months before
you go to war, because we don’t think there’s anything in there.”
They were the only ones in Iraq. We hadn’t been in there. We didn’t
know what the hell was in there. And the president wouldn’t do it! So
to answer your question—Do I regret that vote? Yes, I do regret that
vote.
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