In Death, He is Their Weapon.

So among the many stories that could be written in the wake of President Ford’s death, which headline grabs the top spot today?

Well, that President Ford disagreed with President Bush about the Iraq War, of course. It didn’t take long for the anti-war forces to use the corpse of a former President as a bludgeon.

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.

Let’s look at what was really said, though. Did President Ford seriously disagree with the war in 2004? According to the article, perhaps not as much as Bob Woodward would have us believe. This quote first:

“I don’t think, if I had been president, on the basis of the facts as I saw them publicly,” he said, “I don’t think I would have ordered the Iraq war. I would have maximized our effort through sanctions, through restrictions, whatever, to find another answer.”

Note the qualifier, “..as I saw them publicly…” because that’s very important. Ford understood, as many, including Woodward apparently do not, that President Bush had access to far more information than any of us did through public sources. It is not a real stretch to think that the President had access to, at the very least, the bare bones of the Oil for Food Scandal that demonstrated decisively that sanctions were not working and would not work so long as Saddam Hussein could buy his way out of them. Ford also could not have seen the intelligence that was reaching the President from the other dozen or so nations that also affirmed that Saddam was both very deep into supporting terrorists and producing WMDs, a combination that very much threatened our interests.

The real nut of the article here is not that Ford disagreed with the war itself but that he disagreed with the lead rationale the President presented to support the war. New York Daily News Washington Bureau Chief Thomas DeFrank interviewed him this past November and noted this:

Ford was a few weeks shy of his 93rd birthday as we chatted for about 45 minutes. He’d been visited by President Bush three weeks earlier and said he’d told Bush he supported the war in Iraq but that the 43rd President had erred by staking the invasion on weapons of mass destruction.

“Saddam Hussein was an evil person and there was justification to get rid of him,” he observed, “but we shouldn’t have put the basis on weapons of mass destruction. That was a bad mistake. Where does [Bush] get his advice?”

Now, that first part seems to directly contradict Woodward’s account. It is more than possible that Ford’s opinions changed. That would make sense since what we now know publicly is different from what we knew in 2004. We now know that Hussein was bribing his way to getting the sanctions lifted and that he had all his WMD programs hunkered down in the starting block ready for that to happen. We know that his genocide was far worse than we had imagined. We know that he was far more tied into international terrorism than his cash payments to suicide bombers and sheltering of the first WTC bomber indicated.

All of those facts make a persuasive argument for removing Hussein by any means at our disposal. It’s not difficult to imagine that Ford, who was quite a smart man, would be presuaded by them.

Ford’s problem with the “runup” to the war was the same problem I had: Saddams WMDs were the weakest argument to use with the American people. You could make other arguments, as the President did, but when push comes to shove, you have to pick one to lead the list of complaints. Bush picked WMDs mostly because that had to lead the case he made to the UN. No other argument would ever have worked and anyone with a lick of sense understands that.

As to the question of where Bush got his advice, I don’t you have to look any farther than the feckless Colin Powell and our quisling State Department. The months of pleading to the UN for permission to do something we had the absolute right to do thank to the 1991 cease-fire was a ridiculous and embarassing episode for the nation and for the President.

This interview is going to be painted as another splotch on the record of President Bush, made more important because Gerald Ford was a gracious man who eschewed the petty criticism and rank opportunism of other living former Presidents. His words will carry great weight because he gave us so few in his later years.

But we must be sure that we don’t distort his words either. Bob Woodward, whose stock and trade should be to accurately and objectively report what he is told, has not done that. In the end, Ford and Bush really weren’t that far apart.