Dec 28, 2006, 11:43 GMT
Washington - Gerald Ford opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq ordered by current US President George Bush, according to an interview with the late president published Thursday in the Washington Post.
Excerpts of the interview with Post reporter Bob Woodward, conducted in July 2004 for a future book, were published under an agreement with Ford that allowed early release in the event of the former leader's death.
Ford, who served as president from 1974-77, died Tuesday at age 93.
Two of the key figures in the Bush administration's war in Iraq, Vice President Dick Cheney and ousted defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld, also served the Ford administration. Ford appointed Rumsfeld as defence secretary - a post to which he returned from 2001-2006 under Bush - while Cheney was chief of staff in the Ford White House.
Ford told Woodward that he sympathized with the 'theory' of spreading democracy but that the United States should not go 'around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security.'
'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.'
Ford, who ordered the final withdrawal from in 1975 from a war in Vietnam that had stretched across four US administrations, said that he would have favoured an Iraq policy to have 'maximized our effort through sanctions, through restrictions, whatever, to find another answer.'
'I don't think I would have ordered the Iraq war,' he said.
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