Bill Clinton called in to wish Bob Dole happy birthday on Larry King and had
some excellent comments on the whole SoU flap...
http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0307/22/lkl.00.html
Here's the relevant part:
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KING: President, maybe I can get an area where you may disagree. Do you
join, President Clinton, your fellow Democrats, in complaining about the
portion of the State of the Union address that dealt with nuclear weaponry
in Africa?
CLINTON: Well, I have a little different take on it, I think, than either
side.
First of all, the White House said -- Mr. Fleischer said -- that on balance
they probably shouldn't have put that comment in the speech. What happened,
often happens. There was a disagreement between British intelligence and
American intelligence. The president said it was British intelligence that
said it. And then they said, well, maybe they shouldn't have put it in.
Let me tell you what I know. When I left office, there was a substantial
amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for. That is, at the
end of the first Gulf War, we knew what he had. We knew what was destroyed
in all the inspection processes and that was a lot. And then we bombed with
the British for four days in 1998. We might have gotten it all; we might
have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it. But we didn't know.
So I thought it was prudent for the president to go to the U.N. and for the
U.N. to say you got to let these inspectors in, and this time if you don't
cooperate the penalty could be regime change, not just continued sanctions.
I mean, we're all more sensitive to any possible stocks of chemical and
biological weapons. So there's a difference between British -- British
intelligence still maintains that they think the nuclear story was true. I
don't know what was true, what was false. I thought the White House did the
right thing in just saying, Well, we probably shouldn't have said that. And
I think we ought to focus on where we are and what the right thing to do for
Iraq is now. That's what I think.
KING: So do you share that view, Senator Dole?
DOLE: Oh, he's exactly right. Let's put the focus where it belongs.
I never got to be president. I tried a couple of times. But President
Clinton understands better than anybody that he gets piles and piles of
classified, secret, top secret information, and I don't know how many, maybe
the president can tell me. I don't know how much of this goes across your
desk every day. It probably shouldn't have been in the message.
But that's history. It's passed. We can't change it. And we need to focus on
the real problem.
KING: President, maybe I can get an area where you may disagree. Do you
join, President Clinton, your fellow Democrats, in complaining about the
portion of the State of the Union address that dealt with nuclear weaponry
in Africa?
CLINTON: Well, I have a little different take on it, I think, than either
side.
First of all, the White House said -- Mr. Fleischer said -- that on balance
they probably shouldn't have put that comment in the speech. What happened,
often happens. There was a disagreement between British intelligence and
American intelligence. The president said it was British intelligence that
said it. And then they said, well, maybe they shouldn't have put it in.
Let me tell you what I know. When I left office, there was a substantial
amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for. That is, at the
end of the first Gulf War, we knew what he had. We knew what was destroyed
in all the inspection processes and that was a lot. And then we bombed with
the British for four days in 1998. We might have gotten it all; we might
have gotten half of it; we might have gotten none of it. But we didn't know.
So I thought it was prudent for the president to go to the U.N. and for the
U.N. to say you got to let these inspectors in, and this time if you don't
cooperate the penalty could be regime change, not just continued sanctions.
I mean, we're all more sensitive to any possible stocks of chemical and
biological weapons. So there's a difference between British -- British
intelligence still maintains that they think the nuclear story was true. I
don't know what was true, what was false. I thought the White House did the
right thing in just saying, Well, we probably shouldn't have said that. And
I think we ought to focus on where we are and what the right thing to do for
Iraq is now. That's what I think.
KING: So do you share that view, Senator Dole?
DOLE: Oh, he's exactly right. Let's put the focus where it belongs.
I never got to be president. I tried a couple of times. But President
Clinton understands better than anybody that he gets piles and piles of
classified, secret, top secret information, and I don't know how many, maybe
the president can tell me. I don't know how much of this goes across your
desk every day. It probably
