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BBC TELEVISION
THE CLINTON INTERVIEW: A PANORAMA
SPECIAL
BBC1 TUESDAY 22ND JUNE 2004 1035pm
45’18”

For eight years, Bill Clinton was the most powerful
man on earth. As President of the United States, he
led his country beyond the Cold War and into the
21st century.

Clinton spent his time at the White House trying to
reconcile what he calls parallel lives: affairs of state
at odds with a turbulent private life.

Tonight he speaks frankly to Panorama about his
time in office and his affair with Monica Lewinsky.
And he displays his anger at those who pursued him.

CLINTON: One of the reasons he got away with it is
because people like you only ask people like me the
questions. You gave him a complete free ride. Any
abuse they wanted to do, they indicted all these little
people from Arkansas, what did you care about them,
they’re not famous, who cares that their lives were
trampled. Who cares if their children were humiliated?

CLINTON: The fact that I was sleeping on the couch
and they were still in the same house with me meant that
Hilary and Chelsea hadn’t given up on me. I figured
that, as I said, I was getting a whipping at home where I
should have gotten it.

TITLE PAGE: CLINTON – THE INTERVIEW

DIMBLEBY: Mr President it’s interesting that you
describe yourself as leading two parallel lives. What
do you mean by that?

CLINTON: Well in my book I talk about my childhood
which was marked by living in an alcoholic home where
there was sporadic, arbitrary and sometimes quite
frightening violence and how I saw from my mother’s
example, you know we not only didn’t go around
talking about it, we went on with our lives and we found
something to enjoy about every day. So it occurred to
me as I thought about it that we lived for years with a
kind of an outer life outside our home that we loved,
that we loved living it, we lived it well, I did, my
mother did, then we had this other life that was often a
source of pain, and agony.

DIMBLEBY: But many people have a sort of private
side of their life that they keep private, but you
actually describe it as two different lives and I
wonder whether it’s possible to lead two different
lives and …

A: No it’s not

DIMBLEBY: And whether you end up not living
either?

CLINTON: Well I don’t think it’s possible to lead two
different lives, I think eventually they intersect, and
sometimes they clash and crash, and on occasion that
happened to me and I describe that with some candour
in the book.

DIMBLEBY: You also talk of anger, of a kind of
anger. You say at one point you had a constant
anger which you kept locked away. You don’t seem
to be an angry man; what made you angry?

CLINTON: Well by na, by nature I’m not an angry
person. I wasn’t as a child. And I’m in a different
place in my life now. I’ve worked through a lot of this.
But I was angry because I was living in the face of
arbitrary abusive power, and I always hated it. But it
always er …

DIMBLEBY: From your stepfather.

CLINTON: Yeah.

DIMBLEBY: You also said in a slightly different
context, again about anger that there were moments
when you were so angry that it did you harm. What
harm were you done by your anger?

CLINTON: Well I think whenever you’re, the, the
Greeks said once, Those whom the gods would destroy
they first make angry. If you go round mad you can’t,
you don’t think very well, and you wind up doing things
that you shouldn’t do. And I think there are numerous
points in my life, where I really was angry and I, it
bothered me. I also think a lot of anger is quite healthy
and I’ve bent over backwards because I tried to be a
peace maker in my home; I bent over backwards not to
be angry, and never to show anger and I think there’s a
price for that as well.

DIMBLEBY: But what was the harm that it did
you. Where did you harm yourself or harm others by
it?

CLINTON: Well I don’t think there’s any question
that a lot of the personal mistakes I made in my life I
made when I was angry.

DIMBLEBY: You scourge yourself don’t you really
in this book. You talk also about selfishness. You
said, in this essay you mention when you were a
child, you detested selfishness, but you saw it every
day in the mirror. Has selfishness been a constant
part of your career, which obviously demands
ambition and …

CLINTON: (interrupts) It, if, when you live … my life
has been both selfish and selfless. I mean if you live the
kind of life I live, I’ve lived, you’re running for office –
it’s almost impossible, as I say in this book, I may be
the only person who got elected President ever, because
of the loyalty, support and determination of his personal
friends, who just wouldn’t let my campaign die. It’s
seemed to me often that from the beginning, I was
always taking more from people than I could give back.

I mean I learned very early in life, that we’re all a
mixture of selflessness and selfishness. That we’re all a
mixture of, of love and anger. That we all have these
elements in us, and life is a constant struggle to let the
good outweigh the bad.

ROUND-UP SECTION CLINTON
Despite Bill Clinton’s foreign and domestic
achievements, his time in office was also marred by
scandal.

Whitewater – a property deal gone wrong that
Clinton and his wife Hillary were involved in – led to
an inquiry by independent prosecutor Kenneth
Starr, who had unlimited powers of investigation.

Although the Clintons were found innocent, Starr
controversially broadened his inquiry to examine the
President’s private life and allegations of sexual
harassment –he also investigated many of Clinton’s
friends and colleagues, some of whom were jailed.

In 1998 it was revealed Clinton had had an affair
with a young woman at the White House. But for
eight months, Bill Clinton lied about this infidelity to
his wife and to the country.

CLIP CLINTON :
I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss
Lewinsky.

Clinton became the first US president in over a
century to be impeached – and for a time both his
presidency and marriage were at risk.

DIMBLEBY: When you decided to run for the
Presidency, you were told by your Republican
opponents that they would in effect stop at nothing
to destroy you. And it’s interesting that you knew
that, you were forewarned that they were going to
try and destroy you, and yet you accepted the
challenge.

CLINTON: Well it’s – when I was threatened, it
proved to me all the more that it was time to make a
change. Because I don’t think the purpose of politics is
simply to get power and hold on to it.

DIMBLEBY: But it’s a rough game in Washington.

CLINTON: It’s a rough game. (interjects) It’s a rough
game, but the other side had been in for twelve years;
we had tried it their way. And first I was shocked that
they, they made me think I might have a chance to win
because I was told that they were confident that they
could beat everybody but me and I didn’t think that you
know, at the time, no one else thought I could win so if
they thought I could win, maybe it meant I had a
chance.

DIMBLEBY: But you can’t have had any grounds
for complaint when the Press did go at you when you
became President.

CLINTON: No.

DIMBLEBY: Because you knew it was going to
happen, you brought it on yourself in a sense by
running for it.

CLINTON: Yeah, but I, I don’t like that because that
exonerates everybody else of responsibility for the
decisions that they make. The New Right that
controlled the Republican Party in Washington and the
political press had the same interests. They thought it
was all about power, I thought it was about how power
was used. I was interested, to me, the way I kept score
in my Presidency was, Did more people have jobs or
not? Did more people move out of poverty or not?
Did the crime rate go down or not? Were more kids
breathing clean air and fewer getting asthma? What
was our record in the world? Did we advance peace
and prosperity and security or not? That’s how I kept
score.

Others kept score in a totally different way. You know,
are we hurting the other side or not? Have we got a
good story today that is about personal destruction?
So, yes I knew that, and yes I did it and no, I don’t
complain but I don’t have to agree with it. I still think
American politics works better when the fight is over
who’s right and who’s wrong, rather than who’s good
and who’s bad.

Who’s good and who’s bad maybe a good little flashy
story for today, but it doesn’t have much to do with how
the American people are going to living, ten, twenty,
thirty years from now, and how the world will work.

DIMBLEBY: But if you knew you had enemies like
that, you offered them a gift with the Monica
Lewinsky affair didn’t you.

CLINTON: Of course I did, and was it rational? No.
So I do my very best to explain why I think it happened.
But you know when people ask me this question, well
how could you do something so stupid, when you knew
they were after you. Well of course, if I’d been
thinking straight, I wouldn’t have done it. If – but I
hope that you and everyone else who asks me this
question, never has to know what it’s like to have
somebody who despises you be given unaccountable
legal power, to indict the innocent, because they will not
lie and to exonerate the guilty because they will, and
then to be treated as a totally legitimate person in the
press, as if obviously you must have done something
wrong or why are they doing all this? And you know,
it’s hard to think straight when that’s going on.

And nothing I say is by way of explanation in my
account of my life should be taken as an excuse. I
don’t make any excuses for myself, you’ve already said
I’m pretty tough on myself and I try to be. I don’t
believe anyone who reaches the age of accountability
can take an explanation for his mistakes as an excuse; so
there’s a big difference.

But I frankly think Washington went a little haywire
you know just, ever since Watergate there was this idea
that you know, we treat all our politicians as if they
were basically crooks, and we just keep looking till we
find something. And that’s the way the press kept
score, and that’s the way the Republican right kept
score; that thank God, is not the way the American
people kept score. Let me remind you in all of this
thing, we always had the support of two thirds of the
American people staying with us, so I was gratified that
more people saw the world the way I did, and believed
politics actually mattered. I think – these decisions
affect people’s lives.

DIMBLEBY: But given that you, as you say, hated
the inquiry in to White Water and all this.

CLINTON: Well it was not legitimate. I hated it
(overlaps), I asked for it.

DIMBLEBY: You say, then along came the
Lewinsky affair and you offered it to them on a plate
in effect. How did you come to do that?

CLINTON: Well I, I tried to explain that. I, it, it
happened under circumstances in which people who had
lived parallel lives become quite vulnerable. It
happened at a time when I was angry, I was under
stress, I was afraid I was going to lose my fight with the
Republican Congress. As I said, I was in this titanic
fight for the future of the country and an inevitable fight
with my old demons; so I won the public fight and lost
the private one. And then, Starr turned the private one
in to a legal, constitutional and public one.

DIMBLEBY: You think he … (interjects) was
wrong to do that?

CLINTON: Of course.

DIMBLEBY: Did you think it was dangerous at the
time?

CLINTON: What they were doing.

DIMBLEBY: What you were doing. Did you
think it was risky?

CLINTON: I don’t know that I, I don’t – I can’t answer
that. I don’t know what I thought about it. (interjects)
It didn’t last very long and … and the accounts are not
entirely accurate of what did happen; so I don’t want to
talk about that. I’ve said, all I have to say about that in
the book. I’m not saying any more about that.

DIMBLEBY: There is a curious aspect of it that
you said to Starr, you implied that you expected it to
become public knowledge. You said you expected it
to come out at some point.

GUEST: I didn’t in the beginning but subsequent
things happened which made me think that.

DIMBLEBY: You’ve explained the background to
it and how you felt that this was really a private
matter and was wrongly exposed publicly, but one
thing people were puzzled by, which was when you
said you hadn’t had a sexual relationship with
Lewinsky, did you seriously, when you said that, not
consider oral sex to be a sexual relationship.

CLINTON: First of all I never discuss what did or
didn’t happen; so you only have one side of what
happened. I don’t believe in discussing it and won’t.
Secondly, did you read the instructions I was given?

DIMBLEBY: Which instructions?

CLINTON: Well, keep in mind we were, I testified
very differently to the Grand Jury, than I did in the civil
deposition. I was given the most bizarre definition of
sexual definition – er, relations, which the lawyers said
for, the Republican lawyers that were going after me, said
they did to spare me embarrassment. Then, my lawyer,
and then I personally, I personally asked those lawyers if
they wanted to ask me a specific question and they said
‘No’. And then, they claimed that I had lied in the
deposition, because I had answered no to this contorted
definition they gave me, which to this day, I still believe
is the right answer.

DIMBLEBY: So you’ve never said you had oral
sex, or she did oral sex on you. That’s what …

CLINTON: (overlaps) I’ve never answered that one way
or the other.

DIMBLEBY: Right.

CLINTON: I answered questions in the grand jury
about what I thought the definition meant. But you
know, I wasn’t, keep in mind, at the time I went through
that deposition, I wasn’t in the business of helping them,
and I wasn’t supposed to help them, because they knew
the law suit - that gave them the power to ask me these
questions - was a total fraud. They knew it. And the judge
threw it out. They knew that the theory on which they
were asking me these questions was a total fraud. They
knew there had never been any sexual harassment, and
they knew something I didn’t know, which is that they
had gotten Kenneth Starr involved in the case, for total
political reasons.

Now, maybe you know, given the import of your
question, maybe you think all this is perfectly legitimate
and every person in the world should be treated this way;
I don’t, I think it was wrong. I think it was done by people
who craved power, who wanted to concentrate wealth and
power in my country. Who wanted to radically revise my
country’s future, and move it to the right, and who
resented the fact that two thirds of the American people
supported what I was doing. Now does that excuse what I
did? No. But what they did was a threat to the
Constitution and the fabric of life in America and the
future of the country. And I think when they get in power
they do things that I don’t agree with. So, I fought them,
and I’m glad I did.

DIMBLEBY: You say we’re not to know what you
did and that’s obviously your affair, but your wife, in
her book clearly sets out that you did lie to her.

CLINTON: I did do that and…
BOTH TOGETHER
DIMBLEBY: … you lied to her about your
relationship with …

BOTH TOGETHER

CLINTON: And I said I did, and I acknowledge that in
my book.

DIMBLEBY: So, it is true that you lied.

CLINTON: Ab – is it true that I didn’t tell her the
truth, I didn’t tell anybody the truth. When it broke
publicly, and it was obvious to me that I’d been set up and
when I asked … specifically to ask me these questions,
they declined to do so. And that they had manoeuvred,
that Starr had manoeuvred himself in to the case, I
decided that the most important thing that I should do is
not to compound my personal error by letting these people
win and that in the meantime I shouldn’t expose anybody
until the thing calmed down a little bit because we had a
mad prosecutor on the loose who was dying to indict
anybody.

Let me remind you, in violation of the Justice
Department guidelines, he compelled Monica Lewinsky’s
mother to testify. You know, if this had been a normal
thing where I had been found to have done wrong
personally, and I’d been asked about it, I would have
simply dealt with it in an appropriate way, with my family
and everybody else. Said here’s the evidence, you did
wrong, talk about it. That was not the environment in
which I lived.

DIMBLEBY: You were fighting for your
presidency and you were fighting as you saw it against
political enemies.

CLINTON: Absolutely.

BOTH TOGETHER

DIMBLEBY: Right through ..and that was what it
was about?

CLINTON: Wasn’t as I saw it sir, we had several years
of evidence. We had several years of evidence. Kenneth
Starr would not be allowed to be prosecutor against me as
a defendant in any decent court in the land.

DIMBLEBY: You obviously …

CLINTON: And, and let me just say this. One of the
reasons he got away with it is because people like you
only ask people like me the questions. You gave him a
complete free ride. Any abuse they wanted to do, they
indicted all these little people from Arkansas, what did
you care about them, they’re not famous, who cares that
their life were trampled. Who cares that their children
are humiliated. Who cares if Starr sends FBI agents to
their school, and rip them out of their school to humiliate
them, and try to force their parents to lie about me. Who
cares if he sends a woman like Susan McDougal in to
Hannibal Lector like cell and makes her wear a uniform
worn only by murderers and child molesters. Nobody in
your line of work cared a rip about that at the time. Why,
because he was helping their story.

And that’s the difference in me and the people that were
after me. I actually cared about what happened to those
people, and I wanted to be President to help those people.
And that’s what the fight was about. Now that doesn’t
justify any mistake I made, but look how much time you
spent asking me these questions, and this time you’ve had
… that’s cos what you care about, cos that’s what you
think helps you and helps this interview. I care about what
happened to the people that I fought for.

And that’s why people like you always help the Far
Right cos you like to hurt people, and you like to talk
about how bad people are and all their personal failings,
and (David interjects) and that’s why you. Look, just –
you made a decision to allocate your time in a certain
way. You should take responsibility for that. You should
say yes, I care much more about this than whether the
Bosnian people were saved, and whether he bought a
million people home from Kosovo, than whether twenty
seven million people had jobs at the end, and whether we
moved a hundred times as many people out of poverty as
Regan and Bush. This is what I care about.

DIMBLEBY: I will come to those things, and I
don’t intend to avoid them and I don’t intend to talk
endlessly about Monica Lewinsky.

CLINTON: Well me when we, when this is over ..

BOTH TOGETHER

DIMBLEBY: Your book goes in to this.

CLINTON: It does.

DIMBLEBY: It gives a very interesting insight in
to something that is just as important as your
achievements, which is the nature of the Presidency,
and the power of the President.

CLINTON: I agree with that.

DIMBLEBY: And let me move on to the next point
which I was going to make. You talk about parallel
lives. At the point when the Lewinsky affair was
happening, you were also dealing with a terrible crisis
over Al Qaeda.

CLINTON: U-hum..

DIMBLEBY: The bombing of the two embassies in
East Africa and day by day, I mean to quote you, you
say, I alternated between begging forgiveness with
your wife ..

CLINTON: That’s true.

DIMBLEBY: And planning strikes on Al Qaeda.

CLINTON: That’s true.

DIMBLEBY: Did it do damage to your power of
concentration and decision making as President?

CLINTON: No. I really don’t think so. And I believe
interestingly enough, when I..I don’t want to jump the gun
on the Nine Eleven Commission at home, you know this
by bi parties commission thing. But I think I can say this
because I believe it’s already been made public. The
Commission told me when I met with them for four hours
that they had actually made a finding that none of my
personal challenges or the impeachment thing had any
impact on the decisions that I made or didn’t make as
President, which I was gratified by.

DIMBLEBY: Do you yourself feel that?

CLINTON: Absolutely. But I tell you this is quite
interesting and when I talk about the parallel lives thing
when I was, you know, as a child and you pointed out
that.. some of the problems with having parallel lives and
I agree with you which I tried to be candid about. The flip
side of that is it stood me in very good stead when I had to
go through the whole struggle with the Congress and
Starr and the impeachment thing because I had been doing
that all my life. I worried far more about the people who
were working with me, who had never been subject to
personal attacks who never had to face the problems in
their own lives than I did myself because it’s something I
knew how to do. I’d been doing that since I was a boy.

And we organised the White House so that we could
answer questions likes these questions on the
impeachment or the…the whole deposition, all of that.
We were organised there. And when they needed me I
spent a few minutes and answered their questions so they
briefed me and for the rest of the time we worked on the
Presidency and it sounds crazy to someone who’s never
been through it but I knew how to do that. And I’d had a
lot of practice in the ninety two campaign in the first term
but, basically, it went back to my childhood for learning
to live with big pot of problems. When my mother wrote
her memoirs she talked about the same thing.

DIMBLEBY: And you, as you describe, were
kicked out the marital bed and living on the couch..

CLINTON: I was..(laughs)

DIMBLEBY: While you were doing all this…?

CLINTON: I laugh about it now but it’s true, it’s..it’s
true.

DIMBLEBY: Was it horrifying?

CLINTON: Oh actually I thought it was healthy, I
thought that in a funny way I thought the fact that I was
sleeping on the couch and they were still in the same
house with me meant that Hilary and Chelsea hadn’t
given on me. I figured that, as I said, I was getting a
whipping at home where I should have gotten it. I thought
whatever they wanted to say or do to me, Hilary and
Chelsea, they had an absolute right to do so the fact that I
was still able to stay under the same roof does.. even
though I was.. I thought that was progress (laughs) so I.. I
was just glad to be among the living there at home
but..and frankly eh, perhaps I shouldn’t acknowledge this
but it was a relief to have to go to work and concentrate
on something else cos otherwise I would have nothing to
think about all day long but what a bad fella I’d been.

DIMBLEBY: Your critics say that you gave the
action against terrorism and against Al Qaeda a low
priority I know the 9/11 Commission is sitting on this,
if you had known what we now know about terrorism
and nine eleven, would you have acted more toughly
than you did?

CLINTON: Well first of all it’s not fair to say I gave it
a low priority. I…I had a piece of sweeping anti terrorism
legislation for the Congress in nineteen ninety four. After
Oklahoma City, after the Oklahoma City bombing I
strengthened it and we took another year to pass it in the
congress.

If you go all the way back to nineteen ninety three you
will see we were bringing terrorists back home, we were
preventing terrorist attacks, we prevented terrorist attacks
in the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, the UN
Building, the Los Angeles airport. We thwarted terrorist
attacks over the Millennium that were planned on
America in the Middle East. We broke up twenty Al
Qaeda cells. I came closer to getting Osama Bin Laden
with that air action in nineteen ninety eight that anybody
has since, apparently. Erm, I think the…the question is
could we have invaded Afghanistan based on the African
Embassy bombings? I don’t think so.

DIMBLEBY: Why not?

CLINTON: Well because, I mean in theory we could
have but we would have been all alone everybody would
have thought we were crazy based on that. And then could
I have.. would I have done more after the USS Cole in
October two thousand. And could I have if, that’s one big
if. If the government intelligence agencies in this case the
FBI and the CIA had agreed with me even though my
term was almost over and had told me that they agreed for
sure that Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were responsible for
the USS Cole, a finding they did not make until after I had
left office, I would have done more then.

Would it have succeeded in getting Bin Laden, would it
have prevented 9/11, I don’t know. I mean, we’ve got..
look how long we’ve been in Afghanistan and we still
haven’t succeeded in that. And believe me, I have asked a
lot of these questions myself

DIMBLEBY: Do you expect the 9/11 Commission to
be critical of what you did as President about
terrorism?

I think the 9/11 Commission can make up its own mind
whether on both the attacks on Al Qaeda and the strategy
we adopted, and on the question of homeland defence, I
did enough. I’ll leave that to others to judge. But all I
can tell you, it was a big priority with me, I never lost my
concentration on it, and I worked on it for my first term.
And I think the record will show that we did a heck of a
lot.

I made lots of decisions as President; it’s inconceivable
that they were all right. They couldn’t have all been
right, and if they can find something they think I should
have done differently, then I want them to tell the
American people, because I think what – we’re in for a
long struggle here against terror, and none of us need to
be too defensive. We need to say, in the end, we want
freedom to triumph over terror, and we need to keep
learning and keep getting better and we will.

DIMBLEBY: There’s a striking difference between
your attitude towards Saddam Hussein and Iraq and
that of your successor, the present President. Am I
right in thinking that you thought that containment
was the most effective way of restraining Saddam?

CLINTON: Well, that was the policy of the previous
Bush administration.

DIMBLEBY: And yours.

CLINTON: Yes. For most of the time I was there, the
idea was that his military is less than half the strength it
was in the first Gulf War, which is factually true. We had
these inspections going on and we were making progress
and we were getting the chemical and biological agents
and the laboratory capacity out of there and while he’s not
a good man he’s getting older and eh, as long as we don’t
lift the sanctions and let him rebuild his military power,
that eventually we’ll get a change there.

Then in ninety eight when Saddam kicked the inspectors
out to try to force us to lift the sanctions. Prime Minister
Blair and I bombed him for four days and we bombed the
sites where thought the chemical and biological materials
would be. Because we didn’t get the inspectors back in
we had no idea if we destroyed all of it, half of it, ten per
cent of it, none of it.

So then when President Bush went back to the UN, after
9/11, to demand that the inspectors be let in, I strongly
supported that.

When President Bush asked for authority for the Senate to
use force if Saddam didn’t cooperate with the UN, I
strongly supported that. My only difference and.. and.. I
adopted, in ninety eight, after we kicked the inspectors
out, a policy of regime change. I thought, well, we’re
never going to be ever to do any consistent business with
this guy. That’s different from invading him. You know, I
said we ought to support the opposition elements and just
keep working until we get a new leader.

So, I didn’t have any profound difference with the policy
until it was decided to invade Iraq before the UN
Weapons Inspection process was finished because Hans
Blix I have a very high regard for, he was very tough on
Saddam. He was very explicit when they weren’t fully
cooperating and I thought we should get a chance to
finish.

I also always felt that Bin Laden and Al Qaeda were a far,
far bigger threat and in the early days I worried about
whether we had enough troops in Afghanistan and
whether we wouldn’t weaken our ability to stabilise
President Karzai’s regime, prevent the Taliban and some
of the opium growing warlords from resorting their,
restoring their power. So that’s kind of where I differed.

DIMBLEBY: So what you’re saying is you were
opposed to the invasion of Iraq?

CLINTON: What I am saying is I believe that we
should have led the.. I would have supported the invasion
of Iraq, whether or not we’d had UN opposition, if the UN
inspectors had finished their job and Han Blix had said
they won’t cooperate.

The point is we were there under the authority of the UN
resolution that was about the weapons inspections so I
believe that we should have let them finish. Now we are
where we are, an Amer.. you know, I’m an American first
and the minute the President wants the investigation I was
for the troops and the mission and I did believe that when
it was over we should have immediately moved to
internationalise it, finally that has been done. We’re
moving to give the sovereignty back to the Iraqis and that
we have a new UN resolution for internationalising it, I
think that they’re moving er, in the right direction now.
We still got a lot of tough days ahead, I mean, you know,
but I think basically we’re moving in the right direction
now.

DIMBLEBY: It’s reported that you went privately to
Chequers to see Tony Blair before the invasion. Is that
true and presumably if it is true you didn’t urge him
to support President Bush?

CLINTON: Well I have sa.. I don’t.. you’re asking me
a question and I’m not sure exactly when I was at
Chequers, vis a vis the Iraq date. I’ve been there several
times since I left office. Tony Blair and I are friends. Mrs
Blair and Hillary and all, we’re all friends and I stayed in
touch with him and I urged him to try to work with the,
with the incoming Bush administration because I think the
partnership for the British and the Americans is important
it should transcend party politics and personal differences.

DIMBLEBY: But did you share your doubts about the
wisdom of invading…

CLINTON: Well I…

DIMBLEBY: …without a UN backing.

CLINTON: But here’s the problem Tony Blair faced.
Blair had a problem unique in Europe and that’s why I
went to the Labour Party Conference in Blackpool and
defended him …he had a problem unique in Europe.

Britain, the UK, had been the bridge between the US in
Europe but when America moved to the right after the
2000 election there was nobody to be the bridge between
the US and Europe but the UK. Blair also believed as I
did that we had to open Iraq to inspections, which all the
rest of Europe agreed to after 9/11. They agreed with that.
And that if Saddam Hussein blocked the inspections and
didn’t finish, we should be prepared to attack. I agreed
with that.
So in other words I basically had the same position that
Prime Minister Blair did. That is, not where the Bush
administration was which is we want to attack anyway,
whether there’s weapons or not there and not where the
Europeans were, which is even if there are weapons there
or even if he won’t let the inspections proceed, he’s too
weak to do any harm. We’re helping America and the
world in Afghanistan, let’s don’t fight regardless.

So here was Blair stuck in the middle, same place I was.
And the ground that he wanted to stake out was
represented in the last gasp UN Resolution, if you
remember, that failed, it said let’s give him six more
weeks, or however much time it was, and it collapsed.
So Prime Minister Blair was left in an unenviable
position. He either had to go with the American position,
which he didn’t entirely agree with or go with the
European position, which he didn’t entirely agree with.

And in the end I believed he thought that there was still
some risk that Saddam had the weapons, that if he stayed
involved, he could have an impact on the post-Saddam
Iraq. But if he stayed involved, he could keep America
and Europe, closer together than they otherwise would
have been, and so he made the decision he did. I can’t
quarrel with that; he was in a very difficult position.

DIMBLEBY: But had it been you there, in the White
House or Al Gore there in the White House, this
wouldn’t have arisen, there wouldn’t have been an
invasion of Iraq on these terms.

CLINTON: No. But we might have had to invade
anyway. It would just depend on what happened – with
the wea, weapons inspection. But keep in mind, I had no
problem with that. I never liked Saddam Hussein, we
bombed him several times but I just didn’t think he was as
big a threat as Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, and I was
more concerned with diverting and dividing our resources
until we had finished that job.

DIMBLEBY: But you back in the ‘60s over Vietnam
endorsed what your mentor at the time, Senator
Fulbright, said about American power. That ‘Nations
get in to trouble when they’re arrogant in use of power
and pursue a foreign policy rooted in missionary zeal’.
Did you wonder, do you wonder whether that’s what’s
happened with the use of American power in Iraq?

CLINTON: I think that all Americans felt a certain
missionary zeal after 9/11 and I think we can be forgiven
for feeling a little bit of that. But, my view is that we live
interdependent world, where lots of good and bad things
happen and that most of the problems of that world do not
readily lend themselves to unilateral solutions.

That is, if you are in an environment where you have
actual and potential adversaries, and you don’t want any
help in dealing with them, and you’d like to do whatever
you want to do. The first question you have to ask
yourself is a practical one. Is it possible for me to kill,
occupy or jail all these people. If the answer to that is no,
which it clearly is with the terrorist threat, then you need
two things. You need allies and you need politics. You
need in other words, a process for making war with more
partners than if you were a terrorist.

So that’s why I would, tilt more towards the multilateral
solutions and I don’t think it’s right to get rid of the
conflicts of test ban treaty or the climate change accord,
or the international criminal court or you know, all those
things where I am on a different, I have a different
analysis of this than most of the Republicans do.

DIMBLEBY: Towards the end of your period as
President, you came in your description, close to
achieving a peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
Some people say you were rushing it a bit, others say
it’s an intractable position.

CLINTON: I’m convinced that if Rabin had not been
killed in late 1995, that by 1998 we would have had a
conference of agreement in the Middle East. On the other
hand, to be fair to all the other parties, the process, not the
product, the product in vision in the Middle East peace in
’93, was a Palestinian State that was predominantly but
not exclusively Arab Muslim and an Israel that was
predominantly but not exclusively Jewish. And the
process said look, we’ve been fighting all these years so
we’re going to take baby steps for a few years and then
when we get to the end we’ll take the big steps.

What happened was that all the baby steps, given the
changes and the challenges that both sides were facing,
almost made it harder to get to the big steps because Israel
had more and more immigrants coming in from the
former Soviet Union and North Africa, more and more
people in the settlements, so the compromises became
more difficult.

The Palestinians had more and more competition for the
hearts and minds, the PLO did, of the Palestinian people,
from Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic Jihad. So one of the
things that by 1998 the Conservatives in Israel, the Likud
people, began to talk about is whether we should truncate
this step-by-step process and go right to the end and try
and get to the big issues.

DIMBLEBY: And at that point you seem to blame
Yasser Arafat for not being willing to make the leap.

CLINTON: (overlaps) Well I, I do believe he made a
terrible mistake and I think he admitted that by – within a
year or so after I left the White House, Yasser Arafat said
he wanted a peace agreement based on the parameters I
set out in late 2000. But by then, he had an Israeli public
who not longer trusted him and an Israeli government
who wouldn’t give it to him. So you’ve had all these
other peace agreements, peace efforts like this Geneva
Accord, you know where the Palestinians and the Israelis
met in Switzerland and there was another effort or two,
where they were just trying to fill in the blanks. There are
clearly, Israelis and Palestinians who want to make peace.

I think Arafat made a historical error, and I think he’s
acknowledged it, and now just the question is can we get
both sides back in to place where they can do what they
know what they have to do.

DIMBLEBY: But given the current hostility towards
the United States in the Middle East because of Iraq,
because of America’s support for Israel, do you think
that America can any longer act as a broker of that
peace?

CLINTON: Well, for one thing… The answer to that is
yes. For one simple reason; because Israel knows that
whether we have a Democrat or a Republican President,
that no matter what other things we fight about at home
and abroad, America is firmly, politically, and
emotionally committed to the survival of the State of
Israel. And no government can make a better deal for the
Palestinians who have been oppressed and abused and
ignored by everybody, including a lot of their Arab
brothers.

There is no deal to be made there by America or any other
country unless Israel believes the interlocutor has as a
bottom line condition the continued survival of the State
of Israel; so yes, I do, I think President Bush can make
some progress. I think after the next election, whoever
wins will be able to make some progress but I think that
also we have to fight for the legitimate aspirations of the
Palestinians.

I think the trick is to do both and you can do both as long
as the Israelis believe you’re going to be there for their
survival. I mean look at all the things I ask them to accept,
you know, the de facto 97% of the West Bank as a state,
all of the, the Temple Mount and the East Jerusalem and
half the old city as Al Quds, the Palestinian capital.

DIMBLEBY: The role of the President is to define
during his watch, America’s place in the world and
you have talked about crises coming at you all the
time. Would you agree that America’s response to
crises was very uneven, sent out an uncertain signal.
For instance you were prepared to use bombing raids
to save Kosovo, you weren’t prepared to lift a finger
for Rwanda, where eight hundred thousand people
were massacred in a genocide.

CLINTON: Well, I would agree to some extent that the
response was uneven, but I would not agree with the
characterisation of it. Let me try to give a serious answer
to that. It was predictably uneven because at the end of
the Cold War, we no longer had a bi-polar world. We
had to figure out how we were going to do what I thought
we should do. What I wanted America to do was to be the
world’s leading force for peace and freedom and security
and prosperity. Helping to integrate this interdependent
world in to a more effective global community.

At the same time, we had obligations that we had inherited
from before and we had limits on what we could do. We
didn’t go in to Bosnia as quickly as I wanted to, but that was
mostly because of initial European reluctance, so I was
trying to do two things; I was trying to end the slaughter of
the Bosnian War, but to do it in a way that would increase
European integration, and increase the trans-Atlantic
partnership and it took a couple of years to get that done and
a lot of people died in the mean time, but the major, the
death rate went way down in Bosnia, even before we started
bombing for the peace talks started. Cos we tried to do it in
a way that would put things together.

In Kosovo, all of the European allies were ready from the
beginning. I can’t say enough about them, it wasn’t just
an American operation. Everybody was ready to go, they
know what Milosevic was, they knew what he’d do, and
they went immediately. And that was, led to the end of
Milosevic.

In Northern Ireland what I did was controversial in Great
Britain in the beginning, but in the end, everybody knew
that I didn’t want to end the special relationship with the
UK, I wanted to use the Irish Diaspora in America to
leverage legitimate peace.

In Rwanda, it, as I say over and over again, it’s one of my
greatest regrets. But we look at it backwards and say, well
I had to know that seven or eight hundred thousand
people could be killed with machetes in ninety days, and
as far as I know, there’s no precedent for that in the
history of the world.

DIMBLEBY: But the Red Cross was warning that
this was happening at the time.

CLINTON: The Red Cross was warning, and that’s right.
And that’s right. And I acknowledge that I think perhaps
the greatest failure was - we did – none of us paid
sufficient attention to it. It is one of my greatest regrets
and I went to Rwanda and told them so. Eventually we
got in to the camps and we saved a lot of lives, but we
could have saved probably even with the delay it takes to
go there, we could have saved a couple of hundred
thousand more if we’d moved more quickly. I agree with
that.

I tried to never make that mistake in Africa again. There
is no question that I could have saved lives if I had
unilaterally gone in there, and we didn’t. I think partly
it was the bad experience of Somalia, partly it was the
preoccupation with Bosnia at the time. Partly it was the
preoccupation with Haiti at the time, where there was a lot
of mass slaughter going on, and we were trying to get in
there.

DIMBLEBY: One last thing, you talk about your
policies and how they’ve been altered and your
domestic policies, which we haven’t talked about, have
clearly been changed. Do you now look to a Kerry
victory to restore the domestic policies that you
introduced or will we have to wait for a second Clinton
presidency, in the form of President Hillary Clinton?

CLINTON: Well, first of all I support John Kerry. He’s
a good man, he’s a good senator and I believe he’d be
quite a good President.

DIMBLEBY: Quite?

CLINTON: Very very good President. Quite a good
President, you don’t say that? I think he will, I think
he’d be an excellent President. I’ve got confidence not
only in his views but in the psychological strengths and
the experience he brings to the office; so I think that
would help. But the point I try to make in my book is
that no specific programmatic or policy decisions of any
administration are permanent.

What tends to endure are two things. One on an
individual level, were people’s lives improved or not, and
if so how. And secondly, in a directional level, did I take
the right direction toward the future because while this
period of debate is going on, there may be reversals of the
specific policies, but I’m still, I still believe that we have
no choice, but to move to an integrated world. We’ll have
to do it, and so I feel comfortable that I did what I could
for my country, and in the meanwhile, the way I always
kept score which is how are the little guys doing, I really
like to think about that. So I feel good about it.

DIMBLEBY: And President Hilary Clinton?

CLINTON: I don’t know, because we’ve – Hillary and I
have been in this business long enough to know you can’t
look to far down the road . Right now we’re focused on
this election and trying to help our guy. I can say this;
she has been a fabulous Senator, and if she ever had the
chance to serve, she’d be great. She’s – I’ve never known
anybody abler than her in public life, including me, ever.
She’s something truly special and I’m glad she’s in the
Senate and I hope she gets a chance to stay in public life.

DIMBLEBY: And they’d be getting two for the price
of one.

CLINTON: Yeah, we tried that before and it didn’t work
out so well. I think I’ll just pour tea. (Laughs)

DIMBLEBY: Mr President thank you.

CLINTON: Thanks. Actually, it did work out very well
for the country.