Administration Values Petty Political Revenge More Than American Lives

David Corn Interviews former ambassador Joseph Wilson

Valerie and I realized that for all the hardship it may have imposed upon us, the real crime was the crime against the national security of the country and the responsibility for investigating that crime lay with the appropriate authorities. We have tried to avoid giving the impression that we thought of ourselves as victims. We thought that the country was the victim.

I'm appalled that they haven't gotten to the bottom of it yet, and I have to conclude that the reason is because administration officials in the know are simply stonewalling. The president made it very clear in a public comment that he expected his senior officials to cooperate with the investigation because he wanted to get to the bottom of it. Now either the president was just not being serious when he made that statement, or else his senior staff is disobeying him, or else he doesn't have any authority over his senior staff. You take your pick.

I believe it's important to understand that whether or not the special counsel finds evidence of a crime that enables him to prosecute, it is an irrefutable fact that the national security of the United States has been violated. The person who did this falls into the category of what George H.W. Bush once called the "most insidious of traitors." So they can hide behind a criminal investigation – which is what of course the administration is doing – but that does not get them out from under the charge that somebody decided that his or her political agenda was more important than the national security of my country and that this person was prepared to betray a national security asset to defend that agenda. And that person could still be in their position and still have security clearance.

I always thought that a vigorous debate would have yielded what I thought was the right approach: diplomacy backed by the credible threat of force. You had to be prepared to use force, but if you were going to use the force, it needed to be targeted at the national security objective you wanted to achieve. You needed to have in the calculation some risk/reward, some cost/benefit analyses. It always seemed to me that the invasion, conquest and occupation of Iraq as a means of disarming Hussein was the highest risk, lowest reward option, particularly when it was clear that UN Security Council Resolution 1441 [which led to revived weapons inspections in Iraq] was working.

Recently, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that no one a year ago – including himself – predicted that the situation in Iraq would be so difficult today. Before the war, weren't you, among others, warning that instability and U.S. casualties could continue for a long time after the invasion?

I think if you go back and you look at the interview that I did with Bill Moyers in February of last year, you will see that I suggested that this was a possible outcome. That interview stands the test of time.