INTERESTING CLINTON INTERVIEW — blaming the French and the Germans for the invasion of Iraq?

But at the time nearly everybody thought there was probably a stock of chemical and biological weapons there and it was vulnerable to falling into the wrong hands, either by design or by corruption within Saddam’s regime. And essentially the French and the Germans said we still don’t care. . . .

When both sides in effect fell away from him, the US on one side and France and Germany on the other, he [Tony Blair] was left with the prospect of walking away from what he believed was weapons of mass destruction site, or walking forward without the UN and Europe, it was a terrible dilemma for him. Let me remind you, I don’t know what the Butler report is going to say obviously, but at least according to the reports at the time and ever since, British intelligence was even more far leaning than American intelligence. The CIA for example never believed that Saddam had any ties to Al-Qaeda and the CIA we all know from President Bush’s hotly disputed State of the Union speech. It was the British intelligence, not American intelligence that believed Saddam attempted to get, or did get nuclear materials from Niger in Africa. So your intelligence was apparently more aggressive than ours and Blair had to act on it I think.

Interesting catch. (Full transcript here.)