THE BBC-CLINTON INTERVIEW (Transcript)

BBC TELEVISION THE CLINTON INTERVIEW: A PANORAMA SPECIAL BBC1 TUESDAY 22ND JUNE 2004

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.

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 …

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: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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: 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 …

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: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ..

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.

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: 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.

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: 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

That's hilarious. He goes on and on about not being an angry person, dropping greek quotes and all, spouting psychobabble about his stepdad, then blammo! He goes ballistic! What a riot! But I'll be happy when Swillie disappears again.

CLINTON:...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.

Oh, you only thought you were 'on the couch' back in the Monicazoic Era. Wait till Hellary sees this quote Bubba! Nice try for the save at the end, but no dice. Good luck with the re-attachment surgery!

I thought the quote was "what the Gods would destroy, they first make mad" meaning insane. I could be wrong - but I've never heard "they first make angry" meaning pissed.

I'm sure my Freeper friends will correct me.

Thank you for posting this.

I have just begun to read, but my first comment concerns bj's saying:

"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."

And that explains all the "Arkancide" deaths.

Although bj is wrong. Hoffa got elected President (of the teamsters) because of the loyalty of his "friends" too!

The whole show can be seen at this link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsa/n5ctrl/progs/panorama/latest.ram

All 48 minutes in streaming Real Media format.

This quote:

"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 this were a REPUBLICAN President saying this, the headlines all around the world would be:

CLINTON 'NOT IN HIS RIGHT MIND' WHILE PRESIDENT!

PRESIDENT ADMITS HIS THINKING WAS IMPAIRED DURING TERROR CRISIS!

It worked out very well for the country in the same way that passing a kidney stone worked out well for the poor bastard who had to suffer all the pain until it finally passes.

"When falls on man the anger of the gods, first from his mind they banish understanding."

Lycurgus "When divine power plans evil for a man, it first injures his mind."

Sophocles "Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of their senses."

Euripides "Whom God wishes to destroy he first makes mad."

Seneca "For those whom God to ruin has design’d, He fits for fate, and first destroys their mind."

In England Clinton tells all the lies he can cram into an interview and there is never anyone to refute him. They just write down his crap and go on to the next question. Disgusting.

And he admits it! The man admits to living in two different worlds, and not being in his 'right mind' during a terror crisis, and then is 'relieved' when the 9-11 commission tells him that they don't think that his decision making was impaired---like he wasn't sure!

I can not believe that this wacko said these things and there is a virtual news black out about it! He is insane, and proved it in this interview.

I couldn't watch more than half.

He is whacked. And think! Algore fruit-n-toot was his 2nd string replacement! Good lord how did we make it?????!?!?!?!

Did I just answer my own question?

Thank you for the post. He caught himself there in his last comment. He was actually saying the twofer presidency didn't work out so well. LOL!! Amazing.

From a British perspective, Clinton showed he's insane by accusing the BBC of being a right wing tool. I burst out laughing when he said that.

Regards, Ivan

"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."

Translation --- Ever hear of Gorelick, the wall builder?

More crap:

"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."

Later:
" 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..."

Think of the old saying: "you can't make yourself bigger by tearing other people down". But Bubba lived his entire life doing just that. Every time he got caught, he set out to paint his accusers as more evil, more greedy, more hateful than himself...until he believed it. It's the only way he could live with himself. Whatta sicko.

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