Last night, during a contentious interview with Bush Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell wondered if Saddam Hussein “was the same threat to New Yorkers that Osama bin Laden was.” With the obvious answer being, “No,” Rice had to come up with something. Similar to President Bush’s “You forgot Poland” line during the 2004 presidential debate, Rice said the threat from, and thus invasion of, Iraq was justified by the coalition Bush put together. O’Donnell noted that the so-called “coalition of the willing” didn’t exactly represent the full support of the international community, but in the fog of the interview’s back and forth, Rice just started adding countries that weren’t even part of the coalition:
RICE: So the Georgians who went there and the Japanese who went there and others –Watch it, starting at 5:22:
O’DONNELL: Actually had soldiers firing weapons on the ground?
RICE: This was not part of the coalition. The people who — the British and the Australians and the Poles and all of those who — the Canadians, all of those who were ultimately in Iraq, these were not part of the coalition?
This must be news to the Canadians. While Canada did participate in reconstruction projects after the war began, the Canadian government led by Liberal Party Prime Minister Jean Chrétien did not support the decision to invade. But seeing that Dr. Rice has never made a mistake in her life, perhaps it’s the facts that are wrong in this case.
In what turned out to be a very contentious interview, the Last Word's Lawrence O'Donnell pressed former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice about the Bush administration's use of faulty intelligence to invade Iraq. Rice was defensive and got angry with O'Donnell for his line of questioning and was still defending their excuses for the invasion.
It got sticky pretty early:
O'DONNELL: As we look back and reflect on September 11th today, I want to quote something that President Bush said about September 11th, the lesson of September 11th. He said this repeatedly. It became boilerplate in the speeches.It's about time someone subjected one of these Bushies to an interview where they were pushed the way Rice was here. This is the way any of them should be treated any time they're allowed on the air. I'm tired of watching them all come back on the television to revise history without even being questioned on their lies on Iraq and WMD's, much less challenged when they lie on the air as Rice did here.
"September 11th taught us a lesson I will never forget and America must never forget -- America must confront threats before they fully materialize. My administration looked at the facts and the history and looked at the intelligence in Iraq and we saw a threat."
He's clearly saying that September 11th is the reason he looked at Iraq differently and saw a threat there.
RICE: Yes.
Are you surprised by that?
O'DONNELL: Yes. Because --
RICE: After September --
O'DONNELL: -- because Iraq had --
RICE: -- after September 11th --
O'DONNELL: -- nothing to do with --
RICE: -- after --
O'DONNELL: ---.
RICE: -- after, of course you look at threats differently. Your country has just been attacked. You know that you cannot allow threats to materialize.
Do you know how many times I've been asked --
(CROSSTALK)
O'DONNELL: But there was nothing in the --
(CROSSTALK)
O'DONNELL: -- threat that Iraq --
(CROSSTALK)
RICE: Lawrence --
(CROSSTALK)
O'DONNELL: -- presented --
(CROSSTALK)
RICE: -- Lawrence --
(CROSSTALK)
O'DONNELL: -- that was in any way related to us --
(CROSSTALK)
RICE: Lawrence, we can end this --
(CROSSTALK)
O'DONNELL: -- and.
(CROSSTALK)
RICE: -- interview right now if you don't want me to finish my --
(CROSSTALK)
O'DONNELL: Go ahead.
(CROSSTALK)
RICE: -- my point.
Thank you.
If one looks at what happened to us on, we didn't connect the dots. There was a threat materializing that we didn't respond to. Saddam Hussein had been a threat from the time that he invaded Iran in the late 1980s, through the 1991, when, in fact, he went into Kuwait, dragging us into war.
We thought he had reconstituted his weapons of mass destruction. And in a context in which terrorism and weapons of mass destruction was a nexus that we could not allow, we decided that this was a threat that had to be dealt with.
O'DONNELL: Forty thousand casualties later, in Iraq, 4,400 military -- American military deaths in Iraq later, would you say that is the single biggest miscalculation that the Bush administration made, that Osama -- that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and must be stopped by those military men who went in there and found no weapons of mass destruction?
RICE: Sadda -- Saddam Hussein was threat. He had used weapons of mass destruction. This was not --
O'DONNELL: But we now know he wasn't a threat --
RICE: Lawrence, are we going to do this with my answers or with --
O'DONNELL: Go ahead.
RICE: -- your commentary?
Rachel Maddow came on the air a few minutes early to discuss the interview with O'Donnell.
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