Not a Parody
Not a Parody Former President Bill Clinton addressed the annual spring conference of the Conference Board in New York on April 15, 2003. [Interviewer Marvin Kalb asks Clinton if he agrees with the...
...It gave us the right to interpret all future events in a way that everyone else in the world must agree with us, and if they don't they can go straight to hell...
...We liked the U.N...
...Blix do it, when all these countries came to our aid after 9/11 and many still have soldiers at risk in Afghanistan with us, is a gross overreaction...
...You know, Hans Blix was begging for more time, and they said, "We think he ought to have it...
...It's a complicated world out there, they don't work for us...
...I was shocked and grateful...
...CLINTON: Yeah, I am...
...There are German and French soldiers in Afghanistan today...
...KALB: [It sounds like you are] profoundly in disagreement with those people in the administration right now who feel very negatively toward the U.N...
...I think the idea that we should somehow scorn everyone who disagrees with us, because we decided that we would set the timetable for an invasion instead of letting Mr...
...Interviewer Marvin Kalb asks Clinton if he agrees with the view that America has undergone a fundamental change with a new president, 9/11, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.] Bill Clinton: No . . . [the] fundamental larger realities of the world are and were the same...
...I still think Kofi Annan's a good guy who deserved the Nobel Peace Prize...
...We don't want 'em to help us find bin Laden any more since they didn't agree with our timetable in Iraq...
...Our paradigm now seems to be, something terrible happened to us on September 11...
...a lot after September 11, when the whole world said, "We'll go to Afghanistan and help you get Osama bin Laden...
...I'm totally angry and I'll tell you why...
...He said, "You warned us about this for years and years and years, and we never covered it because we felt secure, and we felt we preferred to cover all the stuff that beat you up and diverted the American people from this...
...And our side says "no, we're gonna liberate Iraq, and we've got a resolution which gives us the authority to do it, and so we've determined that we're gonna do it now, and if you don't like it we'll get even with you when it's over...
...I think if we had given it a little more time, there is a chance either that [Saddam] would have disarmed or if we had gone in then we would've had far more members of the Security Council with us...
...I had one guy, one only in your business who . . . had a very prominent role in one of the networks, call me in the week after September 11 and he said, "Nobody else is gonna call you but I will...
...But," he said, "I just went back and pulled a list of what you said and what you did and when you did it," and he said, "I just want you to know, no one else will say this to you but I'm going to do it...
...So yeah, I'm still pretty much for the U.N...
Vol. 8 • April 2003 • No. 32
