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| Sunday, 8 August 2004 |
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Clinton accuses Bush of contracting out US security to Pakistan TORONTO, Saturday (AFP) Former US president Bill Clinton on Thursday accused President George W. Bush's administration of contracting out US security and the hunt for Osama bin Laden to Pakistan, in its zeal to wage war in Iraq. Though he didn't mention Bush by name, Clinton, on a book tour in Canada, said the Iraq war had drained resources which could have been better spent chasing the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks. "We will never know if we could have gotten him (bin Laden), because we didn't make it a priority," Clinton said in an interview with CBC television. Clinton, who is supporting Bush's Democratic opponent Senator John Kerry in the November 2 US election, said that at the time of the Iraq war, Saddam Hussein was only Washington's number five security threat. "Why did we put our number one security threat in the hands of the Pakistanis with us playing the supporting role and put all our military resources into Iraq which was I think at best our number five security threat?" asked Clinton. "How did we get to the point where we have 130,000 troops in Iraq and 15,000 in Afghanistan?" Clinton said other top security threats after the September 11, 2001 attacks on which the Bush administration should have concentrated were the Middle East, the India-Pakistan conflict, and North Korea's nuclear program. He asked whether, "as a military proposition it was wise to make all these commitments in Iraq and in effect contract our security out to the Pakistanis in Afghanistan and with bin Laden and al-Qaeda, which is unquestionably what has happened." Clinton also said that, had he been president during the run-up to the Iraq war and former United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix told him Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, he would have sided with Blix in the face of US intelligence data to thwe contrary. "It is not a question of believing him over US intelligence agencies, but the intelligence was ambiguous on the point, really." |
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