Big Think

Transcript:I thought it wasn’t and argued against the war that we fought. I did think that the regime of constraint which had been established after the First Gulf War, which involved the no fly zones and the UN inspectors in the country and the embargo on the import of arms. I thought that was a just regime and that we should have sustained that regime. We needed to improve the embargo. We needed what Colin Powel called smart sanctions, because the sanction system was hurting ordinary Iraqi civilians, but there should have been a way--and I have spoken to some of the people who were running the embargo who say there were ways--to deal just with weapons and not to prevent food and medicine from reaching the people. So that system of constraint which I think was working--we now know that it prevented the Iraq from developing weapons of mass destruction. That system of constraint should have been sustained.