Striving for Adequacy: Towards a Neo-Fordite Foreign Policy
By Juan Cole has a nice discussion of Gerald Ford’s foreign policy. Cole concludes that Ford’s record was solid enough, relative to his contemporaries. Loomis does not fully concur, noting that Ford made virtually no effort to press Latin American dictatorships towards better behavior. I probably lean slightly with Cole; signing the Helsinki Accords was a pretty important step towards the end of the Cold War. Pressuring Israel and Egypt to talk, a move for which Carter gained most of the credit, also has to rank as a critical success. Ford also managed the inevitable collapse of South Vietnam well enough, given domestic and international constraints. Peter has more.
Former president Gerald R. Ford said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified. “I don’t think I would have gone to war,” he said a little more than a year after President Bush had launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford’s own administration.
In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., Ford “very strongly” disagreed with the current president’s justifications for invading Iraq and said he would have pushed alternatives, such as sanctions, much more vigorously. In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney — Ford’s White House chief of staff — and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford’s chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.
“Rumsfeld and Cheney and the president made a big mistake in justifying going into the war in Iraq. They put the emphasis on weapons of mass destruction,” Ford said. “And now, I’ve never publicly said I thought they made a mistake, but I felt very strongly it was an error in how they should justify what they were going to do.”