Former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice has said she does not regret the 2003 Iraq war to oust America's "implacable enemy" Saddam Hussein, but admitted that it was a "mistake" to put the spotlight simply on the weapons of mass destruction, which were never found.
"No, I don't regret that we went to war against him (Saddam), because we could be sitting here today, having a discussion about the race for nuclear weapons between Saddam Hussein's Iraq and (President Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad's Iran," Rice said in an interview to CNN.
At the same time, Rice who was in office from 2005 to 2009, said it was a mistake to focus solely on Iraq's alleged stockpile of weapons of mass destruction to justify the war.
"I think the mistake -- and this was a mistake -- was to put a spotlight simply on the weapons of mass destruction. I remember saying to some Senators when I was briefing them, the Russians have 10,000 times more WMD than Iraq has. But I don't worry on a daily basis about that fact, because of the Russian government's relative respectability and responsibility in the international system," Rice said.
Rice pointed out that Saddam Hussein had caused wars in the Middle East and went on to describe the dictator as "an implacable enemy" of the US and a cancer in the Middle East, who was likely to start war again, and who was, the US believed, acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
"It was that picture as a totality that we probably should have talked more about," she said.
The former top American diplomat said that the US was convinced that Saddam was acquiring WMD and that he was a threat.
"We believed that he was acquiring WMD, and given who he was in the Middle East, that it was a threat that had to be dealt with. Now I know that there are those who thought we could wait and wait and wait. After September 11th, we didn't believe that we could wait any longer," Rice said.
"I believe that the total picture was actually a convincing one. The WMD in the hands of that particular person was particularly threatening," she said.
Image: Condoleezza Rice
