It should come as no surprise that Bob Woodward had an interview with Gerald Ford stashed away waiting for the day when Ford passed away to unveil. Woodward is good at what he does, interviewing presidents and politicians and writing books after the fact to let us know what we missed. Wouldn’t it have been nice to read in the news back in July ‘04 that Ford disagreed with Bush on Iraq? Well, the interview was embargoed, no dice until now. So now we know…

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 launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford’s own administration.

The WaPo piece on Woodward’s “four-hour conversation” at Ford’s house in Beaver Creek, Colo., now gives light to the fact that 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.”

Woodward reports that Ford also “took issue with the notion of the United States entering a conflict in service of the idea of spreading democracy.”

“Well, I can understand the theory of wanting to free people,” Ford said, referring to Bush’s assertion that the United States has a “duty to free people.” But the former president said he was skeptical “whether you can detach that from the obligation number one, of what’s in our national interest.” He added: “And I just don’t think we should go hellfire damnation around the globe freeing people, unless it is directly related to our own national security.”

Although Woodward notes that “Ford fondly recalled his close working relationship with key Bush advisers Cheney and Rumsfeld”, he seemed not to mince words when “expressing concern about the policies they pursued in more recent years.”

“He was an excellent chief of staff. First class,” Ford said. “But I think Cheney has become much more pugnacious” as vice president. He said he agreed with former secretary of state Colin L. Powell’s assertion that Cheney developed a “fever” about the threat of terrorism and Iraq. “I think that’s probably true.”

Describing his own preferred policy toward Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Ford said he would not have gone to war, based on the publicly available information at the time, and would have worked harder to find an alternative. “I don’t think, if I had been president, on the basis of the facts as I saw them publicly,” he said, “I don’t think I would have ordered the Iraq war. I would have maximized our effort through sanctions, through restrictions, whatever, to find another answer.”

Woodward’s piece on the interview in the WaPo also reflects on Ford’s “own military crisis — not a war he started like Bush, but one he had to figure out how to end.” There’s audio clips of the interview here.

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