you mentioned in the book -- i think i have this right -- your good friend, brent scowcroft, a senior national security official in bush 41, i think, the first bush administration, opposed the invasion in iraq, and i was wondering -- you never really address that issue as far as you're concerned in this book. had you been part of the administration then, would you have supported the iraq war? >> i say in the last chapter, sort of summing up and reflections, that i don't know. it's hard for me to say what i would have advocated in 2003. i, like a lot of people in the congress and most other countries in the world, initially all accepted the argument that saddam had weapons of mass destruction. that's hundred security council resolution 1441 got passed. intelligence services of even russia and china thought he had these weapons. and so in that speech that i referred to a few weeks after he made it, said i had supported the original decision for that reason. but i say in the book, toward the end, that i had argued strongly against going to baghdad in 1991, in the first gulf war, because

i had been hired by brent scowcroft. so far as i can tell the only qualification i had for the job was that i had an active security clearance and on the basis of that they brought me over. i was assigned a wonderful project, and arms control project which had as the name as an akronism which is lost to history called and bfr. the mutual and balanced force reduction talks in europe. and boy i knew everything about and bfr and i was asked at one point to prepare a memorandum to the national security divisor describing the marvel that was in the negotiations. it went on seven or eight pages and i think it is true that the new security divisor showed great discretion and did not read the memo at all. what he did was he said to me you know you are going to work as sam huntington. you had better try to develop a compound strategy for a national security for this country. having been in the details of an bfr was like the world and opened up and i would be able to look at the world. i think it was sufficiently traumatizing to m