you know all these people, obviously, bob kagan, bob zoellick, james woolsey, richard armitage. and as a matter of fact, you even criticize richard armitage in your book about his attitude toward the saudis, if i remember. >> guest: toward iran. c-span: yes. and ... >> guest: .. declared iran to be a democracy that's a -- that's a statement i think he will ultimately regret. c-span: but go back to this. your -- your enemies see thenewamericancentury.org as the great conspiracy. it's an -- tell us about the organization, and why did you sign the 1998 letter to president clinton saying, go after saddam? >> guest: because i believed then, as did the other signatories of that letter, that he posed a significant threat. remember that at the end of the gulf war, he was obliged to do certain things, including limit his military activities, including weapons of mass destruction. there were inspectors in - in iraq pursuant to that. he threw them out, or he basically made it impossible for them to remain. so we were at a crisis point. i think the failure of the administration to respond t

. >> as we found out, the actual leak came from richard armitage who actually sort of was not really with the policy. that was -- which was ironic here. peter baker's piece is really excellent because it does sort of demystify this whole image of bush being controlled by dick cheney, svengali and so forth. it is true that president bush, you know, was in charge, people may disagree with a lot of the decisions that came out, but he was -- he was in charge and he gave dick cheney a certain amount of liberty to do what had to be done. but ultimately it came down to it actually came down to bush's taking charge. the scooter libby aspect, i thought, was rather interesting, because it seemed to be what could be considered two other admirable traits that were intentioned with one another. on the one hand, bush believed in the idea of the rule of law. on the other hand, he also believed in loyalty from everybody. he basically fell down on the rule of law by not giving libby the complete pardon that cheney wanted. >> when we look at cheney's role in the administration, we can point to the sco