Ford thought Iraq war was a mistake.

Caught up in all the Gerald Ford retrospectives this week, let's remember what he said about George Bush's decision to invade Iraq.

Ford said the justifications were inadequate to justify the war.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In an interview never before published, former President Gerald Ford said President Bush and his chief advisers "made a big mistake" with their justifications for the Iraq war.

Ford made the comments in a four-hour interview in 2004 with Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward....

"I don't think, if I had been president -- on the basis of the facts as I saw them publicly -- I don't think I would have ordered the Iraqi war," Ford said in a part of the interview broadcast on CNN's "Larry King Live" Wednesday.

"I would have maximized our efforts through sanctions, through restrictions, whatever, to find another answer," the former president said.

Too bad he wasn't still the President in that case. What we had instead was a bunch of chicken hawks who had managed to avoid combat themselves, apparently making decisions to send other people off to war without adequately thinking through what the cost of war could be, and more importantly what the cost of failure might be. And backed up by the neo-con crowd whose idea of warfare and military strategy is mostly derived from late nights playing Risk.