Chicago Tribune:

WASHINGTON -- Former President Gerald Ford said in an newly disclosed interview that the Iraq war was not justified.

"I don't think I would have gone to war," he said in July 2004, a little more than a year after President Bush had launched the invasion advocated and carried out by prominent veterans of Ford's own administration.

In a four-hour conversation at his house in Beaver Creek, Colo., 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 Dick Cheney--Ford's White House chief of staff--and then-Defense Secretary Donald 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."

This was from a Washington Post story today by Bob Woodward.

According to Tom DeFrank of the New York Daily News (Fox's Special Report today), however, Ford stated that getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a "legitimate use of U.S. power." DeFrank indicated that Ford seemed to concentrate his objections to the war on the WMD rationale for going to war, rather than the actual removal of Saddam Hussein.