NOVAK:   President Bush says there is no doubt the world is a safer, freer place as a result of Saddam Hussein being gone. Of course, Dr. Howard Dean would not have prescribed the U.S. actions that took Saddam out. In the CROSSFIRE today, Joe Cirincione of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and former assistant defense secretary, Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy. 
BEGALA:   Thank you both for coming. Frank, we all heard the runup to the war, our president told us that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. I thought it turns out he didn't. But it was a reasonable thing to think at the time. Now he's saying something very, very different. Here's what he said last night in an interview with ABC. 
BUSH:   And the world is better off because we got rid of him. 
DIANE SAWYER, ABC ANCHOR:   But stated as a hard fact, that there were weapons of mass destruction, as opposed to the possibility that he could move to acquire those weapons, still... 
BUSH:   So what's the difference? 
BEGALA:   What's the difference? Well, here's the difference, Frank. Here's what the president actually said before the war to get us into it. "The Iraqi regime possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. The evidence indicates Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program." He went on and on. He didn't say, well, no difference before the war. How can he say that now? 
GAFFNEY:   Which president? President Clinton? 
BEGALA:   President Bush. 
GAFFNEY:   No, but President Clinton said exactly the same thing. 
BEGALA:   President Clinton didn't send our guys halfway around the world to get stuck in a quagmire, Frank. 
GAFFNEY:   That was his mistake, because what he said was essentially the same thing, almost verbatim, but he didn't do anything about it. What I think George Bush did is he said this is a sufficiently grave danger to us, after 9/11, that a guy who's got these capabilities, and I don't know anybody who said he doesn't have these capabilities. The truth of the matter is, we haven't found them yet. That, plus his nexus to terror is something that we can't tolerate. And post 9/11, this president did something about it, and I think properly so. 
NOVAK:   Joe Cirincione, I want to give you another quote of the president from the interview last night. Let's listen to this. 
BUSH:   A gathering threat after 9/11 is a threat that needed to be dealt with, and it was done after 12 long years of the world saying, the man's a danger. And so we got rid of him. And there's no doubt the world is a safer, freer place as a result of Saddam being gone. 
NOVAK:   You can't really disagree with that, can you? 
CIRINCIONE:   No, it is a safer place. And we should all be glad that Saddam is gone. The problem is, the cost of getting him out. We have lost 500 American lives in this battle. Plus, several thousand wounded without arms, legs or eyes. Tens of thousands of Iraqis dead or wounded. Is that -- was that worth it? Is that worth it? 
NOVAK:   We lost -- we lost 400,000 to get rid of Hitler, didn't we? 
CIRINCIONE:   Hitler was a completely different -- and this is the problem that Bush makes. He's demonized Saddam, tried to inflate the threat to such a great extent that he, George Bush, is the Hitler slayer. He's going up against Saddam, the great demon of the world. Well, you saw what Saddam looks like, he's a frightened man in a hole in the ground. He didn't represent a threat beyond that to his own people before we went after him. And now he's no threat at all. Are we safer off? Yes. But was it worth the price? No. There were other ways to accomplish the same ends. 
BEGALA:   That's the nob of the debate. Turns out our president not only misled the country at large, his administration misled some important people in the United States Senate. One of the people who voted for Mr. Bush's war, Senator Bill Nelson, conservative Democrat from Florida, told Florida today this... 
NOVAK:   Conservative senator?  
BEGALA:   Bill Nelson? Sure, he voted for Mr. Bush's war. Said: "Senators were told by the Bush administration Iraq had both biological and chemical weapons, notably anthrax, and it could deliver them to cities along the eastern seaboard, via unmanned aerial vehicles commonly known as drones. They have not found anything that resembles a UAV that has that capacity," says Senator Nelson. So he was misled, wasn't he? 
GAFFNEY:   I don't think so. I think the capability that George Bush talked about was real. And the problem that we've got... 
BEGALA:   We can't find the drones, we can't find the weapons, we can't find anthrax. 
GAFFNEY:   The nature of a drone can be anything from an aircraft, an old Cessna, with an autopilot mechanism on it and GPS system to something that's dedicated. 
BEGALA:   Where is it? 
GAFFNEY:   It could be buried in the sand at an air base. 
BEGALA:   We had 100,000 guys there for six months, Frank. He didn't have it. Bush misled us into a war. 
GAFFNEY:   We didn't find Saddam Hussein for six to eight months because he was in a hole in the ground. The problem is, you've jumped to the conclusion that because we haven't found that stuff, it didn't exist. I think that's wrong. And to the contrary, I would say we are safer because Saddam is gone. We were at risk because Saddam was not the frightened man in a hole when we started this thing. Saddam was a guy who was running a country with tens of billions of dollars in oil resources at his disposal, and lashed up with international terror. Which I believe -- I personally believe was used against us in the past. It's certainly true. There's abundant evidence of that. 
NOVAK:   There was a very interesting situation yesterday, where the foreign minister of Iraq, not somebody from the U.S., the Pentagon or the White House, Hoshyar Zebari, had a statement. He said this. He said, "One years ago the Security Council was divided between those who wanted to appease Saddam Hussein and those who wanted to hold him accountable. The United Nations as an organization failed to help rescue the Iraqi people from a murderous tyranny that lasted over 35 years. The U.N. must not fail the Iraqi people again." That's strong testimony. Isn't it? 
CIRINCIONE:   It is, but it's completely wrong, because the U.N. was not failing the Iraqi people a year ago. A year ago today we had Saddam Hussein surrounded. We had over 100,000, building up to 200,000 troops around him. We had dozens, building up to hundreds of inspectors in him. He was in an iron cage. He wasn't going anywhere, and he was getting weaker by the day, not stronger. It's not true that it was a choice between war and doing nothing. We were doing something. If the president had had the patience and the wisdom to stay the course, we would have -- we'd be in a much stronger position today. 
NOVAK:   He would still be in power, would he not? Saddam Hussein? 
CIRINCIONE:   Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe the Iraqi people -- this is up to the Iraqi people to overthrow a tyrant. It's not a job that we should be doing. 
BEGALA:   Let me test your intellectual honesty. It's wrong and dangerous for President Clinton to use containment, sanctions and bombing to keep Saddam Hussein in a box. Was it wrong while Bill Clinton was doing that, was it wrong for Dick Cheney to sell him oil field equipment? Make... 
GAFFNEY:   It was. 
BEGALA:   Say it again? 
GAFFNEY:   I think it was. 
BEGALA:   Good for you. You got a lot of respect  . 
GAFFNEY:   I think it was wrong for us to be doing things through subsidiaries with Iraq, with Iran, with Syria... 
BEGALA:   Libya. 
GAFFNEY:   Anybody else on this terrorism list. 
BEGALA:   Good for you. 
GAFFNEY:   But I would just say to Joe, the problem that we have to confront -- he talks about the costs. If we're going to talk about the costs, let's talk about the 300,000 Iraqi people who died at Saddam Hussein's hands. And there's no reason to believe -- there is no reason to believe that if Saddam Hussein were still in that cage, he wouldn't still be killing his people.    I think we ought to be resisting that at every turn. And not certainly saying to Taiwan, obey that. 
NOVAK:   I just want to ask you one thing, the Kay report, Dr. Kay's report, he says that -- it indicates that Iraq was developing missiles with ranges up to 1,000 kilometers. He said Iraq had tested an unmanned aerial vehicle to 500 kilometers, also in violation of U.N. resolutions. He was a threat, wasn't he? 
CIRINCIONE:   He was definitely a threat. Mostly to his own people. Secondarily to the region. Was he an imminent or an urgent threat to us, that's the question. And the president said he was.    The president said it was a growing danger... 
GAFFNEY:   Let's wait for him to become an imminent threat. He said I don't think that's advisable. 
CIRINCIONE:   They tried to have it both ways. 
GAFFNEY:   You said the president. I just want to be clear. 
CIRINCIONE:   The president said he may have nuclear weapons. He's close to getting nuclear weapons. He's linked up to the al Qaeda terrorists. That's what he said. And the danger was, we had to take him out now before they took out our cities. It turned out that was completely false. What the president said just wasn't true. 
BEGALA:   Got to be it. Joe Cirincione, Frank Gaffney, thank you very much. And coming up, Tucker Carlson joins us from Iraq with a live update on what it's really like in the streets of the Iraqi capital. And then after the break, Wolf Blitzer has the latest on that court ruling involving the man who shot President Reagan back in 1981. Stay with us.
