(2006-12-30) — Reporter Bob Woodward said today he would soon allow his Washington Post editors to publish a secret interview he did in 2005 with former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in which the dictator questioned U.S. President George Bush’s rationale for invading Iraq.

Mr. Woodward, who recently permitted his employer to publish a similar covert interview with the late former President Gerald Ford, said Mr. Hussein agreed to the no-holds-barred chat on the condition that the transcript be embargoed until after he “retired from public life,” which he did earlier today.

“I have always thought that President Bush did the right thing when he ordered the invasion,” Mr. Hussein told the star reporter. “However, I never understood why he made WMD such a big deal. Those canisters are so easy to hide and ship, and the lab just looks like any other lab after we scrub it.”

Mr. Hussein said if he were a U.S. president he would not have “wasted 12 years negotiating toothless resolutions” in the United Nations Security Council, but would have extended the Iraq no-fly zone “border to border, and also made it a no-drive, no-walk, no-breathe zone until the Baathist regime fell.”

“If Bush’s father had tried to take Baghdad in 1991, we would have run like a herd of goats from a pack of wild dogs,” he said. “I’d be living in peaceful seclusion in Geneva now, working on my memoirs with Judith Regan, and trading old war stories by email with the exiled former leaders of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon and so on.”

Mr. Woodward said he would not comment on rumors that he will soon publish interviews with singers James Brown and Lou Rawls, cartoonist Joseph Barbera, actors Don Knotts, Jack Palance, Glenn Ford, June Allyson, Dennis Weaver, Shelley Winters and Jane Wyatt, as well as Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin and sportscaster Curt Gowdy, all of whom died in 2006 and may have been secretly critical of Mr. BushÂ’s rationale for invading Iraq.