I ask him if it had been a mistake to invade Iraq in the first place.
His answer again comes without hesitation.
"In retrospect, it probably was," he says.
Once more, he follows with the kind of analysis only he could give. He acknowledges the people who advocated going to war with Iraq — he among them — did so because they thought there were weapons of mass destruction. But it turned out there were no weapons, which made the war a quest in a search of a shadow of a phantom.
In other words, a mistake.