Is Bush the Worst President in the Last 50 Years?

Dec. 3, 2008— -- Karl Rove, a close confidant and former adviser to President Bush, said Tuesday he did not believe the administration would have gone to war in Iraq had intelligence indicated Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, contradicting some of his former boss's previous statements.

At a debate Tuesday night over President Bush's legacy that posed the question whether Bush had been the worst president of the past 50 years, Rove said the administration had been concerned about Hussein's human rights abuses and violations of United Nations sanctions, but it was primarily the worry over weapons that led to the invasion.

"In the aftermath of 9/11, the concern was about a tyrant accused of enormous human rights abuses" and who the administration believed possessed weapons of mass destruction, said Rove, who was Bush's senior adviser until last year. The debate was hosted by Intelligence Squared US, which sponsors a series of Oxford-style debates in front of a live audience in New York City.

"Absent that, I suspect that the administration's course of action would have been to work to find more creative ways to contain him like in the '90s," he said. "Absent the weapons of mass destruction," the administration would not likely have gone to war, he said.

In a recent interview with ABC News' Charles Gibson, Bush said his greatest regret in office was the "the intelligence failure in Iraq" but added it was "hard ... to speculate" about whether he would have invaded had the information been different.

In 2005, however, Bush told Fox News that he "would have still made that decision."

"So, if you had had this -- if the weapons had been out of the equation because the intelligence did not conclude that he had them, it was still the right call?" Fox News' Brit Hume asked during that interview.

"Absolutely," replied Bush.

Weeks before Bush exits the White House and years before historians sit down to write definitive histories of his time in office, Rove and three journalists debated Bush's standing among postwar presidents before an audience on New York's Upper West Side.

Weighing Bush's war in Iraq against Johnson's war in Vietnam, Nixon's criminality versus Bush's caginess, and Carter's stagflation against the ongoing financial crisis, the debaters had not only to consider the Bush administration's pros against its cons but argue whether this president's bucket of missteps outweighed 50 previous years of presidential errors.