Former U.S. President Gerald Ford disagreed with current President George W. Bush about the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.

Ford, who died on Tuesday at the age of 93, said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified, the newspaper said.

"I don't think I would have gone to war," Ford said a little more than a year after Bush launched the invasion.

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, the report said.

In the tape-recorded interview, Ford was critical not only of Bush but also of Vice President Cheney, who once served as Ford's White House chief of staff, and then Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who served as Ford's chief of staff and then his Pentagon chief.

Ford, a Republican from Michigan, was appointed vice president in 1973 after then vice president Spiro Agnew resigned to avoid prosecution on corruption charges, and then served as president between August 1974 and January 1977 after Nixon had to resign over the Watergate scandal.

"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 was quoted as saying.

"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," he said.

The Ford interview -- and a subsequent lengthy conversation in 2005 -- took place for a future book project, though he said his comments could be published any time after his death, the Post reported.

Describing his own preferred policy toward Saddam Hussein's Iraq, Ford said he would not have gone to war, based on the publicly available information at the time, and would have worked harder to find an alternative, according to the newspaper.

Source: Xinhua