Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stopped by the Daily Show on Tuesday to talk foreign policy with Jon Stewart.
The interview opened on a lighter note, with Stewart inquiring about a song that Libya’s former dictator Muammar Qaddafi wrote for her, titled “Black Flower in the White House.”
“How’s the song go?” Stewart asked. “Is it nice?”
“It’s kind of hard to sing,” Rice said.
But the conversation quickly turned to George W. Bush’s administration. Rice said she believes some Bush-era policy decisions contributed to the sweeping popular uprisings across the Middle East and north Africa.
“We tried to get out ahead of it,” Rice said. “I remember going to see Mubarak and saying to him, Mr. President, reform before your people are in the streets,” she said. “Had he reformed before those people were in the streets, we’d have a lot easier time of it now in the Middle East. Once people are reacting out of anger and desperation, it gets a lot more chaotic.”
Stewart and Rice sparred a bit over the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. Rice defended the move, saying Saddam Hussein posed a threat to international security long before 2003.
Rice admitted to mistakes in the intelligence gathering, specifically regarding Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, but she’s glad Hussein’s regime was toppled.
“You would not have the Middle East that you are seeing unfold now with that cancer, that regime in the middle of it,” Rice said.
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