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Former President George W. Bush says he was a "dissenting voice" on the decision to invade Iraq because he "didn't want to use force" but ran out of options.

"I was a dissenting voice. I didn't want to use force," Bush told NBC's Matt Lauer in his first interview promoting his new memoir, "Decision Points."

"I mean force is the last option for a President," he continued, according to an NBC News transcript e-mailed to Raw Story. "And I think it's clear in the book that I gave diplomacy every chance to work. And I will also tell you the world's better off without somehow in power. And so are 25 million Iraqis."

The Iraq war was sold by the Bush White House on the notion that dictator Saddam Hussein was an immediate threat to the United States, that he had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al-Qaeda. Both were proven false.

The Bush administration invaded before the United Nations completed its weapons inspection, raising the question of whether the president really did exhaust all diplomatic options.

A variety of Bush administration officials -- including his top counter-terrorism adviser and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs -- said the war was based on lies.

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In his new book, Bush is mounting a defense, as selective as it might be, of the Iraq war. He acknowledges that he experiences "a sickening feeling every time" he recalls the absence of WMDs in Iraq, but he contends that invading Iraq was the right move because "America is safer without a homicidal dictator pursuing WMD."

Yet that statement is flat-out wrong. Not the "safer" part, but the description of Saddam Hussein and WMDs. Bush is still trying to mislead the American public, for at the time of the invasion, Saddam, brutal dictator that he was, was not pursuing the development or production of WMDs. The Bush administration's own investigation found this. Following the invasion, there was a probe of Iraq's WMD activity conducted by Charles Duelfer, a hawkish fellow who had been handpicked by the administration to handle this sensitive job. In 2004, his Iraq Survey Group submitted its final report. The report noted that Saddam "aspired to develop a nuclear capability." But it was quite clear on the key point: Iraq had not been actively working on WMD projects. The Duelfer report concluded that Iraq's ability to produce nuclear weapons -- the most troubling W in the WMD category -- had "progressively decayed" since 1991 and that inspectors had found no signs of any "concerted efforts to restart the program." In plain talk: nada on nuclear. The same was true, the report said, for biological and chemical weapons. It found that by 1995, under U.N. pressure, Iraq had abandoned its biological weapons efforts and that there was no evidence Iraq had made any chemical weapons in the preceding 12 years.

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Before the 2006 midterm elections in which Republicans ultimately took a clobbering, Sen. Mitch McConnell asked President Bush in a private Oval Office meeting to pull some troops out of Iraq in order to boost the GOP's chances, Bush reports in his new memoir.

And in the same month -- September 2006 -- that McConnell made his private request, he publicly blasted Democrats for calling for a reduction of troops in Iraq, saying that their position endangered Americans.

"The Democrat leadership finally agrees on something -- unfortunately it's retreat," McConnell said in a Sept. 5, 2006, statement in response to a Democratic letter asking Bush to change his Iraq policy. Using blistering language, McConnell continued:

"Whether they call it 'redeployment' or 'phased withdrawal,' the effect is the same: We would leave Americans more vulnerable and Iraqis at the mercy of al-Qaeda, a terrorist group whose aim -- toward Iraqis and Americans -- is clear."

Despite his public statement blasting Democrats for advocating "retreat," McConnell, then the Republican whip in the Senate, requested a private meeting with Bush to urge essentially the same policy shift Democrats were advocating. Bush ultimately did the opposite, ordering more troops to Iraq in the wake of the election.

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