Bill Clinton backs George Bush: Clinton: Bush Iraq Mistake Understandable.

“When I left office, there was a substantial amount of biological and chemical material unaccounted for,” Clinton said on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

Clinton said he never found out whether a U.S.-British bombing campaign he ordered in 1998 ended Saddam’s capability of producing chemical and biological weapons. “We might have gotten it all, we might have gotten half of it, we might have gotten none of it,” he said.

In his State of the Union speech in February justifying the planned war in Iraq, Bush referred to British intelligence reports that Saddam had tried to purchase uranium for nuclear weapons production. His administration says it now believes those reports were based in part on forged documents.

Clinton confined his remarks to biological and chemical weapons, and did not say whether he would consider credible any report that Saddam had wanted to build a nuclear weapons program.

Nonetheless, he suggested that Bush’s mistake was par for the course — and that it was time to move on now that Bush had acknowledged the error.

“You know, everybody makes mistakes when they are president,” he said. “I mean, you can’t make as many calls as you have to without messing up once in a while. The thing we ought to be focused on is what is the right thing to do now.”