While guest hosting The Radio Factor with Bill O'Reilly, Fox News host John Gibson explained that President Bush and his administration had decided that they “wanted to get” Saddam Hussein and so they “picked” weapons of mass destruction as the justification to win world approval for the invasion of Iraq. Following his explanation, Gibson asked, “What was wrong with that thinking?”

From the August 12 broadcast of Westwood One's The Radio Factor:

GIBSON: I think what happened was [President] Bush said, and I said, “You know what, we have a firm demonstration how vulnerable we are to terrorism, let's look around and see who is it that wants to do things to us. And let's go knock them off -- the guy who did it to us and the guy who is thinking about it,” and picked Saddam Hussein. We think he's a bad player, we think he's got a grudge, we think the war in '91 never ended for him. He's going right on doing stuff to us under the radar. And there's a ton of stuff connecting him to terrorists, but if you don't want to believe it, fine.

But let me just say, that we said we're going after Saddam Hussein. That's what was going on in our country. And people said, give us a good reason. We said, OK, fine, let's find one. Let's pick one. What is it you would believe -- what is it you would give an OK for war? What is it? And then the world said, weapons of mass destruction. OK, fine. What's the information out there? French say they got them, Russians say they got them, the U.N.'s [United Nations] past resolutions, Bill Clinton said they got them and you can't trust them.

So we say, OK, fine, that's the reason. We'll pick that one. But when you get right down to it, way before that one ever was offered, we wanted to get him because he's just a bad guy who shouldn't be running that country, and we had good reason to fear. We were vulnerable if left him sitting there. What was wrong with that thinking?