Former US President Gerald R. Ford, who died on Tuesday at 93. said in an embargoed interview in July 2004 that the Iraq war was not justified, the Washington Post reported.

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 Post's Bob Woodward wrote. The story initially was posted on the newspaper's Internet site Wednesday night.

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

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

"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 said. "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."

Woodward wrote that the interview took place for a future book project, though the former president said his comments could be published at any time after his death.

Funeral date set

In another development, a week of public tributes to Ford will stretch from the California desert to the nation's capital and back to his boyhood home of Grand Rapids, Michigan, for burial, organizers said on Wednesday.

A private funeral service for family and close friends of the 38th US president is scheduled for Friday afternoon at St. Margaret's Episcopal Church in Palm Desert, California, which Ford and his wife, Betty, attended for the past three decades.

Ford's body will then lie in repose at the church until Saturday, when his remains will be flown to Washington, D.C.

Upon arrival in Washington, Ford's casket will be taken by motorcade to the World War Two memorial for a brief tribute, then on to the US Capitol that evening for a ceremony saluting his 24 years as a member of the US House of Representatives.

Ford's casket will be carried up the East House Steps from the Capitol Plaza to be met by a group of his former House colleagues and will then lie in repose at the open doors to the House chamber, honouring his time in Congress. The casket will then be carried through Statuary Hall to the Capitol Rotunda to lie in state until next Tuesday.

That morning, after a brief stop outside the Senate chamber, Ford's remains will be taken to the Washington National Cathedral for a national funeral service.

Ford's casket will be flown later Tuesday to Grand Rapids, where his body will be interred on Wednesday in a hillside tomb overlooking the Ford presidential library and museum.

World leaders extended their condolences for the death of Ford and praised his brief tenure following the resignation of disgraced president Richard Nixon.

Ford, at the time a vice-president, became America's 38th president in 1974 when Nixon was forced to resign amid the Watergate scandal involving the break-in and bugging of opposition Democrats' headquarters.

United Nations chief Kofi Annan said Ford would be remembered for his "leadership, calm resolve and broad experience ... during a particularly difficult period," a UN spokesman said in a statement.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair "praised President Ford's integrity and honour and said he will be dearly missed by many friends and admirers on this side of the Atlantic," a Blair spokesman said.

Chinese President Hu Jintao on Wednesday sent his condolences to Bush and Ford's widow and family and Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing sent a message to US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Source: China Daily