Last Friday, Chris Matthews interviewed Michael Gerson on MSNBC. If you’ve never heard of Gerson, President Bush’s chief speech writer from 2001 until June 2006, you’re not the only one. But his words have changed the world and America’s role in it, and enabled the politics of fear to dominate American discourse.

Gerson’s the guy who decided to illogically label Iraq, Iran and North Korea the “Axis of Evil.” It was Gerson who proposed the use of a “smoking gun/mushroom cloud” metaphor during a September 5, 2002 meeting of the White House Iraq Group. That was the fearful phrase, endlessly repeated by President Bush and his surrogates, that justified the invasion of Iraq in the minds of many people.

Excerpts from the “Hardball” transcript for November 2:

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST: Regime change, weapons of mass destruction, homeland. Who comes up with this lingo of fear and war? Let‘s ask President Bush‘s favorite speechwriter.

Let‘s play HARDBALL.

First, Matthews butters him up: “Michael Gerson, I have so much respect for you, sir.” Then he goes after him: “This is Abu Ghraib for me. This is a chance to get one of you guys inside the room here.”

MATTHEWS: OK, let‘s talk about the hard stuff here. This is a speech the president gave in Cincinnati in October of 2002. Now, this was six months or so before we went to war with Iraq. Let‘s look at the speech.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BUSH: America must not ignore the threat gathering against us. Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MATTHEWS: Did you know at the time that we faced hard evidence that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear weapon? Did you believe there was a mushroom cloud facing us if we didn‘t go to war when you wrote that?

GERSON: I believed it was a real possibility, as did everyone on staff…

MATTHEWS: But didn‘t you get a memo from the CIA a day before that speech expressing doubts about these claims of a deal to buy uranium from Africa?

MATTHEWS: When you look back—and you‘re a very moral guy. I‘ve read your book. You are. In fact, you and I—values are very similar. Maybe we have different implementation attitudes about things like abortion rights and things, but I understand your values. Do you think, looking back on this war and the decision that was made, was the smart, right one? When we went to war, was that the smart thing to do, to put the American army—it really is the American army—in Arab countries surrounded by hostile forces, as it is, Iran, Syria, et cetera—to put that army over there as it is now? Was that the right thing to do?

GERSON: You know, I‘ve written a book. It‘s not a tell-all, but it‘s an honest book. I make a strong argument that, given what we knew at the time, that…

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: … what we know now?

GERSON: Well, given what we know now is a different question.

MATTHEWS: What do you think the answer to that question is?

GERSON: Well, I think the answer to that question is that I may well have come to a different…

MATTHEWS: Yes.

GERSON: … different conclusion.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about these phrases.

GERSON: OK. Sure.

MATTHEWS: Where did the word regime change come from? Because, to me, it‘s a coded word for aggression. You have decided you‘re going to bring down a foreign government with a military force and occupy a country, take it over. But you come up with new term of art, regime change. Where did it come from?

GERSON: Actually, I‘m not sure. It was a preexisting word. We didn‘t invent it.

MATTHEWS: But it‘s a phrase used for justification of war.

GERSON: Well, sometimes, you can have regime change through democratic means, too. I mean, it means that you‘re getting rid of an authoritarian or totalitarian government. That can happen in a variety of ways…

MATTHEWS: Regime change, to me, has been used by this administration as propaganda to push a war. They used the term like weapons of mass destruction to conflate together biological, chemical and, most importantly, nuclear weapon, weaponry.

They use terms—people use terms today like Islamofascist to combine al Qaeda with the Baathist regime, the secular Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein, that may just want us the hell out of their country. They confuse, they conflate a lot of things. They conflate what happened to us on 9/11 with our problem with the regional threat of Iraq.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Language is being used in a way that justifies fear and war. That‘s what bothers me.

GERSON: All right. Well, to one extent, to one extent, fear is justified in a world where there are people out to kill us.

MATTHEWS: Well, then why do we have to cook up new phrases then?

GERSON: Well, I don‘t think it necessarily was a new phrase.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: Weapons of mass destruction, find it in the encyclopedia five, 10 years ago. It‘s a new phrase, weapons of mass destruction, as is homeland to describe our country…

GERSON: Right.

MATTHEWS: … as is regime change, as is Islamofascist, a new phrase of art. Why do we have to come up with this new language all the time?

(CROSSTALK)

GERSON: But these phrases refer to real threats in the world that we saw arrive in our country from the other side of the Earth, because they weren‘t confronted early, because there wasn‘t a proactive American policy in these areas.

MATTHEWS: In what way would changing the government in Iraq, had we done it before 9/11, prevented 9/11?

GERSON: Certainly, I was talking about Afghanistan, not Iraq…

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: OK.

What would—what would getting rid of Saddam Hussein have saved us from 9/11?

GERSON: Well, given what we under…

MATTHEWS: I mean, you say fight them there, rather than here, and there‘s absolutely, in this case, no connection.

(CROSSTALK)

MATTHEWS: And, yet, the administration has been…

GERSON: The president‘s been very, very clear that he did not tie Iraq to 9/11.

MATTHEWS: Do you know how many people believe that because of what the administration has said over the years? They believe that there is a – because the way the president speaks, no, he‘s not stupid. He doesn‘t say, Iraq attacked us.

But the knowledge—the notion of payback, of, we have got to get them there before they get them here—get us here has been used over and over again. Language has been used to justify war.

…I think the actual threat to us is real enough. We don‘t need to have better language or new language to explain the threat to us. That‘s where I would disagree. I think there was a march to war against Iraq, which was a mistake. It had nothing to do with reducing the threat to this country from a real threat, which is what we allowed to escape from us at Tora Bora in Afghanistan.

It was a typical Chris Matthews interview, with Matthews doing almost all the talking. This time I think he had something good to say.

•