President Clinton Makes It Clear: His Wife Wears the Political Pants

President Clinton may have been the most powerful man in the world for eight years, but he reiterated yesterday who wears the political pants in his marriage now.

"I have a wife in the Senate so whatever she says, I'm for," Mr. Clinton said in response to a question posed by the president of Columbia University, Lee Bollinger, about America's situation in Iraq.

Mr. Clinton's quip, which prompted loud laughter from the audience, didn't seem to stop him from giving a political diagnosis of the troubled nation and declaring his philosophy that nations don't necessarily need to be democracies but should have the support of their people.

On Iraq, which is in the midst of its own democratic soul-searching, Mr. Clinton said he doesn't favor providing the public timetables for an American military withdrawal there. Many of Mr. Clinton's fellow Democrats have demanded such a timetable from President Bush.

Still, Mr. Clinton, who met with his successor's Iraq Study Group earlier this week and has been critical of how the Bush administration handled the post-war occupation, said he believed the Iraqi government needs to take more steps in securing its own future.

"The government needs to understand that there has to be some success in getting some people out of the killing business and back into the politics business," he said.

Since leaving office in 2000, Mr. Clinton has huddled with the wealthy and powerful to try to solve problems like poverty, conflict, and health crises.

"I made up my mind that I would not be someone who spent the rest of his life wishing I were still president," Mr. Clinton said. "That seemed to be a stupid way to waste a day and also an arrogant thing."

Nowadays, Mr. Clinton does things like brokering a deal with the nation's soda makers to rid America's elementary and secondary schools of the sugary drinks and encouraging CEO Richard Branson to devote billions of dollars of his Virgin company profits to solving global warming.

"I must say, I underestimated the extent to which in this world private citizens can do public good," Mr. Clinton said.

His "Global Initiative" meeting, held earlier this fall in New York, brought together thousands of these A-list public citizens, as he said, to solve the world's problems in bite-sized pieces.

Mr. Clinton spoke yesterday as part of a panel discussion moderated to celebrate Vaclav Havel, the playwright who served as president of Czechoslovakia and its successor nation, the Czech Republic. During the afternoon discussion, Mr. Clinton likened President Havel to Nelson Mandela and Gandhi for helping to lead the nation through its post-Communism pangs. President Havel has had a seven-week residency at Columbia that began October 26.