Secrecy was so tight that the agents on the ranch were still unaware that I had slipped away for the most thrilling trip of my presidency.
On Saturday, December 13, Don Rumsfeld called. He had just spoken to General John Abizaid, who had replaced Tommy Franks after his retirement in July. John was a cerebral, Lebanese American general who spoke Arabic and understood the Middle East. John believed we had captured Saddam Hussein. Before we announced it to the world, we had to be 100 percent sure.
The next morning, Condi called back to confirm the report. It was Saddam. His tattoos—three blue dots near his wrist, a symbol of his tribe—provided the telltale evidence. I was elated. Getting Saddam would be a big lift for our troops and for the American people. It would also make a psychological difference for the Iraqis, many of whom feared he would return. Now it was clear: The era of the dictator was over forever.
Several months later, four men came to see me at the White House. They were members of the Delta Team that had captured Saddam. They told me the story of the hunt. Intelligence pointed them to a farm near Saddam’s hometown of Tikrit. As the soldiers combed the grounds, one discovered a hole. He climbed in and pulled out a disheveled, angry man.
“My name is Saddam Hussein,” the man said. “I am the president of Iraq and I want to negotiate.”
“Regards from President Bush,” the soldier replied.
Saddam had three weapons with him, including a pistol that the men presented to me in a glass box. I told them I would display the gift in the private study off the Oval Office and one day in my presidential library. The pistol always reminded me that a brutal dictator, responsible for so much death and suffering, had surrendered to our troops while cowering in a hole.
The pistol Saddam Hussein had with him when he was captured. George W. Bush Presidential Library
As I record these thoughts more than seven years after American troops liberated Iraq, I strongly believe that removing Saddam from power was the right decision. For all the difficulties that followed, America is safer without a homicidal dictator pursuing WMD and supporting terror at the heart of the Middle East. The region is more hopeful with a young democracy setting an example for others to follow. And the Iraqi people are better off with a government that answers to them instead of torturing and murdering them.
As we hoped, the liberation of Iraq had an impact beyond its borders. Six days after Saddam’s capture, Colonel Muammar Qaddafi of Libya—a longtime enemy of America and state sponsor of terror—publicly confessed that he had been developing chemical and nuclear weapons. He pledged to dismantle his WMD programs, along with related missiles, under a system of strict international verification. It’s possible the timing was a coincidence. But I don’t think so.
The war also led to consequences we did not intend. Over the years, I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about what went wrong in Iraq and why. I have concluded that we made two errors that account for many of the setbacks we faced.
The first is that we did not respond more quickly or aggressively when the security situation started to deteriorate after Saddam’s regime fell. In the ten months following the invasion, we cut troop levels from 192,000 to 109,000. Many of the remaining troops focused on training the Iraqi army and police, not protecting the Iraqi people. We worried we would create resentment by looking like occupiers. We believed we could train Iraqi security forces to lead the fight. And we thought progress toward a representative democracy, giving Iraqis of all backgrounds a stake in their country, was the best path to lasting security.
While there was logic behind these assumptions, the Iraqi people’s desire for security trumped their aversion to occupation. One of the ironies of the war is that we were criticized harshly by the left and some in the international community for wanting to build an empire in Iraq. We never sought that. In fact, we were so averse to anything that looked like an empire that we made our job far more difficult. By reducing our troop presence and focusing on training Iraqis, we inadvertently allowed the insurgency to gain momentum. Then al Qaeda fighters flocked to Iraq seeking a new safe haven, which made our mission both more difficult and more important.
Cutting troop levels too quickly was the most important failure of execution in the war. Ultimately, we adapted our strategy and fixed the problems, despite almost universal pressure to abandon Iraq. It took four painful, costly years to do so. At the time, progress felt excruciatingly slow. But history’s perspective is broader. If Iraq is a functioning democracy fifty years from now, those four hard years might look a lot different.
The other error was the intelligence failure on Iraq’s WMD. Almost a decade later, it is hard to describe how widespread an assumption it was that Saddam had WMD. Supporters of the war believed it; opponents of the war believed it; even members of Saddam’s own regime believed it. We all knew that intelligence is never 100 percent certain; that’s the nature of the business. But I believed that the intelligence on Iraq’s WMD was solid. If Saddam didn’t have WMD, why wouldn’t he just prove it to the inspectors? Every psychological profile I had read told me Saddam was a survivor. If he cared so much about staying in power, why would he gamble his regime by pretending to have WMD?
Part of the explanation came after Saddam’s capture, when he was debriefed by the FBI. He told agents that he was more worried about looking weak to Iran than being removed by the coalition. He never thought the United States would follow through on our promises to disarm him by force. I’m not sure what more I could have done to show Saddam I meant what I said. I named him part of an axis of evil in my State of the Union address. I spoke to a packed chamber of the United Nations and promised to disarm him by force if diplomacy failed. We presented him with a unanimous Security Council resolution. We sought and received strong bipartisan backing from the U.S. Congress. We deployed 150,000 troops to his border. I gave him a final forty-eight-hours’ notice that we were about to invade his country. How much clearer could I have been?
It’s true that Saddam was getting mixed signals from France, Germany, and Russia—and from antiwar demonstrators around the world. That didn’t help. But the war is not their fault. There was one person with the power to avoid war, and he chose not to use it. For all his deception of the world, the person Saddam ultimately deceived the most was himself.
I decided early on that I would not criticize the hardworking patriots at the CIA for the faulty intelligence on Iraq. I did not want to repeat the nasty finger-pointing investigations that devastated the morale of the intelligence community in the 1970s. But I did want to know why the information I received was wrong and how we could prevent a similar mistake in the future. I appointed a nonpartisan commission co-chaired by Judge Larry Silberman and former Democratic Senator Chuck Robb to study the question. Their investigation produced valuable recommendations—such as increasing coordination between agencies and publishing more dissenting opinions—that will make intelligence more reliable for future presidents, without undermining our intelligence community’s ability to do its job.
The nature of history is that we know the consequences only of the action we took. But inaction would have had consequences, too. Imagine what the world would look like today with Saddam Hussein still ruling Iraq. He would still be threatening his neighbors, sponsoring terror, and piling bodies into mass graves. The rising price of oil—which jumped from just over $30 a barrel in 2003 to almost $140 five years later—would have left Saddam awash in wealth. The sanctions, already falling apart, almost certainly would have crumbled. Saddam still had the infrastructure and know-how to make WMD. And as the final weapons inspections report by Charles Duelfer concluded, “Saddam wanted to re-create Iraq’s WMD capability … after sanctions were removed and Iraq’s economy stabilized.”
Had Saddam followed through on that intention, the world would likely have witnessed a nuclear arms race between Iraq and Iran. Saddam could have turned to Sunni terrorist groups like al Qaeda—a marriage of convenience, not ideology—as
surrogates in an attempt to match Iran’s use of Shia terrorist groups like Hezbollah. The chance of biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons falling into the hands of terrorists would have increased. The pressure on our friends in the region—especially Israel, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—would have been intense. And the American people would be much less secure today.
Instead, as a result of our actions in Iraq, one of America’s most committed and dangerous enemies stopped threatening us forever. The most volatile region in the world lost one of its greatest sources of violence and mayhem. Hostile nations around the world saw the cost of supporting terror and pursuing WMD. And in the space of nine months, twenty-five million Iraqis went from living under a dictatorship of fear to seeing the prospect of a peaceful, functioning democracy. In December 2003, the Iraqis were still a long way from that dream. But they had a chance, and that was a lot more than they’d had before.
The hardest days of the war were still ahead. In January 2004, our troops intercepted a letter from Zarqawi to senior al Qaeda leaders. He wrote about the growing pressure he was feeling and laid out his plan for survival. “We need to bring the Shia into the battle,” he wrote, “because it is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us.” He set a new goal for the jihadists in Iraq—igniting “a sectarian war.”
*The Shia, a Muslim sect, make up about 60 percent of Iraq’s population. Kurds, who are mostly Muslim but identify primarily by their ethnic group, comprise about 20 percent. Sunni Arabs, the Muslim sect that enjoyed privileged status under Saddam, account for 15 percent. Christians, Yezidis, Mandaeans, Jews, and others make up the rest.
**At the same ceremony, I presented the Medal of Freedom to Prime Minister John Howard of Australia, who I called a “man of steel,” and to President Alvaro Uribe, the courageous leader of Colombia.
***Tragically, Lieutenant Commander Zellem died in a training accident in 2004.
onight in this hall, we resolve to be the party not of repose but of reform. We will write not footnotes but chapters in the American story. We will add the work of our hands to the inheritance of our fathers and mothers and leave this nation greater than we found it. … If you give me your trust, I will honor it. Grant me a mandate, I will use it. Give me the opportunity to lead this nation, and I will lead.”
I meant the words I spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2000. When I entered politics, I made a decision: I would confront problems, not pass them on to future generations. I admired presidents who used their time in office to enact transformative change. I had studied Theodore Roosevelt, who served in the White House almost exactly a century before me. He had taken on the financial trusts, built a powerful Navy, and launched the conservation movement. I also learned from Ronald Reagan, who combined an optimistic demeanor with the moral clarity and conviction to cut taxes, strengthen the military, and face down the Soviet Union despite withering criticism throughout his presidency.
One of the lessons I took from Roosevelt and Reagan was to lead the public, not chase the opinion polls. I decided to push for sweeping reforms, not tinker with the status quo. As I told my advisers, “I didn’t take this job to play small ball.”
Two weeks after we moved into the White House, Laura and I held our first movie night in the Family Theater. Situated on the ground floor of the White House, the theater features forty-six comfortable chairs and a ninety-three-square-foot projection screen. The Motion Picture Association of America, led for years by a fascinating Texan, Jack Valenti, generously made movies available to the first family. We never had to sit through coming attractions.
For our first screening, Laura and I chose Thirteen Days, about President Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The movie was a fitting choice for our guest of honor, Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts.
On the surface, Ted and I didn’t have a whole lot in common. He was liberal; I was conservative. He grew up on Cape Cod; I was raised in West Texas. He had spent almost forty years on Capitol Hill; I was relatively new to town.
With Senator Ted Kennedy in early 2001. White House/Eric Draper
Ted and I did share what Laura called the family business. My grandfather Prescott Bush had represented Connecticut in the Senate at the same time John F. Kennedy had represented Massachusetts. Laura and I enjoyed meeting Ted’s wife, Vicki; son Patrick, a congressman from Rhode Island; and niece Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the lieutenant governor of Maryland, along with her daughter Kate.
Ted was friendly, gracious, and full of life. He had the trademark Kennedy accent and a great Irish glow. His smile came easily and often gave way to a big, warm laugh. I felt a connection to history as we watched a movie about how his brothers had defused a crisis from the West Wing.
The movie hadn’t been my only purpose for inviting Ted. He was the ranking Democrat on the Senate committee that drafted education legislation. He had sent signals that he was interested in my school reform proposal, No Child Left Behind.
Ted and I were both appalled by the results coming from our public schools. In the competitive global economy, good jobs demanded knowledge and skills. But American students routinely trailed their peers in key subjects. On an international math test comparing twenty-one countries, America’s high school seniors placed ahead of only Cyprus and South Africa.
Part of the problem was that millions of children were shuffled from one grade to the next without anybody asking what they had learned. Many came from poor and minority backgrounds. In 2000, nearly 70 percent of fourth-graders from high-poverty backgrounds couldn’t read at grade level. Some 40 percent of minority students failed to finish high school in four years. How could a society that promised equal opportunity for all quit on its neediest citizens? Starting in the 2000 campaign I had called the problem “the soft bigotry of low expectations.” I had promised to take on the big issues. This was sure one of them.
In recent years, the national education debate had bogged down in modest proposals like school uniforms and unrealistic calls to abolish the Department of Education. Success was often defined by dollars spent, not results achieved. I had come from a world where accountability was a daily reality. In baseball, any interested party can open the newspaper, analyze your performance in a box score, and demand change. “More pitching, Bush!” was a familiar refrain. Education was a lot more important than baseball, yet most people had no idea how their schools were performing.
As governor, I worked with the legislature to pass a law requiring schools to test students on the basics every year, report the results publicly, and allow parents to transfer their children out of underperforming schools. Between 1994 and 1998, the percentage of third-graders performing at grade level grew from 58 to 76. Minority students showed the largest gains, closing the achievement gap with their white peers.
When I ran for president, I decided to propose federal legislation that set clear goals—every child would learn to read and do math at grade level—and held schools accountable for progress. Under No Child Left Behind, states would test students in reading and math every year between third and eighth grade, and once in high school. Schools would post scores publicly, broken down by ethnicity, income level, and other subcategories. The data would allow parents and concerned citizens to evaluate schools, teachers, and curricula. Schools that scored below standards would receive extra help at first, including money for students to attend after-school tutoring, public or private. But if schools repeatedly failed to make adequate progress, there would be consequences. Parents would have the option to transfer their child to a better-performing public or charter school. The principle was straightforward: You cannot solve a problem until you diagnose it. Accountability would serve as a catalyst for reform.
I highlighted No Child Left Behind at almost every campaign event, including the NAACP convention. I told reporters I hoped to be known as “the education president.” I told Ted Kennedy the same thing the night we watched Thirte
en Days. “I don’t know about you, but I like to surprise people,” I said. “Let’s show them Washington can still get things done.”
The next morning, a letter arrived in the Oval Office:
Dear Mr. President,
You and Mrs. Bush couldn’t have been more gracious and generous to Vicki and me and the members of our family last night and these past few days. I very much appreciate your thoughtful consideration. Like you, I have every intention of getting things done, particularly in education and health care. We will have a difference or two along the way, but I look forward to some important Rose Garden signings.
Warm Regards,
Ted Kennedy
I was excited. No Child Left Behind stood a much better chance of becoming law with support from the Lion of the Senate. It was the beginning of my most unlikely partnership in Washington.
Ted Kennedy was not the only legislator I courted. Over my first two weeks in office, I met with more than 150 members of Congress from both parties. I hoped to replicate the productive relationship I’d forged with Bob Bullock, Pete Laney, and other legislators in Texas. One news story began, “If relations between Congress and the White House soon deteriorate into bitterness-as-usual, it won’t be for lack of effort to avoid that by President Bush.” Another suggested that I was conducting “the biggest charm offensive of any modern chief executive.”
Whatever the press called my effort, both houses of Congress soon took up No Child Left Behind. By March, the Senate education committee had completed a bill that included all the key elements of my proposal. The House moved next. Congressman John Boehner of Ohio, the skilled Republican chairman of the House Education Committee, collaborated on a solid bill with Congressman George Miller of California, one of the chamber’s most liberal members. The House passed it by a vote of 384 to 45.
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