Decision Points

couldn’t remember whether I said I would be in the air at 10:00 a.m. or noon. At 10:15, she had called a Secret Service agent at the ranch and asked if he had heard from President Bush. “Let me check,” the agent said.
    A few seconds passed. “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. “They are ninety minutes away.”
    She realized he was talking about Mother and Dad, who were on their way to spend Thanksgiving with us. “No, I mean my George,” she said. The agent paused. “Well, ma’am,” he said, “we show he is in the ranch house.”
    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 capturedSaddam 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—alongtime 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