n Wednesday, March 19, 2003, I walked into a meeting I had hoped would not be necessary.

The National Security Council had gathered in the White House Situation Room, a nerve center of communications equipment and duty officers on the ground floor of the West Wing. The top center square of the secure video screen showed General Tommy Franks sitting with his senior deputies at Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia. In the other five boxes were our lead Army, Navy, Marine, Air Force, and Special Operations commanders. Their counterparts from the British Armed Forces and Australian Defense Forces joined as well.

I asked each man two questions: Do you have everything you need to win? And are you comfortable with the strategy?

Each commander answered affirmatively.

Tommy spoke last. �Mr. President,� the commanding general said, �this force is ready.�

I turned to Don Rumsfeld. �Mr. Secretary,� I said, �for the peace of the world and the benefit and freedom of the Iraqi people, I hereby give the order to execute Operation Iraqi Freedom. May God bless the troops.�

Tommy snapped a salute. �Mr. President,� he said, �may God bless America.�

As I saluted back, the gravity of the moment hit me. For more than a year, I had tried to address the threat from Saddam Hussein without war. We had rallied an international coalition to pressure him to come clean about his weapons of mass destruction programs. We had obtained a unanimous United Nations Security Council resolution making clear there would be serious consequences for continued defiance. We had reached out to Arab nations about taking Saddam into exile. I had given Saddam and his sons a final forty-eight hours to avoid war. The dictator rejected every opportunity. The only logical conclusion was that he had something to hide, something so important that he was willing to go to war for it.

I knew the consequences my order would bring. I had wept with widows of troops lost in Afghanistan. I had hugged children who no longer had a mom or a dad. I did not want to send Americans into combat again. But after the nightmare of 9/11, I had vowed to do what was necessary to protect the country. Letting a sworn enemy of America refuse to account for his weapons of mass destruction was a risk I could not afford to take.

I needed time to absorb the emotions of the moment. I left the Situation Room, walked up the stairs and through the Oval Office, and took a slow, silent lap around the South Lawn. I prayed for our troops, for the safety of the country, and for strength in the days ahead. Spot, our springer spaniel, bounded out of the White House toward me. It was comforting to see a friend. Her happiness contrasted with the heaviness in my heart.

On the South Lawn after ordering troops into Iraq. White House/Eric Draper

There was one man who understood what I was feeling. I sat down at my desk in the Treaty Room and scrawled out a letter:Dear Dad,��At around 9:30 a.m., I gave the order to SecDef to execute the war plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom. In spite of the fact that I had decided a few months ago to use force, if need be, to liberate Iraq and rid the country of WMD, the decision was an emotional one.��I know I have taken the right action and do pray few will lose life. Iraq will be free, the world will be safer. The emotion of the moment has passed and now I wait word on the covert action that is taking place.I know what you went through.Love,George

A few hours later, his reply came across the fax:Dear George,Your handwritten note, just received, touched my heart. You are doing the right thing. Your decision, just made, is the toughest decision you�ve had to make up until now. But you made it with strength and with compassion. It is right to worry about the loss of innocent life be it Iraqi or American. But you have done that which you had to do.Maybe it helps a tiny bit as you face the toughest bunch of problems any President since Lincoln has faced: You carry the burden with strength and grace.��Remember Robin�s words �I love you more than tongue can tell.�Well, I do.Devotedly,Dad

The bombs that fell on Baghdad that night marked the opening phase in the liberation of Iraq. But that was not the first airstrike on Iraq to make news during my presidency.

In February 2001, I visited President Vicente Fox in San Crist�bal, Mexico. My first foreign trip as president was designed to highlight our commitment to expanding democracy and trade in Latin America. Unfortunately, news out of Iraq intruded. As we admired the serene vistas of Vicente�s ranch, American bombers struck Iraq�s air defense system. It was a relatively routine mission to enforce the no-fly zones that had been created after Saddam massacred thousands of innocent Shia and Kurds following the Gulf War.*

With Vicente Fox. White House/Paul Morse

Saddam fired off a barrage that lit up the Baghdad sky and grabbed the attention of CNN. When Vicente and I stepped out of his home for a press conference, a Mexican reporter began, �I have a question for President Bush.���Is this the beginning of a new war?�

The flare-up was a reminder of the deteriorating situation America faced in Iraq. More than a decade earlier, in August 1990, Saddam Hussein�s tanks blasted across the border into Kuwait. Dad declared that Saddam�s unprovoked aggression would not stand and gave him an ultimatum to withdraw from Kuwait. When the dictator defied his demands, Dad rallied a coalition of thirty-four countries�including Arab nations�to enforce it.

The decision to send American troops to Kuwait was agonizing for Dad�and frustrating to implement. The Senate voted to authorize military force by a slim margin, 52 to 47. A group of lawmakers presented Dad with a letter that predicted ten thousand to fifty thousand American deaths. Former President Jimmy Carter urged members of the Security Council to oppose the war. The UN voted to support it anyway.

Operation Desert Storm proved a stunning success. Coalition forces drove the Iraqi army out of Kuwait in fewer than 100 hours. Ultimately, 149 Americans were killed in action. I was proud of Dad�s decisiveness. I wondered if he would send troops all the way to Baghdad. He had a chance to rid the world of Saddam once and for all. But he stopped at the liberation of Kuwait. That was how he had defined the mission. That was what Congress had voted for and the coalition had signed up to do. I fully understood his rationale.

As a condition for ending hostilities in the Gulf War, UN Resolution 687 required Saddam to destroy his weapons of mass destruction and missiles with a range of more than ninety miles. The resolution banned Iraq from possessing biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons or the means to produce them. To ensure compliance, Saddam was required to submit to a UN monitoring and verification system.

At first, Saddam claimed he had only a limited stockpile of chemical weapons and Scud missiles. Over time, UN inspectors discovered a vast, haunting arsenal. Saddam had filled thousands of bombs, shells, and warheads with chemical agents. He had a nuclear weapons program that was about two years from yielding a bomb, much closer than the CIA�s prewar estimate of eight to ten years. When his son-in-law defected in 1995, Saddam acknowledged that the regime had been hiding a biological weapons program that included anthrax and botulinum toxin.

To keep Saddam in check, the UN imposed strict economic sanctions. But as outrage over Iraq�s invasion of Kuwait faded, the world�s attention drifted. Saddam diverted nearly two billion dollars from the Oil-for-Food program�which the UN had created to provide for the basic humanitarian needs of innocent Iraqis�to enrich his cronies and reconstitute his military strength, including programs related to weapons of mass destruction. As children starved, he launched a propaganda campaign blaming sanctions for the suffering.

By 1998 Saddam had persuaded key trading partners like Russia and France to lobby the UN to loosen the restrictions. Then he forced the UN weapons inspectors to leave the country. The problem was clear: Saddam had never verified that he had destroyed all of his weapons from the Gulf War. With the inspectors gone, the world was blind to whether he had restarted his programs.

The Clinton administration responded by launching Operation Desert Fox�a four-day bombing campaign conducted jointly with Great Britain and aimed at degrading Saddam�s WMD capabilities. In a primetime address from the Oval Office in December 1998, President Clinton explained:The hard fact is that so long as Saddam remains in power, he threatens the well-being of his people, the peace of his region, the security of the world. The best way to end that threat once and for all is with a new Iraqi government�a government ready to live in peace with its neighbors, a government that respects the rights of its people.��Heavy as they are, the costs of action must be weighed against the price of inaction. If Saddam defies the world and we fail to respond, we will face a far greater threat in the future. Saddam will strike again at his neighbors. He will make war on his own people. And mark my words, he will develop weapons of mass destruction. He will deploy them, and he will use them.

The same year, Congress overwhelmingly passed and President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act. The law declared a new official policy of the United States: �To support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq and to promote the emergence of a democratic government.�

By early 2001, Saddam Hussein was waging a low-grade war against the United States. In 1999 and 2000, his forces had fired seven hundred times at our pilots patrolling the no-fly zones.

For my first eight months in office, my policy focused on tightening the sanctions�or, as Colin Powell put it, keeping Saddam in his box. Then 9/11 hit, and we had to take a fresh look at every threat in the world. There were state sponsors of terror. There were sworn enemies of America. There were hostile governments that threatened their neighbors. There were nations that violated international demands. There were dictators who repressed their people. And there were regimes that pursued WMD. Iraq combined all those threats.

Saddam Hussein didn�t just sympathize with terrorists. He had paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers and given sanctuary to terrorists like Abu Nidal, who led attacks that killed nineteen people at an Israeli airline�s ticket counters in Rome and Vienna, and Abu Abbas, who hijacked the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and murdered an elderly, wheelchair-bound American.

Saddam Hussein wasn�t just a sworn enemy of America. He had fired at our aircraft, issued a statement praising 9/11, and made an assassination attempt on a former president, my father.

Saddam Hussein didn�t just threaten his neighbors. He had invaded two of them, Iran in the 1980s and Kuwait in the 1990s.

Saddam Hussein didn�t just violate international demands. He had defied sixteen UN resolutions, dating back to the Gulf War.

Saddam Hussein didn�t just rule brutally. He and his henchmen had tortured innocent people, raped political opponents in front of their families, scalded dissidents with acid, and dumped tens of thousands of Iraqis into mass graves. In 2000, Saddam�s government decreed that people who criticized the president or his family would have their tongues slashed out. Later that year, an Iraqi obstetrician was beheaded on charges of prostitution. The woman�s true crime was speaking out about corruption in the Iraqi health ministry.

Saddam Hussein didn�t just pursue weapons of mass destruction. He had used them. He deployed mustard gas and nerve agents against the Iranians and massacred more than five thousand innocent civilians in a 1988 chemical attack on the Kurdish village of Halabja. Nobody knew what Saddam had done with his biological and chemical stockpiles, especially after he booted inspectors out of the country. But after reviewing the information, virtually every major intelligence agency in the world had reached the same conclusion: Saddam had WMD in his arsenal and the capacity to produce more. One intelligence report summarized the problem: �Since the end of inspections in 1998, Saddam has maintained the chemical weapons effort, energized the missile program, made a bigger investment in biological weapons, and has begun to try to move forward in the nuclear area.�

Before 9/11, Saddam was a problem America might have been able to manage. Through the lens of the post-9/11 world, my view changed. I had just witnessed the damage inflicted by nineteen fanatics armed with box cutters. I could only imagine the destruction possible if an enemy dictator passed his WMD to terrorists. With threats flowing into the Oval Office daily�many of them about chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons�that seemed like a frighteningly real possibility. The stakes were too high to trust the dictator�s word against the weight of the evidence and the consensus of the world. The lesson of 9/11 was that if we waited for a danger to fully materialize, we would have waited too long. I reached a decision: We would confront the threat from Iraq, one way or another.

My first choice was to use diplomacy. Unfortunately, our track record with Iraq was not encouraging. We maintained a bilateral relationship with Baghdad in the 1980s. We obtained UN Security Council resolutions in the 1990s. Despite our engagement, Saddam grew only more belligerent.

If diplomacy was going to succeed, we needed a fundamentally different approach. We believed Saddam�s weakness was that he loved power and would do anything to keep it. If we could convince him we were serious about removing his regime, there was a chance he would give up his WMD, end his support for terror, stop threatening his neighbors, and, over time, respect the human rights of his people. The odds of success were long. But given the alternative, it was worth the effort. The approach was called coercive diplomacy.

Coercive diplomacy with Iraq consisted of two tracks: One was to rally a coalition of nations to make clear that Saddam�s defiance of his international obligations was unacceptable. The other was to develop a credible military option that could be used if he failed to comply. These tracks would run parallel at first. As the military option grew more visible and more advanced, the tracks would converge. Our maximum leverage would come just before they intersected. That would be the moment of decision. And ultimately, it would be Saddam Hussein�s decision to make.

In February 2001, British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his wife, Cherie, came to visit Laura and me at Camp David. Tony was the first foreign leader we invited, a tribute to the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain.

I wasn�t sure what to expect from Tony. I knew he was a left-of-center Labour Party prime minister and a close friend of Bill Clinton�s. I quickly found he was candid, friendly, and engaging. There was no stuffiness about Tony and Cherie. After dinner, we decided to watch a movie. When they agreed on Meet the Parents, a comedy starring Robert De Niro and Ben Stiller, Laura and I knew the Bushes and Blairs would get along.

Laura and me with Cherie and Tony Blair. White House/Eric Draper

Tony and I talked through the major issues of the day. He gave me a briefing on the politics of Europe. We discussed our common goals to expand free trade, relieve suffering in Africa, and address the violence in the Holy Land. We didn�t spend much time on the social issues. That was left for Cherie and me.

In the summer of 2001, the Blairs invited Laura and me to Chequers, the storied country estate of the British prime minister. Chequers is a large, creaky house filled with rustic, comfortable furniture and portraits of former prime ministers. Rather than throw a formal reception, the Blairs arranged a cozy family dinner with their four children�including little Leo, age fourteen months.

About halfway through the meal, the death penalty came up. Cherie made clear she didn�t agree with my position. Tony looked a little uncomfortable. I listened to her views and then defended mine. I told her I believed the death penalty, when properly administered, could save lives by deterring crime. A talented lawyer whom I grew to respect, Cherie rebutted my arguments. At one point, Laura and I overheard Euan, the Blairs� bright seventeen-year-old son, say, �Give the man a break, Mother.�

The more time we spent together, the more I respected Tony. Over the years, he grew into my closest partner and best friend on the world stage. He came to the United States for meetings more than thirty times during my presidency. Laura and I visited him in Northern Ireland, Scotland, and London. In November 2003, Tony and Cherie invited us to their home in Trimdon Colliery, an old mining area in the countryside. They served us a cup of tea in their redbrick Victorian and took us to a town pub, the Dun Cow Inn. We ate fish and chips with mushy peas, which I washed down with a nonalcoholic Bitburger lager. After lunch, we dropped by a local school and watched a soccer practice�known as football to our hosts. The people were decent and welcoming, aside from the protester who carried a sign that read �Mad Cowboy Disease.�

Tony had a quick laugh and a sharp wit. After our first meeting, a British reporter asked what we had in common. I quipped, �We both use Colgate toothpaste.� Tony fired back, �They�re going to wonder how you know that, George.� When he addressed a Joint Session of Congress in 2003, Tony brought up the War of 1812, when British troops burned the White House. �I know this is kind of late,� he said, �but���sorry.�

Unlike many politicians, Tony was a strategic thinker who could see beyond the immediate horizon. As I would come to learn, he and I were kindred spirits in our faith in the transformative power of liberty. In the final week of my presidency, I was proud to make him one of the few foreign leaders to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.**

Above all, Tony Blair had courage. No issue demonstrated it more clearly than Iraq. Like me, Tony considered Saddam a threat the world could not tolerate after 9/11. The British were targets of the extremists. They had extensive intelligence on Saddam. And they understood in a personal way the menace he posed. Saddam was shooting at their pilots, too.

If we had to remove Saddam from power, Tony and I would have an obligation to help the Iraqi people replace Saddam�s tyranny with a democracy. The transformation would have an impact beyond Iraq�s borders. The Middle East was the center of a global ideological struggle. On one side were decent people who wanted to live in dignity and peace. On the other were extremists who sought to impose their radical views through violence and intimidation. They exploited conditions of hopelessness and repression to recruit and spread their ideology. The best way to protect our countries in the long run was to counter their dark vision with a more compelling alternative.

That alternative was freedom. People who could choose their leaders at the ballot box would be less likely to turn to violence. Young people growing up with hope in the future would not search for meaning in the ideology of terror. Once liberty took root in one society, it could spread to others.

In April 2002, Tony and Cherie visited Laura and me in Crawford. Tony and I talked about coercive diplomacy as a way to address the threat from Iraq. Tony suggested that we seek a UN Security Council resolution that presented Saddam with a clear ultimatum: allow weapons inspectors back into Iraq, or face serious consequences. I didn�t have a lot of faith in the UN. The Security Council had passed sixteen resolutions against Saddam to no avail. But I agreed to consider his idea.

I raised Iraq with other world leaders throughout 2002. Many shared my assessment of the threat, including John Howard of Australia, Jos� Maria Aznar of Spain, Junichiro Koizumi of Japan, Jan Peter Balkenende of the Netherlands, Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark, Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland, and most other leaders in Central and Eastern Europe. It was revealing that some of the strongest advocates for confronting Saddam were those with the freshest memories of tyranny. �In the late 1930s, the Western democracies hesitated in the face of danger,� Prime Minister Siim Kallas of Estonia, a former Soviet republic, told me. �As a consequence, we fell under dictatorships and many people lost their lives. Action is sometimes necessary.�

Other leaders had a different outlook. Vladimir Putin didn�t consider Saddam a threat. It seemed to me that part of the reason was Putin didn�t want to jeopardize Russia�s lucrative oil contracts. France also had significant economic interests in Iraq. I was not surprised when Jacques Chirac told me he would support intrusive weapons inspections but cautioned against threatening military force. The problem with his logic was that without a credible threat of force, the diplomacy would be toothless once again.

With Jacques Chirac (left) and Vladimir Putin. White House/Eric Draper

One of the toughest leaders to figure out was Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder of Germany. I met with Gerhard five times in 2001. He was relaxed, affable, and interested in strengthening our bilateral relationship. I appreciated his leadership on Afghanistan, especially his willingness to host the loya jirga in Bonn.

I discussed Iraq with Gerhard during his visit to the White House on January 31, 2002. In my State of the Union address two days earlier, I had outlined the threats posed by Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. �States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world,� I said. The media seized on the phrase �axis of evil.� They took the line to mean that the three countries had formed an alliance. That missed the point. The axis I referred to was the link between the governments that pursued WMD and the terrorists who could use those weapons. There was a larger point in the speech that no one could miss: I was serious about dealing with Iraq.

In a small Oval Office meeting, joined by Condi Rice and Andy Card, I told the German chancellor I was determined to make diplomacy work. I hoped he would help. I also assured him our words would not be empty. The military option was my last choice, but I would use it if necessary.

�What is true of Afghanistan is true of Iraq,� he said. �Nations that sponsor terror must face consequences. If you make it fast and make it decisive, I will be with you.�

I took that as a statement of support. But when the German elections arrived later that year, Schroeder had a different take. He denounced the possibility of using force against Iraq. His justice minister said, �Bush wants to divert attention from domestic political problems.���Hitler also did that.� I was shocked and furious. It was hard to think of anything more insulting than being compared to Hitler by a German official. I continued to work with Gerhard Schroeder on areas of mutual interest. But as someone who valued personal diplomacy, I put a high premium on trust. Once that trust was violated, it was hard to have a constructive relationship again.

Two months after 9/11, I asked Don Rumsfeld to review the existing battle plans for Iraq. We needed to develop the coercive half of coercive diplomacy.

Don tasked General Tommy Franks with updating the plans. Just after Christmas 2001, Tommy came to Crawford to brief me on Iraq. The plan on the shelf required a six-month buildup and four hundred thousand troops. The experience in Afghanistan was at the forefront of our minds. Thanks to new technology and innovative planning, we had destroyed the Taliban and closed the al Qaeda camps using far fewer troops. We were not viewed as occupiers by the Afghan people.

Tommy told the national security team that he was working to apply the same concept of a light footprint to Iraq. He envisioned a fast invasion from Kuwait in the south, Saudi Arabia and Jordan in the west, and Turkey in the north. �If we have multiple, highly skilled Special Operations Forces identifying targets for precision-guided munitions, we will need fewer conventional ground forces,� he said. �That�s an important lesson learned from Afghanistan.�

I had a lot of concerns. I wanted to know how fast our troops could move and what kind of basing we would need. As in Afghanistan, I was concerned about starvation of the local population and asked what we could do to protect innocent life. I worried about Saddam sabotaging the oil fields or firing missiles at Israel. My biggest fear was that he would use biological or chemical weapons against our troops, our allies, or Iraqi civilians.

I asked the team to keep working on the plan. �We should remain optimistic that diplomacy and international pressure will succeed in disarming the regime,� I said at the end of the meeting. �But we cannot allow weapons of mass destruction to fall into the hands of terrorists. I will not allow that to happen.�

Between December 2001 and August 2002, I met or spoke with Tommy more than a dozen times. The plan was getting better, but I wasn�t satisfied. I wanted to make sure we had thought through as many contingencies as possible. I asked Don and Tommy a lot of questions that started with �What if Saddam decides to���?� One scenario I brought up frequently was Saddam consolidating his forces in Baghdad and engaging our troops in bloody urban combat. I remembered the battle in Somalia in 1993 and did not want to see that repeated in Iraq. Tommy and his team didn�t have all the answers on the spot, and I didn�t expect them to. But they were working hard to refine the plan, and every iteration they brought me was an improvement on the previous version.

The updated plan Tommy presented in the Situation Room on August�5, 2002, resolved several key concerns. We had lined up basing and overflight permission from leaders in the Gulf. Tommy had devised a plan for Special Operations to secure suspected WMD sites, Iraq�s southern oil fields, and Scud missile launchers. He had also designed a massive aerial bombardment that would make it costly for Saddam�s elite Republican Guard units to remain in the capital, reducing the chances of a Fortress Baghdad scenario. �Mr. President,� Tommy said in his Texas drawl, �this is going to be shock and awe.�

There were plenty of issues left to resolve. We all worried about the possibility of Saddam launching a biological or chemical attack on our troops, so the military was in the process of procuring hazmat suits. We had gradually increased the level of troops and equipment in Kuwait under the guise of training and other routine exercises, which would make it possible to begin combat operations rapidly if I gave the order to launch. Joint Chiefs Chairman Dick Myers talked about the importance of persuading Turkey to open its territory so we could establish a northern front. George Tenet raised concern about a broader regional war in which Syria attacked Israel, or Iran directed its proxy terrorist group, Hezbollah, to foment instability. Don Rumsfeld pointed out that a war could destabilize Jordan and Saudi Arabia, that America could get stuck in a manhunt for Saddam, and that Iraq could fracture after liberation.

Those potential scenarios were sobering. But so were the briefings we were receiving. A report in July read, �Iraq has managed to preserve and in some cases even enhance the infrastructure and expertise necessary for WMD production.� Another briefing warned that Saddam�s regime was �almost certainly working to produce the causative agent for anthrax along with botulinum toxin, aflatoxin, and ricin.� It continued: �Unmanned aerial vehicles give Baghdad a more lethal means to deliver biological���weapons.� It went on, ominously, �Experience shows that Saddam produces weapons of mass destruction to use, not just to deter.�

In the summer of 2002, I received a startling piece of news. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an al Qaeda�affiliated terrorist who had experimented with biological weapons in Afghanistan, was operating a lab in northeastern Iraq. �Suspect facility in this area may be producing poisons and toxins for terrorist use,� the briefing read. �Al-Zarqawi is an active terrorist planner who has targeted U.S. and Israeli interests: Sensitive reporting from a [classified] service indicates that al-Zarqawi has been directing efforts to smuggle an unspecified chemical material originating in northern Iraq into the United States.�

We couldn�t say for sure whether Saddam knew Zarqawi was in Iraq. We did have intelligence indicating that Zarqawi had spent two months in Baghdad receiving medical treatment and that other al Qaeda operatives had moved to Iraq. The CIA had worked with a major Arab intelligence service to get Saddam to find and extradite Zarqawi. He refused.

The question was whether to bomb the poisons lab in the summer of 2002. We held a series of NSC meetings on the topic. General Dick Myers talked through the options: Tomahawk missiles, a B-2 bomber strike, or a covert ground raid. Dick Cheney and Don saw Zarqawi as a clear threat and argued that taking him out would reinforce the doctrine that America would not tolerate safe havens for terror.

Colin and Condi felt a strike on the lab would create an international firestorm and disrupt our efforts to build a coalition to confront Saddam�especially our attempt to recruit Turkey, which was highly sensitive about any activity in northeastern Iraq. �This would be viewed as a unilateral start to the war in Iraq,� Colin said.

I faced a dilemma. If America was hit with a biological attack from Iraq, I would be responsible for not having taken out the threat when we had the chance. On the other hand, bombing the camp could undermine diplomacy and trigger a military conflict.

I told the intelligence community to keep a close eye on the facility. For the time being, I decided to continue on the diplomatic track. But one thing was clear to me: Iraq was a serious threat growing more dangerous by the day.

I spent much of August 2002 in Crawford, a good place to reflect on the next decision I faced: how to move forward on the diplomatic track.

One option was to seek a UN resolution calling on Saddam to readmit weapons inspectors. The other was to issue an ultimatum demanding that he disarm�and rally a coalition to remove him if he did not comply.

From a legal standpoint, a resolution was unnecessary. Three years earlier, President Clinton and our NATO allies had removed the dictator Slobodan Milosevic from power in Serbia without an explicit UN resolution. Dick and Don argued we didn�t need one for Iraq, either. After all, we already had sixteen. They believed that going to the UN would trigger a long bureaucratic process that would leave Saddam even more dangerous.

I shared that concern. On the other hand, almost every ally I consulted�even staunch advocates of confronting Saddam like Prime Minister John Howard of Australia�told me a UN resolution was essential to win public support in their countries.

Colin agreed. The day before I left for Crawford, I asked him to meet with me privately in the Treaty Room. Colin was more passionate than I had seen him at any NSC meeting. He told me a UN resolution was the only way to get any support from the rest of the world. He went on to say that if we did take out Saddam, the military strike would be the easy part. Then, as Colin put it, America would �own� Iraq. We would be responsible for helping a fractured country rebuild. I listened carefully and shared Colin�s concern. It was another reason I hoped that diplomacy would work.

That summer, the possibility of war had become an all-consuming news story in Washington. Reporters asked frequently whether I had a war plan on my desk.

On August 15, I opened the Wall Street Journal to find a column by Brent Scowcroft, Dad�s national security adviser. It was headlined �Don�t Attack Saddam.� Brent argued that war with Iraq would distract from the war on terror and could unleash �an Armageddon in the Middle East.� His conclusion was that we should �be pressing the United Nations Security Council to insist on an effective no-notice inspection regime for Iraq.�

That was a fair recommendation. But I was angry that Brent had chosen to publish his advice in the newspaper instead of sharing it with me. I called Dad. �Son, Brent is a friend,� he assured me. That might be true. But I knew critics would later exploit Brent�s article if the diplomatic track failed.

Some in Washington speculated that Brent�s op-ed was Dad�s way of sending me a message on Iraq. That was ridiculous. Of all people, Dad understood the stakes. If he thought I was handling Iraq wrong, he damn sure would have told me himself.

On Saturday, September 7, 2002, I convened a meeting of the national security team at Camp David to finalize my decision on the resolution. Fifty-one weeks earlier, we had gathered in Laurel Lodge to plan the war in Afghanistan. Now we sat in the same room trying to find a way to remove the threat in Iraq without war.

I gave everyone on the team a chance to make their arguments. Dick Cheney recommended that we restate the case against Saddam, give him thirty to sixty days to come clean, and then disarm him by force if he refused to comply. �It is time to act,� Dick said. �We can�t delay for another year.���An inspection regime does not solve our problem.�

Colin pushed for the UN resolution. �If we take the case to the UN, we can get allies to join. If not, it will be hard to act unilaterally. We won�t have the international support we need to execute the military plan.�

After listening to the options one last time, I made a decision: We would seek a resolution. �There�s ambiguity in the international community�s view of Saddam,� I said, �and we need to clear it up. Either he will come clean about his weapons, or there will be war.�

I told the team I would deliver that message in a speech to the United Nations the following week. I would remind the UN that Saddam�s defiance was a threat to the credibility of the institution. Either the words of the Security Council would be enforced, or the UN would exist only as a useless international body like the League of Nations.

Tony Blair came to dinner that night at Camp David. He was pleased when I told him I was planning to ask the UN for the resolution. �Many opponents wish we would just be unilateral�then they could complain,� he said. �But you are calling their bluff.�

We both understood what the decision meant. Once we laid out our position at the UN, we had to be willing to follow through with the consequences. If diplomacy failed, there would be only one option left. �I don�t want to go to war,� I told Tony, �but I will do it.�

Tony agreed. After the meeting, I told Alastair Campbell, one of Tony�s top aides, �Your man has got cojones.� I�m not sure how that translated to the refined ears of 10 Downing Street. But to anyone from Texas, its meaning was clear.

�All the world now faces a test,� I told UN delegates on September 12, 2002, �and the United Nations a difficult and defining moment. Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced, or cast aside without consequence? Will the United Nations serve the purpose of its founding, or will it be irrelevant?�

Delivering the speech was a surreal experience. The delegates sat silent, almost frozen in place. It was like speaking to a wax museum.

Speaking before the UN on Iraq. White House/Paul Morse

The response outside the chamber was encouraging. Allies thanked me for respecting the UN and accepting their advice to seek a resolution. Many at home appreciated that I had challenged the UN. An editorial in the Washington Post read: �If the United Nations remains passive in the face of this long-standing and flagrant violation of its authority in a matter involving weapons of mass destruction, it certainly will risk the irrelevance of which Mr. Bush warned.�

While the UN debate unfolded, we went to work on another resolution, a congressional war authorization. As part of the debate, leaders on Capitol Hill asked the intelligence community to prepare a National Intelligence Estimate analyzing Saddam�s WMD programs. The CIA compiled the NIE using much of the same intelligence it had been showing to me for the past eighteen months. In a summary sentence later declassified, the NIE concluded, �Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.�

The intelligence had an impact on members of Congress. Senator John Kerry said, �When I vote to give the president of the United States the authority to use force, if necessary, to disarm Saddam Hussein, it is because I believe that a deadly arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in his hands is a threat, and a grave threat.�

Senator Jay Rockefeller, a respected Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, followed up: �Saddam�s existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities pose real threats to America today, tomorrow.���He could make these weapons available to many terrorist groups, third parties, which have contact with his government. Those groups, in turn, could bring those weapons into the United States and unleash a devastating attack against our citizens. I fear that greatly.�

Senator Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, supported the resolution. He said, �The risks of inaction are too high. We are elected to solve problems, not just debate them. The time has come to chart a new course in Iraq and in the Middle East.�

On October 11, 2002, the Senate passed the resolution 77 to 23. The House passed it 296 to 133. Both margins were larger than those of the votes for the Gulf War. The resolution garnered votes from prominent Democrats, including House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and Senators Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, John Edwards, and Harry Reid.

Some members of Congress would later claim they were not voting to authorize war but only to continue diplomacy. They must not have read the resolution. Its language was unmistakable: �The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.�

The decisive vote at the UN came on November 8. Colin had been horse-trading on minor issues, but he stayed tough on the provisions holding Saddam to account. The question was whether the resolution would have the votes. We needed nine of the fifteen Security Council members, without a veto from France, Russia, or China. We had been burning up the phone lines, trying to get everyone on board. Shortly after the Security Council vote, the phone in the Oval Office rang. �Hey, Boss,� Colin said. �We got it done.�

The vote was unanimous, 15 to 0. Not only had France voted for the resolution, but so had Russia, China, and Syria. The world was now on record: Saddam had a �final opportunity to comply� with his obligation to disclose and disarm. If he did not, he would face �serious consequences.�

Under the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 1441, Iraq had thirty days to submit a �currently accurate, full, and complete declaration� of all WMD-related programs. The resolution made clear the burden of proof rested with Saddam. The inspectors did not have to prove that he had weapons. He had to prove that he did not.

When the deadline arrived on December 7, Saddam submitted his report. I viewed it as a key test. If he came forward with honest admissions, it would send a signal that he understood the message the world was sending. Instead, he submitted reams of irrelevant paperwork clearly designed to deceive. Hans Blix, the mild-mannered Swedish diplomat who led the UN inspections team, later called it �rich in volume but poor in information.� Joe Lieberman was more succinct. He said the declaration was a �twelve-thousand-page, one-hundred-pound lie.�

If Saddam continued his pattern of deception, the only way to keep the pressure on Iraq would be to present some of the evidence ourselves. I asked George Tenet and his capable deputy, John McLaughlin, to brief me on what intelligence we could declassify to explain Iraq�s WMD programs.

A few days before Christmas, John walked me through their first effort. It was not very convincing. I thought back to CIA briefings I had received, the NIE that concluded Saddam had biological and chemical weapons, and the data the CIA had provided for my UN speech in September. �Surely we can do a better job of explaining the evidence against Saddam,� I said. George Tenet agreed.

�It�s a slam dunk,� he said.

I believed him. I had been receiving intelligence briefings on Iraq for nearly two years. The conclusion that Saddam had WMD was nearly a universal consensus. My predecessor believed it. Republicans and Democrats on Capitol Hill believed it. Intelligence agencies in Germany, France, Great Britain, Russia, China, and Egypt believed it. As the German ambassador to the United States, not a supporter of war, later put it, �I think all of our governments believe that Iraq has produced weapons of mass destruction and that we have to assume that they still have���weapons of mass destruction.� If anything, we worried that the CIA was underestimating Saddam, as it had before the Gulf War.

In retrospect, of course, we all should have pushed harder on the intelligence and revisited our assumptions. But at the time, the evidence and the logic pointed in the other direction. If Saddam doesn�t actually have WMD, I asked myself, why on earth would he subject himself to a war he will almost certainly lose?

Every Christmas during my presidency, Laura and I invited our extended family to join us at Camp David. We were happy to continue the tradition started by Mother and Dad. We cherished the opportunity to relax with them, Laura�s mom, Barbara and Jenna, and my brothers and sister and their families. We loved to watch the children�s pageant at the Camp David chapel and to sing carols with military personnel and their families. One of the highlights was an annual Pink Elephant gift exchange, in which my teenage nieces and nephews were not above pilfering the latest iPod or other coveted item from the president of the United States. In later years, we started a tradition of making donations in another family member�s name. Jeb and Doro donated books to the library aboard the USS George H.W. Bush. Marvin and his wife, Margaret, donated a communion chalice to the Camp David chapel on behalf of Laura and me. We gave a gift to the Dorothy Walker Bush Pavilion at the Southern Maine Medical Center in Mother and Dad�s name.

The Christmas pageant at Camp David's Evergreen Chapel, one of our favorite holiday traditions. White House/Eric Draper

Amid the Christmas celebrations in 2002, Dad and I talked about Iraq. For the most part, I didn�t seek Dad�s advice on major issues. He and I both understood that I had access to more and better information than he did. Most of our conversations were for me to reassure him that I was doing fine and for him to express his confidence and love.

Iraq was one issue where I wanted to know what he thought. I told Dad I was praying we could deal with Saddam peacefully but was preparing for the alternative. I walked him through the diplomatic strategy�the solid�support from Blair, Howard, and Aznar;�the�uncertainty with Chirac and Schroeder; and my efforts to rally the Saudis,�Jordanians,�Turks, and others in the Middle East.

He�shared my hope that diplomacy would succeed. �You know how tough war is, son, and you�ve got to try everything you can to avoid war,� he said. �But if the man won�t comply, you don�t have any other choice.�

I sought Dad's advice on Iraq. White House/Eric Draper

Shortly after New Year�s, I sent Barbara and Jenna a letter at college. �I am working hard to keep the peace and avoid a war,� I wrote. �I pray that the man in Iraq will disarm in a peaceful way. We are putting pressure on him to do just that and much of the world is with us.�

As 2003 began, it became increasingly clear that my prayer would not be answered. On January 27, Hans Blix gave a formal report to the United Nations. His inspections team had discovered warheads that Saddam had failed to declare or destroy, indications of the highly toxic VX nerve agent, and precursor chemicals for mustard gas. In addition, the Iraqi government was defying the inspections process. The regime had violated Resolution 1441 by blocking U-2 flights and hiding three thousand documents in the home of an Iraqi nuclear official. �Iraq appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament that was demanded of it,� Blix said.

I could see what was happening: Saddam was trying to shift the burden of proof from himself to us. I reminded our partners that the UN resolution clearly stated that it was Saddam�s responsibility to comply. As Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, explained in late January, �The ball is entirely in Iraq�s court.���Iraq now has to prove that it is innocent.���They need to go out of their way to prove through whatever possible means that they have no weapons of mass destruction.�

In late January, Tony Blair came to Washington for a strategy session. We agreed that Saddam had violated UN Security Council Resolution 1441 by submitting a false declaration. We had ample justification to enforce the �serious consequences.� But Tony wanted to go back to the UN for a second resolution clarifying that Iraq had �failed to take the final opportunity afforded to it.�

�It�s not that we need it,� Tony said. �A second resolution gives us military and political protection.�

I dreaded the thought of plunging back into the UN. Dick, Don, and Condi were opposed. Colin told me that we didn�t need another resolution and probably couldn�t get one. But if Tony wanted a second resolution, we would try. �As I see it, the issue of the second resolution is how best to help our friends,� I said.

The best way to get a second resolution was to lay out the evidence against Saddam. I asked Colin to make the presentation to the UN. He had credibility as a highly respected diplomat known to be reluctant about the possibility of war. I knew he would do a thorough, careful job. In early February, Colin spent four days and four nights at the CIA personally reviewing the intelligence to ensure he was comfortable with every word in his speech. On February 5, he took the microphone at the Security Council.

�The facts on Iraq�s behavior,� he said, �demonstrate that Saddam Hussein and his regime have made no effort�no effort�to disarm as required by the international community. Indeed, the facts and Iraq�s behavior show that Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.�

Colin�s presentation was exhaustive, eloquent, and persuasive. Coming against the backdrop of Saddam�s defiance of the weapons inspectors, it had a profound impact on the public debate. Later, many of the assertions in Colin�s speech would prove inaccurate. But at the time, his words reflected the considered judgment of intelligence agencies at home and around the world.

�We are both moral men,� Jacques Chirac told me after Colin�s speech. �But in this case, we see morality differently.� I replied politely, but I thought to myself: If a dictator who tortures and gasses his people is not immoral, then who is?

Three days later, Chirac stepped in front of the cameras and said, �Nothing today justifies war.� He, Gerhard Schroeder, and Vladimir Putin issued a joint statement of opposition. All three of them sat on the Security Council. The odds of a second resolution looked bleak.

Tony urged that we forge ahead. �The stakes are now much higher,� he wrote to me on February 19. �It is apparent to me from the EU summit that France wants to make this a crucial test: Is Europe America�s partner or competitor?� He reminded me we had support from a strong European coalition, including Spain, Italy, Denmark, the Netherlands, Portugal, and all of Eastern Europe. In a recent NATO vote, fifteen members of the alliance had supported military action in Iraq, with only Belgium and Luxembourg standing with Germany and France. Portuguese Prime Minister Jos� Barroso spoke for many European leaders when he asked, incredulously, �We are faced with the choice of America or Iraq, and we�re going to pick Iraq?�

Tony and I agreed on a strategy: We would introduce the second resolution at the UN, joined by the visionary leader of Spain, Prime Minister Jos� Maria Aznar. If we lined up enough yes votes, we might be able to persuade France and Russia to abstain rather than veto. If not, we would pull down the resolution, and it would be clear they had blocked the final diplomatic effort.

The second resolution, which we introduced on February 24, 2003, was important for another reason. Tony was facing intense internal pressure on the issue of Iraq, and it was important for him to show that he had exhausted every possible alternative to military force. Factions of the Labour Party had revolted against him. By early March, it wasn�t clear if his government could survive.

I called Tony and expressed my concern. I told him I�d rather have him drop out of the coalition and keep his government than try to stay in and lose it.

�I said I�m with you,� Tony answered.

I pressed my point again.

�I understand that, and that�s good of you to say,� he replied. �I absolutely believe in this. I will take it up to the very last.�

I heard an echo of Winston Churchill in my friend�s voice. It was a moment of courage that will stay with me forever.

At Tony�s request, I made one last effort to persuade Mexico and Chile, two wavering Security Council members, to support the second resolution. My first call was to my friend President Vicente Fox. The conversation got off to an inauspicious start. When I told Vicente I was calling about the UN resolution, he asked which one I meant. �If I can give you some advice,� I said, �you should not be seen teaming up with the French.� He said he would think about it and get back to me. An hour passed. Then Condi heard from the embassy. Vicente had checked into the hospital for back surgery. I never did hear from him on the issue.

My conversation with President Ricardo Lagos of Chile did not go much better. He was a distinguished, scholarly man and an effective leader. We had negotiated a free trade agreement that I hoped Congress would approve soon. But public opinion in Chile ran against a potential war, and Ricardo was reluctant to support the resolution. He talked about giving Saddam an additional two or three weeks. I told him a few more weeks would make no difference. Saddam had already had years to comply. �It is sad it has come down to this,� I said. I asked one last time how he planned to vote. He said no.

As the diplomatic process drifted along, the pressure for action had been mounting. In early 2003, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told me the uncertainty was hurting the economy. Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia, the kingdom�s longtime ambassador to Washington and a friend of mine since Dad�s presidency, came to the Oval Office and told me our allies in the Middle East wanted a decision.

Whenever I heard someone claim that we had rushed to war, I thought back to this period. It had been more than a decade since the Gulf War resolutions had demanded that Saddam disarm, over four years since he had kicked out the weapons inspectors, six months since I had issued my ultimatum at the UN, four months since Resolution 1441 had given Saddam his �final opportunity,� and three months past the deadline to fully disclose his WMD. Diplomacy did not feel rushed. It felt like it was taking forever.

Meanwhile, the threats continued. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt had told Tommy Franks that Iraq had biological weapons and was certain to use them on our troops. He refused to make the allegation in public for fear of inciting the Arab Street. But the intelligence from a Middle Eastern leader who knew Saddam well had an impact on my thinking. Just as there were risks to action, there were risks to inaction as well: Saddam with a biological weapon was a serious threat to us all.

In the winter of 2003, I sought opinions on Iraq from a variety of sources. I asked for advice from scholars, Iraqi dissidents in exile, and others outside the administration. One of the most fascinating people I met with was Elie Wiesel, the author, Holocaust survivor, and deserving Nobel Peace Prize recipient. Elie is a sober and gentle man. But there was passion in his seventy-four-year-old eyes when he compared Saddam Hussein�s brutality to the Nazi genocide. �Mr. President,� he said, �you have a moral obligation to act against evil.� The force of his conviction affected me deeply. Here was a man who had devoted his life to peace urging me to intervene in Iraq. As he later explained in an op-ed: �Though I oppose war, I am in favor of intervention when, as in this case because of Hussein�s equivocations and procrastinations, no other option remains.�

With Elie Wiesel. White House/Paul Draper

I�ve always wondered why many critics of the war did not acknowledge the moral argument made by people like Elie Wiesel. Many of those who demonstrated against military action in Iraq were devoted advocates of human rights. Yet they condemned me for using force to remove the man who had gassed the Kurds, mowed down the Shia by helicopter gunship, massacred the Marsh Arabs, and sent tens of thousands to mass graves. I understood why people might disagree on the threat Saddam Hussein posed to the United States. But I didn�t see how anyone could deny that liberating Iraq advanced the cause of human rights.

With diplomacy faltering, our military planning sessions had increasingly focused on what would happen after the removal of Saddam. In later years, some critics would charge that we failed to prepare for the postwar period. That sure isn�t how I remember it.

Starting in the fall of 2002, a group led by Deputy National Security Adviser Steve Hadley produced in-depth plans for post-Saddam Iraq. Two of our biggest concerns were starvation and refugees. Sixty percent of Iraqis were dependent on the government as a source of food. An estimated two million Iraqis could be displaced from their homes during war.

On January 15, Elliott Abrams, a senior NSC staffer, delivered a detailed briefing on our preparations. We planned to prestation food, blankets, medicine, tents, and other relief supplies. We produced maps of where refugees could be sheltered. We deployed experienced humanitarian relief experts to enter Iraq alongside our troops. We had pinpointed the locations of most of Iraq�s fifty-five thousand food distribution points and made arrangements with international organizations�including the World Food Programme�to make sure plenty of food was available.

We also developed plans for long-term reconstruction. We focused on ten areas: education, health, water and sanitation, electricity, shelter, transportation, governance and rule of law, agriculture, communications, and economic policy. For each, we gathered data, formulated a strategy, and set precise goals. For example, USAID determined that Iraq had 250 nonmilitary general hospitals, 20 military hospitals, 5 medical college hospitals, and 995 civilian medical care centers. Our plan called for surging medical supplies into the country, working to recruit Iraqi doctors and nurses living abroad to return home, training new medical personnel, and, ultimately, handing control to a new Iraqi health ministry.

One of the toughest questions was how to plan for a post-Saddam political system. Some in the administration suggested that we turn over power immediately to a group of Iraqi exiles. I didn�t like the idea. While the exiles had close connections in Washington, I felt strongly that the Iraqis� first leader should be someone they selected. I was mindful of the British experience in Iraq in the 1920s. Great Britain had installed a non-Iraqi king, Faisal, who was viewed as illegitimate and whose appointment stoked resentment and instability. We were not going to repeat that mistake.

The other major challenge was how to provide security after Saddam. Some intelligence reports predicted that most of Saddam�s army and police would switch sides once the regime was gone. The top commanders�those with innocent blood on their hands�would not be invited to rejoin. But we would draw on the rest of the Saddam-era forces to form the foundation of the new Iraqi military and police.

In January 2003, I issued a presidential directive, NSPD 24, creating a new Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. ORHA was charged with turning our conceptual plans into concrete action. We based the office in the Pentagon, so that our civilian efforts in Iraq would run through the same chain of command as our military operations. To lead the office, Don Rumsfeld tapped Jay Garner, a retired general who had coordinated the military�s relief effort in northern Iraq in 1991. He recruited a cadre of civilian experts from across the government who would stand by to deploy to Baghdad.

By having our plans and personnel ready before the war, I felt we were well prepared. Yet we were aware of our limitations. Our nation building capabilities were limited, and no one knew for sure what needs would arise. The military had an old adage: �No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.� As we would learn in Iraq, that was doubly true of a plan for the postwar environment.

By March 2003, the battle plan was ready. After more than a year of probing and questioning, Tommy Franks and his team had developed an operation that I was confident would overthrow Saddam Hussein swiftly and decisively, while minimizing the loss of American and Iraqi life. The one remaining uncertainty was the role of Turkey. For months, we had been pressing the Turks to give us access to their territory so that we could send fifteen thousand troops from the Fourth Infantry Division to enter Iraq from the north. We promised to provide economic and military aid, help Turkey access key programs from the International Monetary Fund, and maintain our strong support for Turkey�s admission to the European Union.

At one point, it looked like we would get permission. Prime Minister Abdullah G�l�s cabinet approved our request. But when the Turkish parliament held a final vote on March 1, it came up just short of passage. I was frustrated and disappointed. On one of the most important requests we had ever made, Turkey, our NATO ally, had let America down.

Don and Tommy held the Fourth Infantry Division in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, where it could deploy through Turkey if the government changed its mind or, otherwise, join the invasion from Kuwait. We also planned to deploy a thousand paratroopers from the 173rd Airborne to the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. This wasn�t our first choice, but at least we would have a foothold for a northern front.

In the south, we had more than 150,000 American troops on Iraq�s border, with some 90,000 more stationed in the Gulf region. I had made it abundantly clear that we would use them if necessary. Coercive diplomacy had brought us to our maximum point of leverage. The military and diplomatic tracks had fully converged. The choice between war and peace belonged to Saddam Hussein alone.

For months, the National Security Council had been meeting almost daily to discuss Iraq. I knew where all my advisers stood. Dick Cheney was concerned about the slow diplomatic process. He warned that Saddam Hussein could be using the time to produce weapons, hide weapons, or plot an attack. At one of our weekly lunches that winter, Dick asked me directly, �Are you going to take care of this guy, or not?� That was his way of saying he thought we had given diplomacy enough time. I appreciated Dick�s blunt advice. I told him I wasn�t ready to move yet. �Okay, Mr. President, it�s your call,� he said. Then he deployed one of his favorite lines. �That�s why they pay you the big bucks,� he said with a gentle smile.

Don Rumsfeld was not as definitive. He assured me the military would be ready if I gave the order. He also warned that we couldn�t leave 150,000 troops sitting on Iraq�s border forever. The logistical strain of supporting that many forces was immense. At some point, the buildup would lose its coercive value because Saddam would conclude we weren�t serious about sending the troops in.

Condi was careful to stay neutral at the NSC meetings, but she gave me her opinion in private. She had been a strong supporter of inspections. But after meeting with Blix and his team, she was convinced Saddam would do nothing but stall. She reluctantly concluded that the only way to enforce the UN resolution would be to use the military option.

Colin had the deepest reservations. In a one-on-one meeting in early 2003, he had told me he believed we could manage the threat of Iraq diplomatically. He also told me he was not fully comfortable with the war plans. That did not surprise me. The operation Tommy Franks had conceived would use about a third as many troops as we had in the Gulf War. It marked a stark departure from the belief that America could win wars only by deploying massive, decisive force�commonly known as the Powell Doctrine.

I was pleased when Colin told me he had shared his concerns about the plan with Tommy. Colin had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs during Desert Storm, and I was confident Tommy would take his input seriously. While I was still hopeful diplomacy would work, I told Colin it was possible that we would reach the point where war was the only option left. Neither of us wanted war, but I asked if he would support military action as a last resort. �If this is what you have to do,� he said, �I�m with you, Mr. President.�

On Sunday morning, March 16, I boarded Air Force One and winged my way to the Azores Islands, a Portuguese territory about two thirds of the way from Washington to Lisbon. I was headed to a last-minute summit on diplomatic strategy with Tony Blair, Jos� Maria Aznar, and Prime Minister Jos� Barroso of Portugal. With the French, Germans, and Russians opposed to the second UN resolution, and the Mexicans and Chileans unwilling to provide their votes, we all agreed the diplomatic track had reached its end. We planned to withdraw the second UN resolution Monday morning. That evening, I would give Saddam Hussein and his sons forty-eight hours to leave the country, a final opportunity to avoid war.

With three steadfast European allies at the Azores Islands, (from left) Jos� Barroso, Tony Blair, and Jos� Maria Aznar. White House/Eric Draper

Tony�s critical vote in parliament would come Tuesday. He told me he would resign if the vote failed, meaning that Great Britain would withdraw from the military coalition. I never imagined I would be following a British parliamentary vote so closely, let alone pulling for the Labour Party prime minister. I shook hands with my friend and his team as we left the Azores. �I hope that�s not the last time we ever see them,� Condi said on the walk to Air Force One.

The flight home was long and quiet. After so much planning and waiting, the moment had arrived. Unless Saddam fled the country, we would be at war in three days. I was deeply disappointed that diplomacy had failed. But I had promised the American people, our allies, and the world that we would enforce the UN resolutions. I was not going to break my word.

For months I had solicited advice, listened to a variety of opinions, and considered the counterarguments. Some believed we could contain Saddam by keeping the inspectors in Iraq. But I didn�t see how. If we were to tell Saddam he had another chance�after declaring this was his last chance�we would shatter our credibility and embolden him.

Others suggested that the threat wasn�t as serious as we thought. That was easy for them to say. They weren�t responsible for protecting the country. I remembered the shattering pain of 9/11, a surprise attack for which we had received no warning. This time we had a warning like a blaring siren. Years of intelligence pointed overwhelmingly to the conclusion that Saddam had WMD. He had used them in the past. He had not met his responsibility to prove their destruction. He had refused to cooperate with the inspectors, even with the threat of an invasion on his doorstep. The only logical conclusion was that he was hiding WMD. And given his support of terror and his sworn hatred of America, there was no way to know where those weapons would end up.

Others alleged that America�s real intent was to control Iraq�s oil or satisfy Israel. Those theories were false. I was sending our troops into combat to protect the American people.

I knew the cost would be high. But inaction had a cost, too. Given everything we knew, allowing Saddam to stay in power would have amounted to an enormous gamble. I would have had to bet that either every major intelligence agency was wrong or that Saddam would have a change of heart. After seeing the horror of 9/11, that was not a chance I was willing to take. Military action was my last resort. But I believed it was necessary.

The next day, Monday, March 17, 2003, Ambassador John Negroponte withdrew the second resolution at the UN. That night, I addressed the nation from the Cross Hall of the White House. �The United Nations Security Council has not lived up to its responsibilities, so we will rise to ours,� I said, �����Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within forty-eight hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict, commenced at a time of our choosing.�

The next two days felt like a week. We did get some good news on Tuesday: Tony Blair had won his vote in parliament by a solid margin. Great Britain would be at our side.

George Tenet and Colin Powell kept me updated on the latest developments with Iraq. Our last-ditch hope was that Saddam would agree to go into exile. At one point, an offer from a Middle Eastern government to send Saddam to Belarus with $1 to $2 billion looked like it might gain traction. Instead, in one of his last acts, Saddam ordered the tongue of a dissident slashed out and left the man to bleed to death. The dictator of Iraq had made his decision. He chose war.

On Wednesday morning, I convened the entire National Security Council in the Situation Room, where I gave the order to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom. Six hours later, I got an unexpected call from Don Rumsfeld. He said that he had something major to discuss. He and George Tenet were on their way to the Oval Office.

�What�s going on?� I asked when they arrived.

�Mr. President,� George said, �we think we have a chance to kill Saddam Hussein.�

What followed was one of the most extraordinary meetings of my presidency. With the full national security team gathered in the Oval Office, advisers scrambled in and out providing the latest updates from the field. A network of intelligence sources in Iraq reported that Saddam and some of his family were likely to spend the night at a complex outside Baghdad called Dora Farms. If we bombed the site, we might be able to decapitate the regime.

I was skeptical. If I ordered the airstrike, we would be departing from our well-conceived plan, which called for two days of covert operations before the air war commenced. I pictured all that could go wrong. Two F-117 bombers would have to fly unescorted over a heavily fortified city. My biggest concern was that the intelligence was a trap. What if it was not Saddam headed to Dora Farms, but a busload of kids? The first images of the war would show us killing innocent Iraqi children.

The safest course was to stick with the plan. But one thought kept recurring: By killing the dictator we might be able to end the war before it began, and spare lives. I felt a responsibility to seize this opportunity. General Myers briefed me that the planes were gassed up and the Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles were programmed. I turned to the team gathered in the Oval Office and said, �Let�s go.� Just after the forty-eight-hour deadline expired, the bombing began.

Condi called early the next morning. A witness had seen a man who resembled Saddam being carried out of the rubble at Dora Farms. But as the days passed, the reports changed. The operation was a harbinger of things to come. Our intent was right. The pilots performed bravely. But the intelligence was wrong.

The day after the opening shot at Dora Farms, a flurry of military activity commenced. From Iraq�s southern border with Kuwait, the V Corps and First Marine Expeditionary Force started their parallel charge to Baghdad. Meanwhile, our air forces bombarded the capital. In the initial wave of the strike, more than three hundred cruise missiles�followed by stealth bombers�took out most of Saddam�s military command and government headquarters. Unlike the firebombing of Dresden, the nuclear strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the use of napalm on Vietnam, our attack spared much of Baghdad�s civilian population and infrastructure. It was not only shock and awe, but one of the most precise air raids in history.

In southern Iraq, Marines deployed to protect key oil fields. Polish Special Forces and U.S. Navy SEALs secured offshore oil infrastructure. A British armored division liberated the southern city of Basra and the vital port of Umm Qasr. The oil fires and sabotage we feared never materialized, and we had cleared a path for humanitarian aid to flow into Iraq.

In northern Iraq, paratroopers seized key transit points and helped build an air bridge for supplies and humanitarian aid. With support from Kurdish forces, the Zarqawi camp was destroyed. In western Iraq, American, British, and Australian Special Forces patrolled the desert for Scud missiles and made sure Saddam never had the chance to attack Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Israel, or other allies in the region.

By the end of the second week, our troops had reached the outskirts of Baghdad. They had endured blinding sandstorms, searing heat, and heavy hazmat gear to protect against the biological or chemical attack we feared. They faced fierce resistance from Saddam�s most loyal forces, who attacked from civilian vehicles and hid behind human shields. Yet they completed the fastest armored advance in the history of warfare. Along the way, they handed out candy and medicine to children and risked their lives to protect Iraqi civilians.

On April 4, Sergeant Paul Ray Smith and his men were securing a courtyard near the Baghdad airport. Saddam�s Republican Guards ambushed them, wounding several of Sergeant Smith�s men. Exposed to enemy fire, Sergeant Smith manned a machine gun and kept shooting until he suffered a mortal wound. The Army�s after-action report revealed that he had killed fifty enemy soldiers and saved as many as one hundred Americans. For his act of bravery, Paul Ray Smith became the first soldier in the war on terror to earn the Medal of Honor. In April 2005, I presented the medal to his widow, Birgit, and young son at the White House.

The day after Sergeant Smith gave his life to secure the airport, the Third Infantry Division entered Baghdad. The First Marine Division arrived two days later. At the NSC meeting on the morning of April 9, Tommy Franks reported that the Iraqi capital could fall at any moment. My next meeting was with President Rudolf Schuster of Slovakia. His young democracy, one of forty-eight countries that had pledged military or logistical support in Iraq, had deployed a unit trained to manage the impact of a WMD attack. President Schuster had tears in his eyes as he described his nation�s pride in helping liberate Iraq. I kept that moment in mind when I heard critics allege that America acted unilaterally. The false charge denigrated our allies and pissed me off.

When the meeting ended, Dan Bartlett told me I ought to take a look at the TV. I didn�t keep one in the Oval Office, so I went to the area outside where my personal assistants sat. I watched as a crowd of Iraqis in Baghdad�s Firdos Square cheered while a Marine vehicle dragged down a forty-foot-tall statue of Saddam.

For twenty days I had been filled with anxiety. Now I was overwhelmed with relief and pride. I was also mindful of the challenges ahead. Saddam�s forces still controlled parts of northern Iraq, including his hometown of Tikrit. There were pockets of resistance from ruthless Baathist fighters called Fedayeen Saddam. And Saddam and his sons were on the run. As I told Jos� Maria Aznar when I called to share the news, �You won�t see us doing any victory dances or anything.�

I should have followed my own advice. Tommy Franks felt it was important to show that a new phase in the war had begun. As a way to do that, I decided to give a speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, which was returning home after ten months at sea. The five thousand sailors, airmen, and Marines aboard the carrier had supported operations in both the Afghan and Iraqi theaters.

On May 1, 2003, I climbed into the seat of a military jet for the first time in more than thirty years. Navy pilot Scott Zellem, known by his call sign as Z-Man, briefed us on the safety procedures at Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego.*** Commander John �Skip� Lussier, a fine pilot with more than five hundred carrier landings on his r�sum�, got our S-3B Viking off the ground. At one point, he handed the controls to me, and I flew the jet for a few minutes over the Pacific Ocean. I was rusty, but after a few porpoises I steadied out. The commander wisely took over as we approached the carrier. He guided the plane down to the deck and caught the final arresting wire.

Aboard the Lincoln, I visited with the landing crew, marveled at takeoffs and landings in the catapult zone, and ate chow with the sailors and Marines. �My fellow Americans,� I said in my speech, �Major combat operations in Iraq have ended.���The transition from dictatorship to democracy will take time, but it is worth every effort. Our coalition will stay until our work is done. Then we will leave, and we will leave behind a free Iraq.�

Aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. White House/Paul Morse

I hadn�t noticed the large banner my staff had placed on the bridge of the ship, positioned for TV. It read �Mission Accomplished.� It was intended as a tribute to the folks aboard the Lincoln, which had just completed the longest deployment for an aircraft carrier of its class. Instead, it looked like I was doing the victory dance I had warned against. �Mission Accomplished� became a shorthand criticism for all that subsequently went wrong in Iraq. My speech made clear that our work was far from done. But all the explaining in the world could not reverse the perception. Our stagecraft had gone awry. It was a big mistake.

With Saddam gone from power, our central objective became helping the Iraqis develop a democracy that could govern itself, sustain itself, defend itself, and serve as an ally in the war on terror. The objective was ambitious, but I was optimistic. Many of the dire contingencies we had planned for and worried about before the war had not come to pass. There had been no Fortress Baghdad, no massive oil field fires, no widespread starvation, no civilian massacre by Saddam, no WMD attack on our troops, and no terrorist attack on America or our allies.

There was one important contingency for which we had not adequately prepared. In the weeks after liberation, Baghdad descended into a state of lawlessness. I was appalled to see looters carrying precious artifacts out of Iraq�s national museum and to read reports of kidnapping, murder, and rape. Part of the explanation was that Saddam had released tens of thousands of criminals shortly before the war. But the problem was deeper than that. Saddam had warped the psychology of Iraqis in a way we didn�t fully understand. The suspicion and fear that he had cultivated for decades were rising to the surface.

�What the hell is happening?� I asked during an NSC meeting in late April. �Why isn�t anybody stopping these looters?�

The short answer was that there was a manpower shortage in Baghdad. The Iraqi police force had collapsed when the regime fell. The Iraqi army had melted away. Because of Turkey�s decision, many of the American troops who liberated Baghdad had been required to continue north to free the rest of the country. The damage done in those early days created problems that would linger for years. The Iraqis were looking for someone to protect them. By failing to secure Baghdad, we missed our first chance to show that we could.

The security vacuum was accompanied by a political vacuum. I decided to name an American administrator to provide order while we worked to develop a legitimate government. The idea grew into the Coalition Provisional Authority, authorized by a United Nations resolution and led by a distinguished foreign service officer and counterterrorism expert, Ambassador L. Paul �Jerry� Bremer.

Jerry impressed me from the start. He was an aggressive leader who shared my conviction that the Iraqis were capable of democracy. He knew it would take time for them to write a constitution and prepare for elections. In one of our first meetings, he told me he�d read a study of previous postwar operations and thought we needed more troops in Iraq.

I raised the question of troop levels with Don Rumsfeld and the military leadership. They assured me we had enough. They anticipated the arrival of more forces from Coalition partners and believed we could train an Iraqi army and police force fairly quickly. They were also concerned about stirring up Iraqi nationalism and inciting violence by appearing to occupy the country.

I accepted Don and the military�s judgment. The chaos and violence we witnessed was alarming, but it was still early. The situation reminded me of the difficult first days in Afghanistan. I refused to give up on our plan before it had a chance to work.

Bremer arrived in Iraq on May 12, 2003. One of his first tasks was to assemble an Iraqi Governing Council that would take responsibility for key ministries and prepare for a formal return of sovereignty. Navigating Iraq�s tribal, religious, and ethnic politics was highly complicated. But Jerry and his team did a superb job. The Governing Council took office in July, just four months after liberation. It included twenty-five Iraqis from all backgrounds. Iraqis still had a long way to go, but they had taken their first step toward a representative government.

Forming the Governing Council was an important way to demonstrate that Saddam�s tyranny was gone forever. With that in mind, Jerry issued two orders shortly after his arrival in Baghdad. One declared that certain members of Saddam�s Baath Party would not be eligible to serve in the new government of Iraq. The other formally disbanded the Iraqi army, which had largely disappeared on its own.

In some ways, the orders achieved their objectives. Iraq�s Shia and Kurds�the majority of the population�welcomed the clean break from Saddam. But the orders had a psychological impact I did not foresee. Many Sunnis took them as a signal they would have no place in Iraq�s future. This was especially dangerous in the case of the army. Thousands of armed men had just been told they were not wanted. Instead of signing up for the new military, many joined the insurgency.

In retrospect, I should have insisted on more debate on Jerry�s orders, especially on what message disbanding the army would send and how many Sunnis the de-Baathification would affect. Overseen by longtime exile Ahmed Chalabi, the de-Baathification program turned out to cut much deeper than we expected, including mid-level party members like teachers. It is possible we would have issued the orders anyway. They were tough calls, and any alternative would have created a separate set of problems. Had the Shia concluded that we were not serious about ending the era of the Baath Party, they may have turned against the coalition, rejected the goal of a unified Iraqi democracy, and aligned themselves with Iran. There is no way to know for sure what would have happened, but the discussion would have better prepared us for what followed.

The security situation continued to deteriorate over the summer. Iraq was becoming a magnet for extremists�Baathist insurgents, Fedayeen Saddam, foreign terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda, and, later, militant Shia and agents of Iran. These groups had different ideologies, but they shared an immediate goal: to drive America out of Iraq. They knew they could never win a direct fight against our troops, so they deployed roadside bombs and attacked nonmilitary targets such as the Jordanian embassy and the UN complex in Baghdad. Another tactic was to kidnap reconstruction workers and execute them in grisly Internet videos. Their strategy was to present an image of Iraq as hopeless and unwinnable, swinging American public opinion against the war and forcing us to withdraw as we had in Vietnam.

To an extent, they succeeded. It was difficult for the average American to differentiate the twisted terrorists from the millions of ordinary Iraqis who were grateful for liberation. We tried to get the good news out�the relative calm in the Kurdish north and Shia south, the rebuilding of schools and hospitals, and the training of a new Iraqi army. But in the eyes of the media�and, therefore, of the public�none of this quiet progress could compete with the bombings and the beheadings.

In early July, a reporter asked me about attacks on our troops. �There are some who feel like that if they attack us that we may decide to leave prematurely,� I said. �����My answer is: Bring �em on.�

Anytime I spoke on Iraq, there were multiple audiences listening, each of which had a different perspective. I thought about four in particular.

The first audience was the American people. Their support was essential to funding and fighting the war. I believed that most Americans wanted to win in Iraq. But if the cost seemed too high or victory too distant, they would grow weary. It was important for me to reinforce the importance of the cause and our determination to prevail.

The second audience was our troops. They had volunteered to serve and were risking their lives far from home. They and their families needed to know I believed in them, stood firmly behind their mission, and would not make military decisions based on politics.

The third audience was the Iraqi people. Some wanted us gone, but I was convinced that the vast majority of Iraqis wanted us to stay long enough to help a democratic society emerge. It was important that I communicate my resolve to complete the work we had begun. If Iraqis suspected we were going to abandon them, they would turn to other sources of protection.

The final audience was the enemy. They believed their acts of savagery could affect our decisions. I had to make clear they never would.

My �bring �em on� comment was intended to show confidence in our troops and signal that the enemy could never shake our will. But the firestorm of criticism showed that I had left a wrong impression with other audiences. I learned from the experience and paid closer attention to how I communicated with each audience in the years ahead.

By the fall of 2003, the international coalition in Iraq was comprised of ground forces from thirty countries, including two multinational divisions led by Great Britain and Poland, and logistical support from many others. Coalition forces had discovered torture chambers, rape rooms, and mass graves containing thousands of bodies. They found a facility containing state-of-the-art hazmat suits and syringes with the antidote for VX nerve agent. But they had not found the stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons that virtually every major intelligence agency in the world believed Saddam had.

When Saddam didn�t use WMD on our troops, I was relieved. When we didn�t discover the stockpile soon after the fall of Baghdad, I was surprised. When the whole summer passed without finding any, I was alarmed. The press corps constantly raised the question, �Where are the WMD?�

I was asking the same thing. The military and intelligence teams assured me they were looking constantly. They examined hidden sites Saddam had used during the Gulf War. They collected intelligence and responded to tips. At one point, the CIA heard that large canisters had been spotted from a bridge over the Euphrates River. Navy frogmen deployed to the scene. They found nothing. A high-ranking official from the United Arab Emirates brought drawings of tunnels he believed Saddam had used to hide weapons. We dug up the ground. Nothing materialized.

George Tenet recruited David Kay, the UN�s chief weapons inspector in Iraq in 1991, to lead a new inspections team. Kay conducted a thorough search of Iraq and found irrefutable evidence that Saddam had lied to the world and violated Resolution 1441. �Iraq�s WMD programs spanned more than two decades, involved thousands of people, billions of dollars, and were elaborately shielded by security and deception operations that continued even beyond the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom,� he told Congress in October 2003. But there was one thing Kay did not find: the WMD stockpiles everyone expected.

The left trotted out a new mantra: �Bush Lied, People Died.� The charge was illogical. If I wanted to mislead the country into war, why would I pick an allegation that was certain to be disproven publicly shortly after we invaded the country? The charge was also dishonest. Members of the previous administration, John Kerry, John Edwards, and the vast majority of Congress had all read the same intelligence that I had and concluded Iraq had WMD. So had intelligence agencies around the world. Nobody was lying. We were all wrong. The absence of WMD stockpiles did not change the fact that Saddam was a threat. In January 2004, David Kay said, �It was reasonable to conclude that Iraq posed an imminent threat.���What we learned during the inspection made Iraq a more dangerous place potentially than in fact we thought it was even before the war.�

Still, I knew the failure to find WMD would transform public perception of the war. While the world was undoubtedly safer with Saddam gone, the reality was that I had sent American troops into combat based in large part on intelligence that proved false. That was a massive blow to our credibility�my credibility�that would shake the confidence of the American people.

No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn�t find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do.

While the fight in Iraq was more difficult than I expected, I remained optimistic. I was inspired by the courage of the one hundred thousand Iraqis who volunteered to join their security forces, by leaders who stepped forward to replace members of the Governing Council who had been assassinated, and by ordinary people who longed for freedom.

Nothing gave me more confidence than our troops. Thanks to them, most of the senior members of Saddam�s regime had been captured or killed by the end of 2003. In July, we got an intelligence tip that Saddam�s two sons were in the Mosul area of northern Iraq. Joined by Special Forces, troops from the 101st Airborne under the command of General David Petraeus laid siege to the building where Hussein�s sons, Uday and Qusay, were hiding. After a six-hour firefight, both were dead. We later received intelligence that Saddam had ordered the killing of Barbara and Jenna in return for the death of his sons.

Two days after the fall of Baghdad, Laura and I visited Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. We met with almost a hundred wounded service members and their families. Some were from Afghanistan; many were from Iraq. It was a heart-wrenching experience to look into a hospital bed and see the consequences of sending Americans into combat. One comfort was that I knew they would receive superb medical care from the skilled and compassionate professionals of the military health-care system.

Visiting the wounded was both the toughest and most inspiring part of my job. Here, with Sergeant Patrick Hagood at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. White House/Paul Morse

At Walter Reed, I met a member of the Delta Team, one of our elite Special Forces units. For classification reasons, I cannot give his name. He had lost the lower half of his leg. �I appreciate your service,� I said as I shook his hand. �I�m sorry you got hurt.�

�Don�t feel sorry for me, Mr. President,� he replied. �Just get me another leg so I can go back in.�

At the National Naval Medical Center, I met forty-two-year-old Marine Master Gunnery Sergeant Guadalupe Denogean. He had been wounded a few weeks earlier, when a rocket-propelled grenade struck his vehicle. The explosion blew off part of his skull and his right hand; shrapnel penetrated his upper back and legs, and his eardrums burst.

When asked if he had any requests, Guadalupe said he had two. He asked for a promotion for the corporal who had saved his life. And he wanted to become an American citizen. After 9/11, I had issued an executive order making all foreign nationals serving in the military eligible for immediate citizenship.

Guadalupe had come to the United States from Mexico as a boy. He picked fruit to help his family make a living until he joined the Marines at age seventeen. After serving for twenty-five years�and deploying for two wars with Iraq�he wanted the flag on his uniform to be his own. That day in the hospital, Laura and I attended his naturalization ceremony, conducted by Director Eduardo Aguirre of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. Guadalupe raised his right hand, covered in bandages, and swore the oath of citizenship.

Witnessing Master Gunnery Sergeant Guadalupe Denogean become an an American citizen. White House/Eric Draper

A few moments later, he was followed by Marine Lance Corporal O.J. Santamaria, a native of the Philippines. He was twenty-one years old and had suffered a serious wound in Iraq. He was hooked up to an intravenous blood transfusion. About halfway through the ceremony, he broke down in tears. He powered through to the end of the oath. I was proud to respond, �My fellow American.�

In the fall of 2003, Andy Card came to me with an idea. Was I interested in making a trip to Iraq to thank the troops? You bet I was.

The risk was high. But Deputy Chief of Staff Joe Hagin, working with the Secret Service and White House Military Office, came up with a way to pull it off. The week of Thanksgiving, I would travel to Crawford and tell the press I was staying for the full holiday. Then, on Wednesday night, I would slip out of the ranch and fly to Baghdad.

I told Laura several weeks ahead of the trip. She was reassured when I told her we would abort the trip if news of it leaked. I told Barbara and Jenna about thirty minutes before I left. �I�m scared, Dad,� Barbara said. �Be safe. Come home.�

Condi and I climbed into an unmarked Suburban, our baseball caps pulled low, and headed for the airport. To maintain secrecy, there was no motorcade. I had nearly forgotten what a traffic jam felt like, but riding on I-35 the day before Thanksgiving brought the memories back. We crept along, passing an occasional car full of counterassault agents, and made it to Air Force One on schedule. Timeliness was important. We needed to land as the sun was setting in Baghdad.

We flew from Texas to Andrews Air Force Base, where we switched to the twin version of Air Force One and took off for Iraq. The plane carried a skeleton crew of staff, military and Secret Service personnel, and a press contingent sworn to secrecy. I slept little on the ten-and-a-half-hour flight. As we neared Baghdad, I showered, shaved, and headed to the cockpit to watch the landing. Colonel Mark Tillman manned the controls. I trusted him completely. As Laura always put it, �That Mark can sure land this plane.�

Sitting in the cockpit of Air Force One on the approach to Baghdad. White House/Tina Hager

With the sun dropping on the horizon, I could make out the minarets of the Baghdad skyline. The city seemed so serene from above. But we were concerned about surface-to-air missiles on the ground. While Joe Hagin assured us the military had cleared a wide perimeter around Baghdad International Airport, the mood aboard the plane was anxious. As we descended in a corkscrew pattern with the shades drawn, some staffers joined together in a prayer session. At the last moment, Colonel Tillman leveled out the plane and kissed the runway, no sweat.

Waiting for me at the airport were Jerry Bremer and General Ricardo Sanchez, the senior ground commander in Iraq. �Welcome to a free Iraq,� Jerry said.

We went to the mess hall, where six hundred troops had gathered for a Thanksgiving meal. Jerry was supposed to be the guest of honor. He told the troops he had a holiday message from the president. �Let�s see if we�ve got anybody more senior here��,� he said.

That was my cue. I walked out from behind a curtain and onto the stage of the packed hall. Many of the stunned troops hesitated for a split second, then let out deafening whoops and hooahs. Some had tears running down their faces. I was swept up by the emotion. These were the souls who just eight months earlier had liberated Iraq on my orders. Many had seen combat. Some had seen friends perish. I took a deep breath and said, �I bring a message on behalf of America. We thank you for your service, we�re proud of you, and America stands solidly behind you.�

After the speech, I had dinner with the troops and moved to a side room to meet with four members of the Governing Council, the mayor of Baghdad, and members of the city council. One woman, the director of a maternity hospital, told me how women had more opportunities now than they had ever dreamed about under Saddam. I knew Iraq still faced big problems, but the trip reinforced my faith that they could be overcome.

The most dangerous part left was the takeoff from Baghdad. We were told to keep all lights out and maintain total telephone silence until we hit ten thousand feet. I was still on an emotional high. But the exhilaration of the moment was replaced by an eerie feeling of uncertainty as we blasted off the ground and climbed silently through the night.

After a few tense minutes, we reached a safe altitude. I called one of the operators on the plane and asked him to connect me with Laura. �Where are you?� she asked. �I am on the way home,� I said. �Tell the girls all is well.�

She sounded relieved. It turns out she�d had a little mix-up with the timing. She 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 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.