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.
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.
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?
