Decision Points

by George W. Bush

My goals in writing this book are twofold. First, I hope to paint a picture of what it was like to serve as president for eight consequential years. I believe it will be impossible to reach definitive conclusions about my presidency—or any recent presidency, for that matter—for several decades. The passage of time allows passions to cool, results to clarify, and scholars to compare different approaches. My hope is that this book will serve as a resource for anyone studying this period in American history. Second, I write to give readers a perspective on decision making in a complex environment. Many of the decisions that reach the president’s desk are tough calls, with strong arguments on both sides. Throughout the book, I describe the options I weighed and the principles I followed. I hope this will give you a better sense of why I made the decisions I did.

I have done my best to write about the decisions I got right, those I got wrong, and what I would do differently if given the chance. Of course, in the presidency, there are no do-overs. You have to do what you believe is right and accept the consequences. I tried to do that every day of my eight years in office. Serving as president was the honor of a lifetime, and I appreciate your giving me an opportunity to share my story.

Quitting drinking was one of the toughest decisions I have ever made. Without it, none of the others that follow in this book would have been possible. Yet without the experiences of my first forty years, quitting drinking would not have been possible either. So much of my character, so many of my convictions, took shape during those first four decades. My journey included challenges, struggles, and failures. It is testimony to the strength of love, the power of faith, and the truth that people can change.

China’s experience reminded me of the French and Russian revolutions. The pattern was the same: People seized control by promising to promote certain ideals. Once they had consolidated power, they abused it, casting aside their beliefs and brutalizing their fellow citizens. It was as if mankind had a sickness that it kept inflicting on itself. The sobering thought deepened my conviction that freedom—economic, political, and religious—is the only fair and productive way of governing a society.

While I couldn’t pinpoint it at the time, I believe there is a reason Laura and I never met all those years before. God brought her into my life at just the right time, when I was ready to settle down and was open to having a partner at my side. Thankfully, I had the good sense to recognize it. It was the best decision of my life.

I’ve been asked if I consider myself an alcoholic. I can’t say for sure. I do know that I have a habitual personality. I was drinking too much, and it was starting to create problems. My ability to quit cold leads me to believe that I didn’t have a chemical addiction. Some drinkers are not as fortunate as I was. I admire those who use other methods to quit, such as the twelve-step process of Alcoholics Anonymous. I could not have quit drinking without faith. I also don’t think my faith would be as strong if I hadn’t quit drinking. I believe God helped open my eyes, which were closing because of booze.

I hadn’t spent a lifetime planning to run for president. If I had, I probably would have done a few things differently when I was younger.

The final tally was 53 percent to 47 percent. I hated losing, but I was glad I’d run. I enjoyed the hard work of politics, meeting people and making my case. I learned that allowing your opponent to define you is one of the biggest mistakes you can make in a campaign. And I discovered that I could accept defeat and move on. That was not easy for someone as competitive as I am. But it was an important part of my maturing. As for Congressman Kent Hance, he deserved to win that race, and we became good friends. Two gubernatorial and presidential victories later, he is still the only politician ever to beat me.

Eventually, September 11 will come to feel more like Pearl Harbor Day—an honored date on the calendar and an important moment in history, but not a scar on the heart, not a reason to fight on. For me, the week of September 11 will always be something more. I still see the Pentagon smoldering, the towers in flames, and that pile of twisted steel. I still hear the voices of the loved ones searching for survivors and the workers yelling, “Do not let me down!” and “Whatever it takes!” I still feel the sadness of the children, the agony of the burn victims, and the torment of the broken families. I still marvel at the bravery of the firefighters, and the compassion of strangers, and the matchless courage of the passengers who forced down that plane. September 11 redefined sacrifice. It redefined duty. And it redefined my job.

Each piece of information was like a tile in a mosaic. In late September, FBI Director Bob Mueller inserted a big tile when he told me there were 331 potential al Qaeda operatives inside the United States. The overall image was unmistakable: The prospect of a second wave of terrorist attacks against America was very real.

On 9/11, it was obvious the law enforcement approach to terrorism had failed. Suicidal men willing to fly passenger planes into buildings were not common criminals. They could not be deterred by the threat of prosecution. They had declared war on America. To protect the country, we had to wage war against the terrorists. The war would be different from any America had fought in the past. We had to uncover the terrorists’ plots. We had to track their movements and disrupt their operations. We had to cut off their money and deprive them of their safe havens. And we had to do it all under the threat of another attack. The terrorists had made our homefront a battleground. Putting America on a war footing was one of the most important decisions of my presidency.

Some claimed the Lackawanna Six and others we arrested were little more than “small-town dupes” with fanciful plots “who had no intention of carrying out terrorist acts.” I always wondered how the second-guessers could be so sure. After all, in August 2001, the idea that terrorists commanded from caves in Afghanistan would attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on U.S. commercial airplanes would have seemed pretty far-fetched. For me, the lesson of 9/11 was simple: Don’t take chances. When our law enforcement and intelligence professionals found people with ties to terrorist networks inside the United States, I would rather be criticized for taking them into custody too early than waiting until it was too late.

My one regret about the PATRIOT Act is its name. When my administration sent the bill to Capitol Hill, it was initially called the Anti-Terrorism Act of 2001. Congress got clever and renamed it. As a result, there was an implication that people who opposed the law were unpatriotic. That was not what I intended. I should have pushed Congress to change the name of the bill before I signed it.

When Richard Reid was arrested, he was swiftly placed into the U.S. criminal justice system, which entitled him to the same constitutional protections as a common criminal. But the shoe bomber was not a burglar or bank robber; he was a foot soldier in al Qaeda’s war against America. He had emailed his mother two days before his attempted attack: “What I am doing is part of the ongoing war between Islam and disbelief.” By giving this terrorist the right to remain silent, we deprived ourselves of the opportunity to collect vital intelligence on his plan and his handlers.

At Guantanamo, detainees were given clean and safe shelter, three meals a day, a personal copy of the Koran, the opportunity to pray five times daily, and the same medical care their guards received. They had access to exercise space and a library stocked with books and DVDs. One of the most popular was an Arabic translation of Harry Potter. Over the years, we invited members of Congress, journalists, and international observers to visit Guantanamo and see the conditions for themselves. Many came away surprised by what they found. A Belgian official inspected Guantanamo five times and called it a “model prison” that offered detainees better treatment than Belgian prisons. “I have never witnessed acts of violence or things which shocked me in Guantanamo,” he said. “One should not confuse this center with Abu Ghraib.”

While our humane treatment of Guantanamo detainees was consistent with the Geneva Conventions, al Qaeda did not meet the qualifications for Geneva protection as a legal matter. The purpose of Geneva was to provide incentives for nation-states to fight wars by an agreed set of rules that protect human dignity and innocent life—and to punish warriors who do not. But the terrorists did not represent a nation-state. They had not signed the Geneva Conventions. Their entire mode of operation—intentionally killing the innocent—defied the principles of Geneva. And if al Qaeda captured an American, there was little chance they would treat him humanely.

I knew that an interrogation program this sensitive and controversial would one day become public. When it did, we would open ourselves up to criticism that America had compromised our moral values. I would have preferred that we get the information another way. But the choice between security and values was real. Had I not authorized waterboarding on senior al Qaeda leaders, I would have had to accept a greater risk that the country would be attacked. In the wake of 9/11, that was a risk I was unwilling to take. My most solemn responsibility as president was to protect the country. I approved the use of the interrogation techniques.

The new techniques proved highly effective. Zubaydah revealed large amounts of information on al Qaeda’s structure and operations. He also provided leads that helped reveal the location of Ramzi bin al Shibh, the logistical planner of the 9/11 attacks. The Pakistani police picked him up on the first anniversary of 9/11. Zubaydah later explained to interrogators why he started answering questions again. His understanding of Islam was that he had to resist interrogation only up to a certain point. Waterboarding was the technique that allowed him to reach that threshold, fulfill his religious duty, and then cooperate. “You must do this for all the brothers,” he said.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed proved difficult to break. But when he did, he gave us a lot. He disclosed plans to attack American targets with anthrax and directed us to three people involved in the al Qaeda biological weapons program. He provided information that led to the capture of Hambali, the chief of al Qaeda’s most dangerous affiliate in Southeast Asia and the architect of the Bali terrorist attack that killed 202 people. He provided further details that led agents to Hambali’s brother, who had been grooming operatives to carry out another attack inside the United States, possibly a West Coast version of 9/11 in which terrorists flew a hijacked plane into the Library Tower in Los Angeles.

Of the thousands of terrorists we captured in the years after 9/11, about a hundred were placed into the CIA program. About a third of those were questioned using enhanced techniques. Three were waterboarded. The information the detainees in the CIA program revealed constituted more than half of what the CIA knew about al Qaeda. Their interrogations helped break up plots to attack American military and diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow Airport and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States. Experts in the intelligence community told me that without the CIA program, there would have been another attack on the United States.

One of my favorite books is the fine historian David McCullough’s biography of President Harry Truman. I admired Truman’s toughness, principle, and strategic vision. “I felt like the moon, the stars, and all the planets had fallen on me,” he said when he took office suddenly in the final months of World War II. Yet the man from Missouri knew how to make a hard decision and stick by it. He did what he thought was right and didn’t care much what the critics said. When he left office in 1953, his approval ratings were in the twenties. Today he is viewed as one of America’s great presidents.

In retrospect, I probably could have avoided some of the controversy and legal setbacks by seeking legislation on military tribunals, the TSP, and the CIA enhanced interrogation program as soon as they were created. If members of Congress had been required to make their decisions at the same time I did—in the immediate aftermath of 9/11—I am confident they would have overwhelmingly approved everything we requested. Yet in the case of the TSP and the CIA program, the risk of exposing operational details to the enemy was one I could not take until we had a better handle on the security situation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

*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.

I didn’t blame President Clinton for the failure at Camp David or the violence that followed. I blamed Arafat. America, Europe, and the United Nations had flooded the Palestinian Territories with development aid. A good portion of it was diverted to Arafat’s bank account. He made the Forbes list of the world’s wealthiest “kings, queens, and despots.” Yet his people remained trapped in poverty, hopelessness, and extremism. For a Nobel Peace Prize recipient, he sure didn’t seem very interested in peace.

In January 2002, the Israeli navy intercepted a ship called the Karine A in the Red Sea. Aboard was an arsenal of deadly weapons. The Israelis believed the ship was headed from Iran to the Palestinian city of Gaza. Arafat sent a letter pleading his innocence. “The smuggling of arms is in total contradiction of the Palestinian Authority’s commitment to the peace process,” he wrote. But we and the Israelis had evidence that disproved the Palestinian leader’s claim. Arafat had lied to me. I never trusted him again. In fact, I never spoke to him again. By the spring of 2002, I had concluded that peace would not be possible with Arafat in power.

The crown prince sat silently. I wasn’t making much headway. What began as a tense ride around the ranch with the Crown Prince. White House/Eric Draper Then we reached a remote part of the property. A lone hen turkey was standing in the road. I stopped the truck. The bird stayed put. “What is that?” the crown prince asked. I told him it was a turkey. “Benjamin Franklin loved the turkey so much he wanted it to be America’s national bird,” I said. Suddenly I felt the crown prince’s hand grab my arm. “My brother,” he said, “it is a sign from Allah. This is a good omen.” I’ve never fully understood the significance of the bird, but I felt the tension begin to melt. When we got back to the house, our aides were surprised to hear us say we were ready for lunch.