Saddam Hussein left Kuwait, but he retained power in Iraq. Some had urged Dad to expand the mission to remove Saddam from power, but he refused. Congress and the Coalition had signed on to liberate Kuwait. That was the mission. It was achieved. It was time to bring the troops home. President George H.W. Bush’s approval rating reached 89 percent, the highest level that any President had ever recorded to that point.

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IN MARCH AND April of 1991, Iraqi factions in several parts of the country mounted uprisings against Saddam, only to be crushed brutally by Saddam’s ground forces and helicopters and then dumped into mass graves. Over the years, some critics have suggested that the United States should have intervened to stop Saddam from suppressing the rebels, some of whom had been counting on American support. Dad’s response has always been that he had no mandate from Congress or from our international partners to intervene militarily.

Intelligence gathered during the Gulf War showed that Saddam’s biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs were more advanced than the CIA had previously estimated. And as the 1990s progressed, he continued to pose a threat. He defied the UN resolutions requiring that he disarm, disclose, and account for his weapons of mass destruction. He circumvented the sanctions that the UN had imposed without facing any serious punishment. And he routinely violated the no-fly zones that had been created to protect Iraqis in the northern and southern parts of the country. In 1998, Congress passed and President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act, which made the removal of Saddam and the promotion of a democratic Iraq the official policy of the United States.

When I took office in 2001, it seemed that the best way to pursue that policy was to contain Saddam and push for tougher sanctions. The hope was that if we pressured the regime hard enough, it would change. On September 11, 2001, the world changed instead. Al Qaeda terrorists operating out of Afghanistan killed nearly three thousand people on American soil. In the ensuing months, we received a constant stream of chilling intelligence that the terrorists wanted to attack the United States again, this time on a grander scale—incl

uding with chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. Intelligence agencies around the world believed that Saddam Hussein had chemical and biological weapons, as well as a nuclear weapons program. One of our greatest fears was that Saddam would share those capabilities with terrorists. We knew that Saddam had paid the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, used chemical weapons on his own people, invaded two of his neighbors, regularly fired on American planes patrolling the no-fly zone, and remained a sworn enemy of the United States. In short, after the horror of September 11 and the threats we were receiving, Saddam Hussein had to be dealt with. Beginning in early 2002, I mounted a sustained diplomatic campaign, backed up by the threat of military force, to convince Saddam to comply with his international obligations. I was not trying “to finish what my father had begun,” as some have suggested. My motivation was to protect the United States of America, as I had sworn an oath to do.

I thought about my father’s leadership in the Gulf War. Like Dad, I went to the UN Security Council to increase international pressure on Saddam. By that time, the UN Security Council had already passed sixteen resolutions demanding, among other things, that Saddam disclose, disarm, and account for his chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs. Saddam had defied every one of those resolutions. In November 2002, I worked with leaders around the world to pass a unanimous seventeenth resolution that declared Iraq to be in “material breach” of the earlier resolutions but afforded Saddam a “final opportunity to comply” with his obligations or else face “serious consequences.” In addition to conducting diplomacy at the UN, my administration assembled a large coalition of like-minded nations to put pressure on Saddam. Like Dad, I went to Congress, where both houses delivered bipartisan votes for a resolution authorizing me to take military action to enforce the UN resolutions and defend the country against the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. The Senate passed the war authorization resolution by a vote of 77–23, and the House passed it 296–133. (Interesti

ngly, some of the same Senators who spent the 1990s running away from their vote against the Gulf War spent the 2000s running away from their vote for the Iraq War.) I also spoke out against Saddam’s terrible violations of human dignity and urged our citizens and our allies to support our efforts against Saddam as a matter of human rights. And like Dad, I worked closely with our military commanders to assemble a plan to accomplish our objective—in this case, removing Saddam’s regime from power in Baghdad—decisively and with minimal loss of innocent life if our diplomatic efforts should fail.

Unfortunately, for the second time in two decades, Saddam Hussein defied the United States, our allies, and the United Nations. As it became increasingly clear that military force might be the only option to address the threat from Iraq, I sent intelligence briefers to update Dad on the situation. (I also sent them to brief former President Clinton.) I never asked Dad what I should do. We both knew that this was a decision that only the President can make. We did talk about the issue, however. Over Christmas 2002 at Camp David, I gave Dad an update on our strategy.

“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.”

In early 2003, Saddam briefly allowed weapons inspectors into the country, but he would not give them the access they needed to verify that he had complied with his obligations to destroy his weapons of mass destruction. Remembering Dad’s pledge to “go the extra mile for peace” in 1991, I made one last diplomatic effort to give Saddam a way out. My administration spoke to leaders in the Middle East about taking Saddam into exile. It was clear that he had no intention of leaving. On March 17, 2003, I gave him a final forty-eight hours to leave the country. Again, he refused. Time and again, Saddam Hussein could have chosen peace. Instead, he chose war.

On March 19, 2003, I gave the order to launch Operation Iraqi Freedom. Later that morning, I wrote a letter to Dad. “I know I have taken the right action and do pray few will lose life,” I wrote. “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.”

A few hours later, he replied, “Your handwritten note, just received, touched my heart. You are doing the right thing…. Remember Robin’s words, ‘I love you more than tongue can tell.’ Well, I do.”

The military operation, which had support from more than thirty-five nations, was a rapid success. Within a month, our forces had liberated Baghdad and overthrown Saddam’s regime. We worked with a diverse group of allies and Iraqi leaders to meet our objective: a free and representative Iraqi government that would replace Saddam’s brutal tyranny, a democracy in the heart of the Middle East, and an ally in the war on terror. For a variety of reasons, the mission proved to be more difficult than we expected. First, we never found the stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction that intelligence agencies around the world believed that Saddam had. (We did, however, find evidence that he still had the capacity to make chemical and biological weapons and that he intended to restart his nuclear program after the sanctions were lifted.)