“Is Iran going to get nuclear weapons?” Bush responded by expanding on a point he made in the book. As president, he contemplated Iran policy by thinking about two clocks – one measured the time it would take for Iran to get nuclear weapons and the other kept track of the time it would take for internal change to take root in Iran. Bush writes that his plan was to accelerate the latter and retard the former. As to regrets, Mr Bush has quite a few. He says he should have deployed troops earlier to restore order after Hurricane Katrina smote New Orleans. He was wrong to trust Vladimir Putin on the strength of looking into his eyes. He wonders whether he could have foreseen the financial crisis. Lulled by early success, he sent too few troops to Afghanistan. As for Iraq, it was a mistake to stand in front of the “Mission Accomplished” banner on board the Abraham Lincoln. It was a mistake to keep too few troops on the ground to ensure order after the fall of Baghdad. He is sorry he did not think harder before agreeing to disband the Iraqi army. And “no one was more shocked and angry” than he when no weapons of mass destruction showed up. “That was a massive blow to our credibility—my credibility—that would shake the confidence of the American people.”
Israel’s request to America to bomb a secret Syrian reactor (when Mr Bush said no, Israel did it alone)
