Bush --'I'm the guy making history'

From Time mag's exclusive interview with the President at his Prairie Chapel Ranch in Texas with TIME’s John F. Dickerson and Nancy Gibbs:

At a press conference last April, Dickerson asked Bush what he thought was his biggest mistake and the President didn’t have an answer then. Bush responds to the same question in this TIME interview, “When you asked that question, I was convinced you were trying to force me to say it was a mistake to go into Iraq, which I wasn’t going to do. As sure as I’m sitting here, the right decision was to remove Saddam Hussein from power. The tactics going into Iraq were based upon a certain set of assumptions, like refugee flows, hunger, oil destruction. Had we had to do it over again, we would look at the consequences of catastrophic success—being so successful so fast that an enemy that should have surrendered or been done in escaped and lived to fight another day. I couldn’t have sat down and said to you, By the way, we’re going to be so victorious so quickly that we’ll end up having to fight another third of the Baathists over the next year in order to bring liberty to the country. There’s an idea that you can chew on. “