Ladies and gentlemen, these are not assertions. These are facts, corroborated by many sources, some of them sources of the intelligence services of other countries.

That's why the army sends all its future generals to what we call "charm school." As soon as you are a general, people think that you know everything. You think yourself that you have become omniscient and omnipotent. Be careful, because people want to do everything they can to please the general, and you need to guard against this.

It was not the United States who invaded Kuwait; it was Iraq. It was not the United States that went to war with Iran; it was Iraq. It was not the United States that fired chemical weapons at Iran; it was Iraq. And it was not the United States that murdered innocent Iraqi citizens with chemical weapons; it was Iraq.

For all the hardship, I was still excited to be on the trail, testing my endurance, feeling especially alive as strength and fatigue flowed alternately through my limbs.

I'm absolutely sure that there are weapons of mass destruction there and the evidence will be forthcoming. We're just getting it just now.

Each of us must work to become a hardheaded realist, or else we risk wasting our time and energy on pursuing impossible dreams. Yet constant naysayers pursue no less impossible dreams. Their fear and cynicism move nothing forward. They kill progress. How many cynics built empires, great cities, or powerful corporations?

Our failure was that our intelligence community thought [Saddam Hussein ] had stockpiled weapons of mass destruction. That was a mistake. There is fallibility in human intelligence and in human decisions.