Two days ahead of schedule, the world witnessed the arrival of a free and sovereign Iraq.

I've worked for four presidents and watched two others up close, and I know that there's no such thing as a routine day in the Oval Office.

We live in a free society, and freedom means freedom for everybody. We shouldn't be able to choose and say, 'You get to live free and you don't.' That means people should be free to enter into any kind of relationship they want to enter into. Like Joe (Lieberman), I'm also wrestling with the extent to which there ought to be legal sanction of those relationships. I think we ought to do everything we can to tolerate and accommodate whatever kind of relationships people want to enter into.

I don’t think that [the war in Iraq] damaged our reputation around the world.

One of the reasons the deficit got as big as it did, frankly, was because of the economic slowdown, the fall-off in deficits, the terrorist attacks. A significant chunk was taken out of the economy by what happened after the attacks of 9/11.

In our own country, we take democratic values seriously - and so we always have a vigorous debate on the issues. That's part of the greatness of America, and we wouldn't have it any other way.

It's very important to go back and keep in mind the distinction between handling these events as criminal acts, which was the way we did before 9/11, and then looking at 9/11 and saying, 'This is not a criminal act,' not when you destroy 16 acres of Manhattan, kill 3,000 Americans, blow a big hole in the Pentagon. That's an act of war.