I remember my mom saying to me that what your friends do is one thing, but what you do could be on the front page of the paper.

In survey after survey, the Iraqi people say, 'We want to choose our leaders.'

I still like and admire George W. Bush. I consider him a fundamentally decent person, and I do not believe he or his White House deliberately or consciously sought to deceive the American people.

As a Texas loyalist who followed Bush to Washington with great hope and personal affection and as a proud member of his administration, I was all too ready to give him and his highly experienced foreign policy advisers the benefit of the doubt on Iraq. Unfortunately, subsequent events have showed that our willingness to trust the judgment of Bush and his team was misplaced.

I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself.

I think that there's a tendency in this town to try to selectively pick snapshots, when the broader reality is that we have a record of results and that we're getting things done for the American people.

When I was knowingly misled but only learned that much later, that's really when I started to become disillusioned at the White House.