Asked if he had ever considered resigning during his first term in the Bush administration, he said, “Certainly there are days,” without mentioning any one or any incident in particular.

Looking back over the past four years, he acknowledged that the two biggest mistakes or misjudgments that had been made - though not necessarily by him - were the failure to discover any prohibited weapons in Iraq (”that’s clearly a disappointment”) and a lack of intelligence that predicted “the degree of insurgency today.”