talk , `` I said , ` What if we just say he has to come to surrender , would he have done it ? ' And this guy said , ` I 'm absolutely convinced he would have . ' My experts tell me he would n't have . '' Bush said , `` We ended it the way we said we would '' as a military success , but noted a cleaner ending `` would have been perfect . '' He added , `` If we had tried to get Saddam Hussein to come and literally surrender and put his sword on the table , I think it might have been avoided some of the problems that we did have in the future from him . '' On a day that President Barack Obama dispatched George Mitchell to the Middle East as the latest U.S. envoy , Clinton discussed the failure to achieve peace between Israelis and Palestinians . `` My No. 1 regret is that I was not able to persuade Yasser Arafat to accept the peace plan I offered at the end of my presidency that the Israelis accepted . `` If he had done that
-LRB- CNN -RRB- -- Two former presidents reflected on their greatest regrets in office Monday , each looking back to issues that continue to plague the nation years later . Former presidents and political rivals Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush now share philanthropic efforts . Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton appeared together at a question-and-answer forum before the National Automobile Dealers Association in New Orleans , Louisiana . Asked his biggest regret after leaving office , Bush said he now wonders whether he should have tried to get Saddam Hussein to leave office at the end of the first Gulf War in 1991 . He told the gathering , `` I 've thought a lot about it , but at the end of Desert Storm , the question was should we have kind of kept going on that road to death and all this slaughter until Saddam Hussein showed up and laid his sword on the table , surrendered . And the common wisdom was he would n't do that . '' But he said a conversation with an FBI agent who interrogated Saddam after he was captured has made him reconsider . Bush recalled their