More time with the family……hmmmmmm.

Public support for the Iraq war is low. Lawmakers are battling the White House over money to pay for the combat. Suicide bombings continue in Baghdad.

Despite it all, J.D. Crouch, who is stepping down from his national security post at the White House, is confident history will prove that invading Iraq was the right thing to do.

Crouch, who has been President Bush’s deputy national security adviser for more than two years, said the President never will be swayed by opposition to the war. Instead, Crouch said, Bush will use his resolve to help convince a broad section of Americans that it’s important to be in Iraq.

“I think it was really the right thing to do, and I think history will bear that out,” Crouch said emphatically in an interview Thursday.

Crouch, 48, said he’s been thinking for months about leaving his job as deputy to the President’s national security adviser, Stephen Hadley. In announcing his resignation on Friday, Bush said Crouch has been “at the forefront in devising and implementing the new strategy to help build a peaceful, stable and secure Iraq.”

The Administration is still far from achieving that goal. But with the latest, top-to-bottom review of the war and another big project on detainees off his desk, Crouch said he thought it was time, for both him and his family, to leave the government for the private sector or academia.

Hadley said he’ll miss Crouch’s self-deprecating humor and the way his work discourages leaks.

“He was able to force people to step up to difficult issues, but do it in a way that everybody felt that they had a hearing and that the process was fair,” Hadley said. “And that’s one of the reasons why I think there has been very little leaking of squabbles of State versus Defense, which you’ve seen from time to time.”

More at Time.com