Book: Bush Had Secret War Plan

President Bush secretly ordered a war plan drawn up against Iraq less than two months after U.S. forces attacked Afghanistan and was so worried the decision would cause a furor he did not tell everyone on his national security team, says a new book on his Iraq policy.

Mr. Bush feared that if news got out about the Iraq plan as U.S. forces were fighting another conflict, people would think he was too eager for war, journalist Bob Woodward writes in "Plan of Attack," a behind-the-scenes account of the 16 months leading to the Iraq invasion.

The Associated Press and the Washington Post separately reported details of the book. The 468-page book is published by Simon & Schuster. Sunday night to promote the book. [CBS and Simon & Schuster are both owned by Viacom.]

"I knew what would happen if people thought we were developing a potential war plan for Iraq," Mr. Bush is quoted as telling Woodward. "It was such a high-stakes moment and … it would look like that I was anxious to go to war. And I'm not anxious to go to war."

Mr. Bush and his aides have denied accusations they were preoccupied with Iraq at the cost of paying attention to the al Qaeda terrorist threat before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Woodward says Mr. Bush pulled Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld aside on Nov. 21, 2001 — when U.S. forces and allies were in control of about half of Afghanistan — and asked him what kind of war plan he had on Iraq. When Rumsfeld said it was outdated, Mr. Bush told him to get started on a fresh one.

The book says Mr. Bush told Rumsfeld to keep quiet about it and when the defense secretary asked to bring CIA Director George Tenet into the planning at some point, the president said not to do so yet.

Even Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was apparently not fully briefed. Woodward said the president told her that morning he was having Rumsfeld work on Iraq, but did not give details.

In an interview two years later, Mr. Bush told Woodward that if the news had leaked, it would have caused "enormous international angst and domestic speculation."

The Washington Post said the book reports that the case for war was bolstered by the CIA's belief that only a U.S. invasion could remove Saddam Hussein from power, and Tenet's assertion that it was a "slam dunk" that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq.

Woodward says the president told him that his decision to go to war was bolstered by his strong religious faith.

"I'm surely not going to justify war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case I pray that I be as good a messenger of His will as possible," Mr. Bush told Woodward, according to the Post.

The book says Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the Afghan war as head of Central Command, uttered a string of obscenities when the Pentagon told him to come up with an Iraq war plan in the midst of fighting another conflict.

Woodward's account fleshes out the degree to which some members of the administration, particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, were focused on Saddam Hussein from the onset of Mr. Bush's presidency and even after the terrorist attacks made the destruction of al Qaeda the top priority.

In August 2002, when Mr. Bush talked publicly of being a patient man who would weigh Iraqi options carefully, the vice president took the administration's Iraq policy on a harder track in a speech declaring the weapons inspections ineffective.

Cheney's speech was viewed as the beginning of a campaign to undermine or overthrow Saddam. Woodward said Mr. Bush let Cheney make the speech without asking what he would say.

According to the Post, Woodward says the friction between Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell — described as an opponent of the war — over Iraq was so great that the two men now barely speak.

Powell believed Cheney and his allies had established what amounted to a separate government within the White House. Cheney, for his part, said Powell was mainly interested in his public image, the Post said.

The vice president also figured prominently in a protracted decision March 19, 2003, to strike Iraq before a 48-hour ultimatum for Saddam Hussein to leave the country had expired.

When the CIA and its Iraqi sources reported that Saddam's sons and other family members were at a small palace, and Saddam was on his way to join them, Mr. Bush's top advisers debated whether to strike ahead of plan.

Franks was against it, saying it was unfair to move before a deadline announced to the other side, the book says. Rumsfeld and Rice favored the early strike, and Powell leaned that way.

But Mr. Bush did not make his decision until he had cleared everyone out of the Oval Office except the vice president. "I think we ought to go for it," Cheney is quoted as saying. Mr. Bush did.

U.S. forces unleashed bombs and cruise missiles, blanketing the compound but missing the palace. Tenet called the White House before dawn to say the Iraqi leader had been killed. But his optimism was premature. Saddam was alive.

Mr. Bush said Friday the subject of Iraq came up four days after the terrorist attacks when he met his national security team at Camp David to discuss a response to the assault. "I said let us focus on Afghanistan," he said, taking questions after a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Asked about the Nov. 21 meeting with Rumsfeld in an office adjacent to the Situation Room, Mr. Bush said only, "I can't remember exact dates that far back."