Rice Disputes Claim of Early Iraq Attack Plan

National security advisor Condoleezza Rice said Sunday that President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was not made in January 2003, as a new book asserts, but came in March, after all efforts to avoid a war had been exhausted.

The statement in “Plan of Attack,” by Bob Woodward, a Washington Post assistant managing editor, is “simply not, not right,” Rice said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”

In an interview broadcast Sunday evening on CBS’ “60 Minutes,” Woodward said that “the decision [to invade] was conveyed to Condi Rice in early January.... [Bush] was frustrated with the weapons inspections. He had promised the United Nations and the world and the country that either the U.N. would disarm Saddam [Hussein] or he, George Bush, would do it, and do it alone if necessary.”

But Rice said the final determination that war would occur came more than two months after their private conversation at Bush’s Texas ranch.

In that conversation, Rice told CBS, she and Bush were discussing Bush’s frustrations with Hussein, who Bush said “was starting to fool the world again, as he had over the past 12 years.”

“He said, ‘Now, I think we probably are going to have to go to war, we’re going to have to go to war,’ ” Rice said.

But that “was not a decision to go to war,” she continued. “The decision to go to war is in March. The president is saying in that [January] conversation, ‘I think the chances are that this is not going to work out any other way. We’re going to have to go to war.’ ”

Rice’s comments are in line with the administration’s official account of the pre-war deliberations and with Bush’s statement at a March 6, 2003, news conference that he had not yet made a decision about military action. The invasion began two weeks later.

Rice also disputed that Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who had been arguing for a diplomatic resolution, had been kept out of the loop on the plans, as Woodward’s book contends.

Woodward wrote that Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar ibn Sultan, learned of the war plans before Powell did.

According to Woodward, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, showed Bandar a secret war map, off-limits to foreign officials. That meeting came two days before Bush briefed Powell, Woodward wrote.

“I just can’t let this impression stand,” Rice said Sunday on CBS. “It’s just not the proper impression that somehow Prince Bandar was in the know in the way that Secretary Powell was not. It’s just not right. Secretary Powell had been privy to all of this. He knew what the war plan was.”

Myers, appearing Sunday on CNN’s “Late Edition,” also disagreed that Powell had not been informed. “I think he was fully aware of the plan,” Myers said.

Rice and Myers emphasized that they had not yet read the book, which is based on interviews with top administration officials, including Bush. It goes on sale today.

Rice also defended Bush’s decision in late 2001 to ask Rumsfeld to come up with a war plan against Iraq, even as the U.S. was fighting Al Qaeda and Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

“By the end of November, things are starting to wind down in Afghanistan, and I do think the president’s mind was beginning to move to what else he would have to do to deal with the blow, with the threat that had emerged as a result of 9/11,” Rice said on “Fox News Sunday.”

The U.S. relationship with Iraq was “the most hostile ... that we had in the Middle East,” she said. “It’s not at all surprising that the president wanted to know what his options were before he began a course of diplomatic activity.”