Bush Planned Iraq War During Afghan Attack, New Book Says

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.

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 invasion of Iraq.

Bush did not address those preparations when asked about them Friday, saying, “I do know that it was Afghanistan that was on my mind and I didn’t really start focusing on Iraq ‘til later on.”

Associated Press obtained a copy of the book, which will be available in stores next week.

“I knew what would happen if people thought we were developing a potential war plan for Iraq,” 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.”

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 attacks. A panel probing the attacks just concluded several weeks of extraordinary public testimony from high-ranking government officials. One of them, former counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke, charged that the Bush administration’s determination to invade Iraq undermined the war on terror.

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 Bush’s presidency.

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 When Rumsfeld said it was outdated, Bush told him to draft a fresh one.

Bush said Friday that Iraq came up four days after the terrorist attacks when he met his national security team to discuss a response to the assault. “I said let us focus on Afghanistan,” he said after a meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Asked about the Nov. 21 meeting with Rumsfeld in an office next to the Situation Room, Bush said only, “I can’t remember exact dates that far back.”

The book says Bush told Rumsfeld to keep the plans quiet. When the defense secretary asked to bring CIA Director George J. Tenet into it at some point, the president said not to do so yet.

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

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

The Bush administration’s drive toward war with Iraq raised an international furor anyway, alienating longtime allies. Hussein was toppled a year ago and taken into custody in December. But the central figure of Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, remains at large.

The book says Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the war in Afghanistan, uttered a string of obscenities when the Pentagon told him to come up with an Iraq war plan in the midst of another conflict.

Woodward, now an assistant managing editor at the Washington Post who broke the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein, says Cheney’s well-known hawkish attitudes on Iraq frequently affected Bush’s decisions.

Cheney pressed the outgoing Clinton administration to brief Bush on the Iraq threat before he took office, Woodward writes.

In August 2002, when Bush talked publicly of being a patient man who would weigh the options carefully, the vice president took the administration’s Iraq policy on a harder track in a speech declaring the weapons inspections ineffective. The speech was viewed as the beginning of a bid to undermine or overthrow Hussein. Woodward said Bush let Cheney make the speech without asking what he would say.

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

When the CIA reported that Hussein’s sons and other family members were at a small palace, and Hussein was joining them, Bush’s top advisors debated whether to strike early.

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 Secretary of State Colin L. Powell leaned that way.

But Bush did not decide 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. Bush did.