WASHINGTON, April 18: President George W. Bush asked military leaders in November 2001 about 'options' in Iraq, US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Sunday, despite Washington's public claims of the search for a diplomatic solution.
Mr Bush asked Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about possible actions in Iraq just two months after the 9/11 attacks, while the United States was embroiled in the war in Afghanistan, she said. "The president apparently did talk to Don Rumsfeld and say to him, you know, "I need to know what my options might be concerning Iraq," Ms Rice told 'Fox News Sunday'.
"We planned for Afghanistan, we fought the war in Afghanistan. By the end of November, things started 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."
A new book says Mr Bush began planning to attack Iraq in December two years ago despite repeated comments Washington was seeking a diplomatic way out of the standoff with Baghdad.
The book, entitled 'Plan of Attack' by Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward says that Mr Bush met repeatedly with General Tommy Franks, then head of the US Central Command, and his war cabinet in late 2001 - three months after the attacks on the United States - to plan a US war in Iraq.
At the same time, administration officials publicly insisted that diplomatic efforts designed to avoid war were still under way. Ms Rice defended Mr Bush's focus on Iraq, saying Saddam Hussein's regime "was the most hostile relationship that we had in the Middle East."
"It's not at all surprising that the president wanted to know what his options were before he began a course of diplomatic activity, of going to the United Nations, of trying to figure out how to carry out, by the way, a regime change policy that had been the law of the land in the United States since 1998."
She also confirmed the book's account of a December 2002 meeting with Mr Bush and CIA Director George Tenet, in which Mr Bush asks if the Central Intelligence Agency had more information on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. According to Woodward, Tenet asked the president not to worry, insisting that the case against Saddam's regime was a 'slam dunk.'
"It did happen. The fact is that we all thought that the intelligence case against Iraq was very strong," she said. "At that particular moment in time, the presentation was not that categorical.
But it did say - the national intelligence estimate said he has chemical and biological weapons, he's been improving his capability, and by the end of the decade if something's not done he could have a nuclear weapon," Rice said. -AFP
