WASHINGTON, April 17: President George Bush was planning to attack Iraq in Dec 2001 despite public assurances Washington was seeking a diplomatic solution to the standoff with Baghdad , according to a new book whose excerpts were released on Friday.

The book, titled "Plan of Attack", was written by Bob Woodward, the Washington Post reporter who along with Carl Bernstein unveiled the Watergate scandal that led to president Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974.

Bob Woodward writes that Bush met repeatedly with his war cabinet in late 2001 - three months after the Sept 11 attacks in the United States - to plan the US attack on Iraq, according to advanced transcripts made available to his newspaper.

Mr Bush was asked on Friday at a news conference with visiting British Prime Minister Tony Blair whether he asked Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to prepare war against Iraq as early as Nov 2001. "You know, I can't remember exact dates that far back," he said.

"I do know this: that at a key meeting at Camp David (presidential retreat) the subject of Iraq - this is on September the 15th - we'd been attacked on September the 11th, obviously," Bush said.

"The 15th we sat down," he said. "I sat down with my national security team to discuss the response, and the subject of Iraq came up."

In more than three hours of interviews for Woodward's book, Bush said the secret planning was necessary to avoid "enormous international angst and domestic speculation" and that "war is my absolute last option," according to Post.-AFP