NEW YORK, Sept 21: The Pentagon has completed and delivered to President Bush a highly detailed set of military options for attacking Iraq, said the New York Times, quoting Pentagon and White House officials on Saturday.

The paper said that the commander of forces in the Persian Gulf region, Gen Tommy R. Franks, presented the war-planning document to Mr Bush in early September, just days before the president spoke to the United Nations on Sept 12 and demanded that it authorize military action against Saddam Hussein. In his speech, Mr Bush made clear that the United States was prepared to act unilaterally.

The highly classified plans, which were presented to the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the president was briefed, are the most specific plans the military has presented to Mr Bush so far.

“The president has options now, and he has not made any decisions,” Ari Fleischer, the president’s spokesman, told the Times. He noted that Mr Bush had asked Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in August to send him options that were more concrete than earlier concepts.

Any attack would begin with a lengthy air campaign led by B-2 bombers armed with 2,000-pound satellite-guided bombs to knock out Iraqi command and control headquarters and air defences, the paper quoted officials as saying, who added that a principal goal of the aerial bombardment would be to sever most communications from Baghdad and isolate Saddam Hussein from his commanders in the rest of the country.

At the same time, according to officials knowledgeable about the planning, tens of thousands of marines and soldiers would stage out of Kuwait and possibly other countries in the region, officials were quoted as saying.

Officials familiar with the war-planning document say its contents include the number of ground troops, combat aircraft and aircraft carrier battle groups that would be needed. It also contains detailed sequencing for the use of air, land, naval and Special Operations forces to attack thousands of Iraqi targets, from air-defence sites to command-and-control headquarters to fielded forces.

Asked about how to suppress Iraq’s capability to use chemical or biological weapons on American troops or Israel, Gen Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the paper on Thursday that “one of the things you’d think about doing would be attacking his delivery means or his weapons of mass destruction.”