Book: Bush Secretly Ordered Iraq War Plan
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: April 16, 2004
Filed at 5:19 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- 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....
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The book says Gen. Tommy Franks, who was in charge of the Afghan war as head of Central Command, uttered a string of obscenities when the Pentagon told him to come up with an Iraq war plan in the midst of fighting another conflict.
Woodward, a Washington Post journalist who wrote an earlier book on Bush's anti-terrorism campaign and broke the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein, says Cheney's well-known hawkish attitudes on Iraq were frequently decisive in Bush's decision-making....
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The vice president also figured prominently in a protracted decision March 19, 2003, to strike Iraq before a 48-hour ultimatum for Saddam Hussein to leave the country had expired....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 Powell leaned that way.
But Bush did not make his decision 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....
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Woodward-Book.html
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