President Bush on Monday disputed a suggestion by Paul O'Neill, the former Treasury secretary, that the White House was looking for a reason to go to war with Iraq from the very beginning of his administration.
Responding to an account provided by O'Neill in a book that was to be published yesterday, The Price of Loyalty, by Ron Suskind, Bush said he was working from his first days in office on how to implement an existing national policy of promoting a change of government in Iraq. But the president said his focus at the time was on re-evaluating the ways in which the US and Britain were enforcing the "no-flight" zones in northern and southern Iraq.
"And no, the stated policy of my administration toward Saddam Hussein was very clear," Bush said at a news conference in Monterrey, Mexico, when asked whether he had begun planning within days of his inauguration for an invasion of Iraq. "Like the previous administration, we were for regime change.
"And in the initial stages of the administration, as you might remember, we were dealing with desert badger or fly-overs and fly-betweens and looks, and so we were fashioning policy along those lines," Bush continued, apparently referring to confrontations with Iraq over the no-flight zones. "And then all of a sudden September the 11th hit."
Administration officials said Bush had taken office determined to adopt a more aggressive approach toward Iraq. Toward that end, they said, the president sought a broad review of issues and options, from the effectiveness of economic sanctions imposed on Iraq to the possibility of covert action to depose Saddam.
While the administration also did contingency planning for dealing with any threat that Iraq might pose, the officials said, it was not looking for pretexts to mount a military campaign, as O'Neill suggested in the book, which was written with his cooperation and tracks the two years he spent as Treasury secretary before being dismissed.
"It's laughable to suggest that the administration was planning an invasion of Iraq that shortly after coming to office," a White House official said Monday when asked about O'Neill's account.
The Treasury Department said it was opening an inspector general's inquiry into how an apparently classified document about Iraq came into the possession of Suskind, who showed it during an interview about the book with CBS' 60 Minutes on Sunday. Suskind, who was given access by O'Neill to 19,000 documents that were turned over to him by the department after his resignation, said the inquiry would find that the transfer of documents was "entirely appropriate."
The book describes O'Neill's surprise at the focus put on Iraq at the very first National Security Council meeting held by Bush, on Jan. 30, 2001. Iraq was also the primary topic at the second meeting of the council, two days later. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld spoke at the second meeting about how removing Saddam would "demonstrate what US policy is all about" and help transform the Middle East, the book said.
Rumsfeld talked at the meeting "in general terms about post-Saddam Iraq, dealing with the Kurds in the north, the oil fields, the reconstruction of the country's economy, and the `freeing of the Iraqi people,'" the book said.
The book portrays O'Neill, who was a member of the National Security Council, as concerned that Bush was rushing toward a confrontation without a sufficiently rigorous debate about why doing so was necessary.
"From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country," the book quotes O'Neill as saying. "And if we did that, it would solve everything. It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying, `Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'"
The question of how and when Bush made the decision to go to war with Iraq has been a simmering political issue since even before the conflict began last year.
On Sunday, after excerpts from the book were made public, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said O'Neill's account meant the president and his advisers "were dead set on going to war alone since almost the day they took office and deliberately lied to the American people, Congress, and the world."
But administration officials said Bush was simply looking for more effective ways to carry out an established policy that had bipartisan backing, and that there was no early decision to go to war.
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