Posted on 03/24/2004 7:40:37 PM PST by kattracks
WASHINGTON (AP) -- President Bush directed the Pentagon to develop plans to confront Iraq if it tried to exploit the U.S. military's engagement with Afghanistan in fall 2001, a White House official said Wednesday.But spokesman Scott McClellan insisted the "contingency" plan was not a blueprint for a full-scale invasion of Iraq, as Bush's former counterterrorism chief contends in a new book.
"Obviously, it was important to have contingencies in place in case Iraq tried to take advantage of the president's military action in Afghanistan," McClellan said.
Moreover, Iraq had been firing for years at American pilots patroling the no-fly zone there, McClellan said.
But he stressed that the decision to invade Iraq a year ago "came much later."
Any suggestion that Bush was drawing up plans in 2001 for the Iraq war he launched in March 2003 is "revisionist history," McClellan said.
Clarke wrote in the book that Bush was preoccupied with Iraq before and after the attacks, at the expense of fighting al-Qaida. Bush asked him just after the Sept. 11 terror attacks to find out whether Iraq was involved in the suicide hijackings, Clarke wrote.
The White House has bristled at the suggestion that Bush planned to invade Iraq before March 2003 -- an accusation that former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, another administration official now critical of Bush, also made in a recent book.
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