Rice disputes war claims

WASHINGTON — National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Sunday that President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was not made in January 2003, as a new book asserts, but came in March, after all efforts to avoid a war had been exhausted.

The statement in "Plan of Attack," by Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, is "simply not, not right," Rice said on CBS’s "Face the Nation."

In an interview broadcast Sunday evening on CBS’s "60 Minutes," Woodward said that "the decision (to invade) was conveyed to Condi Rice in early January. … (Bush) was frustrated with the weapons inspections. He had promised the United Nations and the world and the country that either the U.N. would disarm Saddam (Hussein) or he, George Bush, would do it, and do it alone if necessary."

But Rice said the final determination that war would occur came more than two months after their private conversation at Bush’s Texas ranch.

In that conversation, Rice told CBS, she and Bush were discussing Bush’s frustrations with Hussein, who Bush said "was starting to fool the world again, as he had over the past 12 years."

"He said, ‘Now, I think we probably are going to have to go to war, we’re going to have to go to war,’ " Rice said.

But that "was not a decision to go to war," she continued. "The decision to go to war is in March. The president is saying in that (January) conversation, ‘I think the chances are that this is not going to work out any other way. We’re going to have to go to war.’ "

Rice’s comments are in line with the administration’s official account of the prewar deliberations and with Bush’s statement at a March 6 news conference that he had not yet made a decision about military action. The invasion began two weeks later.

Rice also disputed that Secretary of State Colin Powell, who had been arguing for a diplomatic resolution, had been kept out of the loop on the war plans, as Woodward’s book contends. Woodward wrote that Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Washington, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, learned of the war plans before Powell did.

Rice also defended Bush’s decision in late 2001 to ask Rumsfeld to come up with a war plan against Iraq, even as the United States was fighting al-Qaida and Taliban forces in Afghanistan.

"By the end of November, things are starting to wind down in Afghanistan, and I do think the president’s mind was beginning to move to what else he would have to do to deal with the blow, with the threat that had emerged as a result of 9-11," Rice said on "Fox News Sunday."

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