Washington, April 17: Bob Woodward, the investigative journalist-turned-author who helped bring down Richard Nixon after the Watergate break-in, has done it again.

At his joint press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair yesterday, the White House correspondent of Associated Press stunned President George W. Bush and everyone else present with this question: “Mr President, did you ask secretary (of defence Donald) Rumsfeld to draw up war plans against Iraq in November, 2001, just as the military action was getting underway in Afghanistan? Why couldn’t Iraq wait?”

A few hours earlier AP had obtained a copy of Woodward’s new book, Plan of Attack, due to be released on Tuesday, in which Bush tells the author that he kept the Iraq war plans secret because “I knew what would happen if people thought we were developing a potential war plan for Iraq. It was such a high-stakes moment and... it would look like that I was anxious to go to war.”

Woodward says in the book that Bush told Rumsfeld in November 2001, six weeks after US forces attacked Afghanistan, to prepare for war with Iraq. Worse, the President told Rumsfeld not to reveal his plans to CIA director George Tenet and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was not told all the details of what Bush and his defence secretary were cooking up.

Yesterday, Bush fumbled for an answer to the question from the AP correspondent.

“You know, I can’t remember exact dates that far back. I do know this, that at a key meeting at Camp David, the subject of Iraq — this was on September the...”

“Fifteenth”, the correspondent helpfully reminded Bush.

“Fifteenth”, Bush agreed, rather sheepishly.

“We had been attacked on September the 11th, obviously. On the 15th, we sat down, I sat down with my national security team to discuss the response, and the subject of Iraq came up. And I said as plainly as I possibly could, we’ll focus on Afghanistan... So I don’t remember in times of — what was being developed or not being developed.

“But I do know that it was Afghanistan that was on my mind. And I didn’t really start focusing on Iraq until later on...”

“I was asking you about November”, the correspondent did not let go.

Bush said again: “I can’t remember. I’d have to get back to you about a specific moment. But I can tell you, in September, I said, let us focus on Afghanistan, let us make sure that we do this job and do it well”.

Woodward’s book promises to be a hot potato for Bush, who is already on the defensive on Iraq.

Polls show popular disapproval of his handling of Iraq rising week after week and his former treasury secretary as well as his former counter-terrorism chief have both said in recently published books that Bush was obsessed with Iraq when he should have been concentrating on Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden.

The Washington Post, where Woodward is assistant managing editor, today began publishing excerpts from the book, which chronicles strains in the relations between secretary of state Colin Powell and Vice-President Dick Cheney over Iraq to the point where they are no longer on speaking terms.

Asked about this at his daily briefing yesterday, state department spokesman Richard Boucher was not convincing when he weakly replied that “I think that is not true”.

Woodward says Powell refers to under-secretary for defence policy Douglas Feith’s role in the administration as “Gestapo” office and believes Feith, Cheney and the Vice-President’s two aides, Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby run a parallel US government.

According to the book, Powell prophetically told Bush before the war that if he sent US troops there “you are going to be owning this place... You break it, you own it.”

An alarming revelation by Woodward is that Bush himself found the case that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) — the main reason for going into Iraq — less than convincing. On December 21, 2002, the CIA’s deputy director John McLaughlin made a presentation at the White House about Iraq's WMD using communications intercepts, satellite photos and other classified data.

“Nice try,” Bush said rather dismissively of the evidence presented to him.

“I don’t think this quite — it’s not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from... I have been told all this intelligence about having WMD, and this is the best we have got?”

Woodward says General Tommy Franks, then head of the US army’s Central Command, uttered a string of obscenities when he was told to prepare a plan to fight in Iraq even as he was battling the Taliban and al Qaida in Afghanistan.