FEATURES

WASHINGTON, April 16 — In the fall of 2001, as memories of the Sept. 11 attacks were still fresh and American forces were still fighting in Afghanistan, President Bush secretly ordered that plans be drawn up for war against Iraq, according to a new book by Bob Woodward.

"I knew what would happen if people thought we were developing a potential war plan for Iraq," Mr. Bush is quoted as telling the author, who is an assistant managing editor at the Washington Post.

"It was such a high-stakes moment," Mr. Bush goes on, according to The Associated Press, which obtained a copy of the forthcoming book and distributed an article about it today. "It would look like that I was anxious to go to war. And I'm not anxious to go to war."

The president regarded the planning for action against Iraq as so potentially explosive that he did not even tell his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, about it. Nor did he tell George J. Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, according to The A.P.

The book also offers titillating glimpses of the struggle for power between Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, according to an article about the book on the Post's Web site. Mr. Powell thought Mr. Cheney was obsessed with Iraq and willing to embrace foggy intelligence to establish a link between Saddam Hussein and the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The book, "Plan of Attack," is a behind-the-scenes account of the 16 months, from November 2001 to March 2003, that led up to the military campaign against Iraq. The book, published by Simon & Schuster, will be available in stores next week.

The Associated Press's reports on the book caused The Washington Post to move up its plans to serialize it. The newspaper now plans to begin running installments on Saturday, and it posted an article about the book on its Web site today.

That the Bush administration was studying the possibility of war with Iraq in late 2001 was no secret at the time. Administration officials were reported in December of that year to be saying that although no decision for war had been made, serious consideration and planning were under way for driving Saddam Hussein from power.

But the book adds new insight into the planning process, and makes clear how sensitive an issue Mr. Bush believed an Iraqi war plan to be. The president told Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to keep quiet about the planning to avoid "enormous international angst and domestic speculation," according to The Post's Web site.

Mr. Woodward's book offers news details about the extent to which some of Mr. Bush's closest advisers, notably Mr. Cheney, were focused on Saddam Hussein from the earliest days of the Bush presidency, even after Sept. 11, 2001, when Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, and the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that sheltered it, vaulted to the top of the agenda.

It also describes the deteriorating relationship between Mr. Cheney and Mr. Powell, who were never closed despite years of working together, The Post reports. Indeed, their relationship grew so strained that they rarely spoke.

Mr. Cheney is described as regarding Mr. Powell as not really a team player and too concerned with his own image. And Mr. Powell, who as an Army general was a leader in the first war in Iraq but opposed a second one, is described as seeing the vice president and his close advisers, including Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, as having their own little government within the administration.

And Gen. Tommy Franks, who as head of the Central Command was running the war in Afghanistan, is said to have unleashed a string of barracks obscenities when the Pentagon told him he had to come up with a war plan for Iraq while he was still busy in Afghanistan.

The book was fast becoming the talk of Washington today, as demonstrated at the mid-day news conference held by President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain.

"Mr. President," the very first questioner began, "did you ask Secretary Rumsfeld to draw up war plans against Iraq in November 2001 just as the military action was getting under way in Afghanistan? Why couldn't Iraq wait?"

Mr. Bush replied that it was difficult for him to recall specific dates that far back. He then recalled conferring at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, on Sept. 15, the Saturday after the attacks.

"I sat down with my national security team to discuss the response, and the subject of Iraq came up," Mr. Bush told reporters today. "And I said as plainly as I possibly could: We'll focus on Afghanistan. That's where we'll focus."

In fact, as millions of Americans recall, Mr. Bush addressed Congress and the nation not many days after the Sept. 11 attacks and said he had a message for the Taliban: "Give us Osama bin Laden immediately, or suffer the consequences. These terms are not negotiable."

The following month, forces led by the United States began the Afghan campaign that toppled the Taliban.

By late November, it was clear that victory, if not complete tranquility, was approaching in Afghanistan. As Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, put it today, "Things were winding down."

"And the president did talk to Secretary Rumsfeld about Iraq," Mr. McClellan said. "But there is a difference between planning and making a decision."

A reporter asked if the planning included an invasion.

Mr. McClellan replied, "Let's talk about planning versus the actual decision, because as I said, there is a difference there."

Mr. Woodward's book, based on three and a half hours of interviews with the president, is likely to provide ammunition for Mr. Bush's detractors. They have accused him of needlessly weakening the campaign against Al Qaeda by going after a supposed enemy, Iraq, that was not really an imminent threat. They have accused him also of relying on faulty intelligence about Saddam Hussein's supposed possession of deadly weapons. And they have accused him of cynically implying a link between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks.

Mr. Bush, according to the accounts of the book, told Mr. Woodward he prayed over what to do about Iraq, prayed "for personal strength and forgiveness."

The president has consistently described the Iraq war and the peacekeeping effort as a blessing for the Iraqi people, for the Middle East and for the cause of world peace.

Mr. Bush is described as willing to risk his presidency on the war. When Mr. Woodward asked him how history would judge it, the president replied: "History. We don't know. We'll all be dead."