Bush's Answer to O'Neill, Deny the Reports then Charge Him With Leaking Them

President Bush on Monday disputed a suggestion by Paul H. 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.

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 Mr. 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 Mr. O'Neill's account.

The Treasury Department said it had referred to its inspector general for a possible inquiry the question of how a Treasury document marked secret came to be shown on a segment about the book on CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday. Mr. Suskind, who was given access by Mr. O'Neill to 19,000 documents that were turned over to him by the department after his departure, said the document that was shown on "60 Minutes" was the cover sheet for a February 2001 briefing paper on planning for a post-war Iraq. But he said Mr. O'Neill was not provided with the briefing paper itself.

Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, said at a news conference in Iowa on Monday that Mr. O'Neill's account amounted to a "very serious allegation" against Mr. Bush. On Sunday, after excerpts from the book were made public, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, another candidate for the Democratic nomination, said Mr. 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."

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