Two months before the Iraq invasion, US President George W Bush had told British Premier Tony Blair that he 'wanted to go beyond Iraq' in dealing with the spread of weapons of mass destruction and mentioned Pakistan as one of the countries posing problems, a US daily reported on Friday.
Bush's comment, made during a private telephone conversation on January 30, 2003 and mentioned in notes taken by Matthew Rycroft, then the private secretary to Blair, have been cited in a new book, The New York Times reported.
The reference is confined to one sentence in a two-page document, which says that Bush 'wanted to go beyond Iraq in dealing with WMD proliferation, mentioning in particular Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea and Pakistan', the daily said.
The notes do not provide any indication of what Bush meant by including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan on the list of concern over so-called weapons of mass destruction.
The comment reported in an American edition of Lawless World by Philippe Sands, a professor at University College, London, could be significant because it appeared to add
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to a list that previously had included public mentions only of Iraq, Iran and North Korea, which Bush had called an 'axis of evil', the paper said.
The British government has not questioned the authenticity of the documents described in the book.
The White House declined to comment, saying any telephone conversation between Bush and Blair at that time would have been private and personal. A spokesman for the British Embassy in Washington also declined to comment.
The document recorded a conversation between the leaders a day before they met in Washington, and shows that they discussed whether to seek a second United Nations resolution imposing an ultimatum on Iraq before beginning any military action.
Bush was reported to have agreed with Blair that 'it made sense to try for a second resolution, which he would love to have'.
But Bush was also said to be 'worried about Saddam playing tricks' and the possibility that Hans Blix, the top United Nations weapons inspector, would report 'that Saddam was beginning to cooperate'.
'His biggest concern was looking weak,' the British document says about Bush. It says that the two leaders had agreed that United Nations inspectors in Iraq should be given 'weeks not months', to complete their work.
