Former Treasury Secretary Mr Paul O'Neill said he never saw any evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and was told "deficits don't matter" when he warned of a looming fiscal crisis.
In a new book on his two-year tenure and in an interview with CBS's 60 Minutes aired yesterday, Mr O'Neill said removing Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was a top priority at Mr Bush's very first National Security Council meeting - within days of the inauguration and eight months before the September 11th, 2001, attacks.
Mr O'Neill, fired in a shake-up of Mr Bush's economic team in December 2002, told CBS the discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two days later and that he was given internal memos, including one outlining a "Plan for post-Saddam Iraq."
"In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterise as evidence of weapons of mass destruction," Mr O'Neill told Time magazine in a separate interview. "There were allegations and assertions by people. . . . To me there is a difference between real evidence and everything else."
Mr O'Neill also raised objections to a new round of tax cuts and said the president did not favour his more aggressive plan to combat corporate crime after a string of accounting scandals because of opposition from "the corporate crowd," a key constituency.
Mr O'Neill said he tried to warn Vice President Dick Cheney that growing budget deficits - expected to top $500 billion this fiscal year - posed a threat to the US economy.
According to Mr O'Neill, Mr Cheney said: "You know, Paul, Reagan proved deficits don't matter. . . .We won the midterms [congressional elections]. This is our due." A month later, Mr Cheney told the Treasury secretary he was fired.
The vice president's office had no immediate comment. Mr John Snow, who replaced Mr O'Neill, insisted that deficits "do matter" to the administration. "We're not happy about the size of these deficits. They're larger than they should be," Mr Snow told ABC's This Week, adding that Mr Bush was committed to cutting them in half over the next five years.