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umours that George W Bush is planning to publish a memoire having been floating in US literary circles for months, so when Herschel Lipshitz, senior partner at publishing giant Simon Schuster, had a call put through from Crawford Texas last April, he could hardly believe his luck. Two weeks later at a top secret meeting with a senior Bush aid on the 10th floor of the publishers’ New York offices, Lipshitz was handed a sample batch of six leather-bound diaries, taken from different periods of the former President’s eight year tenure. That evening, as Lipshitz sat in the back of a taxi on his way back home he could not resist the temptation of flicking through the diaries. And that is how the unthinkable happened. In his excitement, the publishing executive got out of the taxi and went into his Park Avenue apartment block without noticing that he had left one of the diaries, dated 4th July – 21st October 2008, on the back seat of the cab.

Although the incident was hushed-up, speculation about the whereabouts of the missing diary and its contents nevertheless found its way on to the Internet. That might have been where the story ended until, last week when I was contacted by a journalist-friend in the States who had been approached by Puerto Rican cab-driver, Raul Arroya. Arroya claimed to have found the diary in his taxi and, after some deliberation, chose to contact the press.

Following extensive tests, the diaries have been authenticated and today we publish this installment of the ‘private thoughts of George W Bush’. It reveals how, in the dying days of his presidency, just how close America came to attacking Iran.

4th September 2008, Washington DC

‘You know what you should do, Dubya,’ Laura joked at the ranch last week, ‘you should make a list of things to do before you retire.’ We laughed at the time but then I gotta thinking, with only a few months left as President and a whole buncha stuff still to get done, maybe a list wasn’t such a bad idea. I’d been at the breakfast bar for a long while when Laura came by and looked down at my notepad. ‘You’re sure you only got one thing to do before you go, sweet pea?’ she says. ‘I guess so,’ I said. I had just one single line written on that there list: take down Iran. NEXT PAGE