"I was a dissenting voice. I didn't want to use force," Bush said in an interview on NBC television as part of a series of appearances ahead of the release of his new book.

"I was trying to give diplomacy a chance to work."

Asked vice president Dick Cheney's influence on the decision to invade Iraq in 2003, Bush said in the end, "I was the guy who makes the decisions as to when we move."

"And he (Cheney) might have been saying, 'Let's go.' But I said no," Bush added.

In his 500-page "Decision Points," Bush wrote of his errors in the Iraq campaign and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, which international intelligence reports strongly suggested Saddam had obtained.

"No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn't find the weapons. I had a sickening feeling every time I thought about it. I still do," Bush wrote, according to excerpts.

But on NBC, he refused to apologize to the American people for never finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq -- which his administration had cited as its main motive to go to war -- and the chaos that followed in the years after the 2003 invasion.

"Apologizing would basically say the decision was a wrong decision. And I don't believe it was the wrong decision," he said.

Asked about the Abu Ghraib scandal and abuses committed by US soldiers to Iraqi detainees, Bush said his first reaction was to feel "sick to my stomach."

"Not only have they mistreated prisoners, they had disgraced the US military and stained our good name," he added.

The former president also confirmed that his then-defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, tendered his resignation at the time.

Bush said he seriously thought about accepting the offer, but eventually declined because he could find no obvious replacement for Rumsfeld.

"Now here's what happens. We're in the middle of war and if I couldn't have found somebody quickly to replace Secretary Rumsfeld, you'd have been on TV saying,' 'There's a vacuum at the Pentagon.' It's sending terrible signals to our troops," he said.

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