CRAWFORD, Texas, Aug 22 (AFP) - US President George W. Bush vowed to consult US allies and lawmakers about military action against Iraq, striving to calm what he calls a "frenzy" of speculation that a US attack is imminent, even as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld admits Bush is "thinking about it."

"I'm a patient man, and we will look at all options, and we will consider all technologies available to us, and diplomacy, and intelligence," Bush said Wednesday after a half-day meeting with top national security advisers.

"The American people know my position, and that is that regime change is in the interest of the world. How we achieve that is a matter of consultation and deliberation," he added, speaking with Rumsfeld at his side.

Later, Rumsfeld, meeting with US troops at nearby Fort Hood, Texas, quipped that Bush was "thinking about" an attack on Iraq when asked by a soldier how such a war would impact US relations with Russia.

"The president has made no such decision that we should go into a war with Iraq," he said, adding with a chuckle, "He's thinking about it."

Bush said Iraq "didn't come up" during talks here with Vice President Dick Cheney, White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, joint chiefs chairman General Richard Myers, and the head of the Pentagon's missile defense office, Lieutenant General Ronald Kadish.

Just hours after the US leader sought to calm what he termed "a churning, a frenzy" that he will soon carry out his repeated threats to topple Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, Rumsfeld at Ford Hood said there was nothing definite.

"The president has made no such decision that we should go into a war with Iraq," Rumsfeld said before adding with a chuckle: "He's thinking about it."

Those comments came a day after General Tommy Franks, the commander of US forces in the Gulf, said he would present Bush with "credible options" for military action against Iraq.

Bush stressed that Franks was absent from the meeting on his "Prairie Chapel" ranch here, and that the general was following a directive to plan for "all contingencies," not charting a course for battle.

Bush and Rumsfeld said that the meeting aimed to assess the impact of the September 11 terrorist attacks and Washington's new freedom to deploy a missile defense system on longstanding plans to modernize the US military.

"The cold, hard fact is that the United States lives in a very different security environment today in this 21st century than we did prior to September 11," said Rumsfeld, who was here a year ago for a similar discussion.

Sounding the same conciliatory tone on missile defense -- which like Iraq policy has worried many US allies, as well as China -- Bush emphasized that Rumsfeld and top aides were briefing friends abroad on US progress.

"That's one of the things I said when we withdrew from the ABM Treaty, that we would consult with our friends and allies, and we are," he said, referring to the scrapped Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that forbad missile defense.

Asked how swiftly the United States could deploy a missile defense, Rumsfeld demurred, saying that is "not knowable" until Washington gets further along in the testing and research and development phase.

"And as that continues to succeed and to work out, we then will put things in place and they will evolve over a period of time," the defense secretary said, describing a "layered" testing program taking aim at incoming missiles at various points in their flight.

Rumsfeld said that much of the discussion had centered on Bush's longstanding efforts to transform the US military to counter threats of the 21st century, namely by making US forces lighter, more nimble, and more lethal.

The president and his aides mulled military spending for the 2004-2009 period even though the US Congress has yet to approve the 2003 budget, which includes the largest increase since the end of the Cold War.

Iraq looms large in such budgetary issues, because US forces have been deployed to enforce "no-fly zones" there since the end of the 1991 Gulf War and because any future attack would likely have a major impact on spending.

"We have the task, in the Department of Defense, of seeing that we're able to provide the kind of defense capabilities and deterrents that will enable our country to contribute to peace and stability and to protect the American people," said Rumsfeld.

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