Weapons of mass destruction were the excuse du jour.

http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/...5025024.htm?1c

A portion of the above article follows:


Posted on Mon, Jan. 27, 2003

Invading Iraq not a new idea for Bush clique

4 years before 9/11, plan was set

By WILLIAM BUNCH

bunchw@phillynews.com

It was 2:40 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, and rescue crews were still scouring the ravaged section of the Pentagon that hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 had destroyed just five hours earlier.

On the other side of the still-smoldering Pentagon complex, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was poring through incoming intelligence reports and jotting down notes. Although most Americans were still shell-shocked, Rumsfeld's thoughts had already turned to a longstanding foe.

Rumsfeld wrote, according to a later CBS News report, that he wanted "best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit S.H. at the same time. Not only UBL" - meaning Osama bin Laden. He added: "Go massive. Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

"S.H.," of course, is Saddam Hussein. The White House has long insisted its strategy for a war against Saddam's Iraq - a war that could now begin in a matter of days - arose from the rubble of the deadly attack that day.

But in reality, Rumsfeld, Vice President Dick Cheney, and a small band of conservative ideologues had begun making the case for an American invasion of Iraq as early as 1997 - nearly four years before the Sept. 11 attacks and three years before President Bush took office.

An obscure, ominous-sounding right-wing policy group called Project for the New American Century, or PNAC - affiliated with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld's top deputy Paul Wolfowitz and Bush's brother Jeb - even urged then-President Clinton to invade Iraq back in January 1998.