In a National Security Council meeting with President Bush on September 13, 2001: “Looking beyond bin Laden and Afghanistan, [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld mentioned Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a threat to both its region and to the United States. Iraq, he observed, was a state that supported terrorism, and that might someday offer terrorists weapons of mass destruction to use against us. Unlike Afghanistan, however, Iraq also had substantial infrastructure and military capability. In Iraq, he noted, we could inflict the kind of costly damage that could cause terrorist-supporting regimes around the world to rethink their policies. And we could locate Iraq’s assets, including its weapons of mass destruction. No one contradicted this last remark. Supported by the intelligence assessments at the time, it sounded unexceptionable.”
– Douglas Feith, War and Decision, Page 15