During a meeting at Camp David on September 15, 2001, President Bush and his advisors, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz–all part of Bush Sr.’s Gulf War deliberations–discussed how to respond to the 9/11 attacks. Bush said: ” ‘one of the things I wasn’t going to allow to happen is, that we weren’t going to let their previous experience in this theater dictate a rational course for the new war.’ In other words, he didn’t want them to use the war on terror as an excuse to settle an old score.”
– Bob Woodward, Bush at War, Pages 84-85