Then-Vice President Dick Cheney recalled the National Security Council meeting on September 15, 2001, where a response to the 9/11 attacks was discussed: “Although we had discussed Iraq earlier in the day, I also took time now to say that Afghanistan, where the 9/11 terrorists had trained and plotted, should be [targeted] first. I believed it important to deal with the threat Iraq posed, but not until we had an effective plan for taking down the Taliban and denying al Qaeda a safe haven in Afghanistan.”
– Dick Cheney, In My Time, Page 334