Courtesy of Atrios:

Media Whores Online discovered that:

CBS News has learned that barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was telling his aides to come up with plans for striking Iraq — even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks.

..."Go massive," the notes quote him as saying. "Sweep it all up. Things related and not."

This was pretty obvious to everybody who wasn't swept up in the hype, but it still bears repeating: the cases for and against invading Iraq predated the War on Terror and are only dimly and remotely related to it. An invasion of Iraq is not just another theatre in the wider war- it is a seperate conflict, roped in for P.R. purposes. (Well, aside from all those "strategic" analyses that presume to use Iraq as some sort of base of operations for a war against Arabs.)