General Wesley Clark, appearing on tonight's Real Time with Bill Maher, told a story about his meeting with Pentagon generals 10 days after 9/11.
It goes something like this...
"One of the generals called me in and said, 'I got a joke for you.' And I said, 'Please, you guys don't have time for jokes.' And he said, 'Oh no, you gotta hear this one.'
(Big laugh from the audience)
'9/11 equals Saddam,' he said. 'Doesn't matter if he did it or not, we're going to get him.' And this was ten days after September 11th."
Earth shattering? No. But it does show that the Iraq plan had already filtered out of the NSC meetings we read about in the first Woodward book and into the ranks of the Pentagon brass who were, I must infer, already at work on the Iraq plan.
How many times were we told that Bush had no Iraq plan in the works after September 11th?