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But if Hussein was unable to sell/give/bargain WMDs to a terror group on 9/10, how did he magically gain that power on 9/12?

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He didn't suddenly gain any new powers; but we became more acutely aware of potential dangers. And if Saddam had proceeded apace, as we thought he was doing, to develop such weapons, that was suddenly a more ominous concern.


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I'm not saying we shouldn't have looked at things differently on 9/12 than we did on 9/10. I am saying that the administration used the excuse of 9/11 to go after Hussein, which it's neocon members had been itching to do from the get-go.

Hussein was not being ignored pre 9/11. That's why he was "bottled up." It was the Taliban's harboring of Al Qaeda that was being ignored. [Even the barbaric social programs of the Taliban failed to inspire any meaningful condemnation from the United States. (It was, of all people, Jay Leno's wife, who publicly complained about the treatment of women in Taliban-led Afghanistan that first garnered attention from Amreican officials.)]

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I don't see it as an "excuse" but rather an additional reason amongst many.

You seem deeply concerned with the hierarchy of motivations. To me, they were ALL good reasons to go after Hussein: I could probably list a half-dozen off the top of my head, and there were more. That the administration emphasized certain reasons over others, in order to to "sell" the war, doesn't matter much to me. And that regime change was a darling idea of the neo-cons was to me just another good reason to go to war, neo-cons or not: regime change in iraq was the policy of the Clinton administration too, but it was Bush who had the balls to actually do it. So all reasons pointed to removing Saddam. If anything, I think the Bush administration could have benefitted from better marketing strategy, but if there are ten good reasons to do a thing, does it much matter which is sold first? Not a great deal to my way of thinking.