Which was before SEPTEMBER 11, 2001.
Being from New Jersey, I would have thought YOU would get it. Did you move there in the last 3 years?
Please spare me the bullsh!t. For one thing, "regime change" in Iraq had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. More importantly, 9/11 simply provided this administration the public support it needed to do something it had every intention of doing anyway.
If you have any doubts whatsoever about that second point, just go back and run down a list of the key architects of this war back in late 2002 and early 2003 -- Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, etc. These people were all hired to administration positions or advisory roles in the Pentagon long before 9/11, and in their prior careers none of them had any kind of reputations or policy expertise in any area ther than their incessant calls for regime change in Iraq throughout the 1990s.
If you think Richard Perle, for example, was named as head of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board for his "expertise" in anything other than Iraq (a potential emerging threat in China, political developments in Russia, NATO expansion to eastern Europe, etc.), then you are delusional. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to indicate that despite their pathological obsession with Iraq, this group of individuals was utterly ignorant about the threat posed to the United States by radical Islamic terrorism.