The other thing to remember is that the White House had planned to take out Saddam even before Bush was elected. They where simply waiting for an excuse. They probably thought that American fears and blind patriotism where so high after 9/11 that they could easily justify the war by mentioning Saddam and terrorists in the same sentence.

It was the group at the Defense that wanted to take out Saddam. The State dept was opposed and Bush was undecided on the issue. It was 9/ll that caused him to move over to the Defense side of the fence.

There was an excellent [link|http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/longroad/etc/script.html|PBS documentary] before war covering the events leading up to the war that talks about this:

NARRATOR: But the skirmishes between the State Department and the Pentagon's hawks hardly captured the new president's attention during that first year in office. Adrift, his foreign policy apparatus stalled between the two competing forces.

WILLIAM KRISTOL: You had bureaucratic gridlock, no big increase in the defense budget, no change in Clinton's China policy, a lot of talk about pulling troops back from around the world, no evident change in Iraq policy. I think you could make a case that on September 10th, 2001, that it's not clear that George W. Bush was in any fundamental way going in our direction on foreign policy.