"The NYT's David Kirkpatrick had a very strong piece yesterday on John McCain's foreign policy worldview, his embrace of neoconservatism, and his response to the attacks of 9/11. It applies a little more scrutiny than McCain is probably accustomed to receiving.

[By the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001], Mr. McCain, the Vietnam War hero and famed straight talker of the 2000 Republican primary, had taken on a new role: the leading advocate of taking the American retaliation against Al Qaeda far beyond Afghanistan. In a marathon of television and radio appearances, Mr. McCain recited a short list of other countries said to support terrorism, invariably including Iraq, Iran and Syria.

"There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked," Mr. McCain said the next morning on ABC News. "It isn't just Afghanistan," he added, on MSNBC. "I don't think if you got bin Laden tomorrow that the threat has disappeared," he said on CBS, pointing toward other countries in the Middle East.

Within a month he made clear his priority. "Very obviously Iraq is the first country," he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: "Next up, Baghdad!"

Just to clarify, by October 2001, McCain was already a cheerleader for invading Iraq. This was his reflexive response to the terrorism perpetrated by al Qaeda. ..." (Steve Benen quoting D. Kirkpatrick)