Paper trail mounts
In a March 22, 2002, letter to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, Blair political adviser Peter Ricketts advised steering the public rationale for war away from "regime change."
"'Regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam," Ricketts wrote.
Four days after the Sept. 11 attacks, during a crisis meeting at Camp David, Wolfowitz argued for attacking Iraq in response, as first recounted in journalist Bob Woodward's book "Plan of Attack."
Later that month, Wolfowitz helped arrange a trip by former CIA Director James Woolsey to the United Kingdom to look for evidence of an Iraqi role in Sept. 11.
The search for evidence, along with claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, continued for more than a year.
No Iraqi link to Sept. 11 has been found, and most of the intelligence about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction has since proved to be bogus.
"US scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al (Qaida) is so far frankly unconvincing," Ricketts reported earlier in his March 2002 letter to Straw.
In his own letter to Blair three days later, Straw also seemed to question the scale of the threat. "In the documents so far presented, it has been hard to glean whether the threat from Iraq is so significantly different from that of Iran and North Korea as to justify military action," he wrote.