Just Askin'

I watched the Mehlman/Dean round-up from this week's Meet the Press (transcript here; see previous post on Dean segment) last night, and when I heard this, it got me wondering:

MR. RUSSERT: John Edwards today said he was wrong to vote for the war because he now realizes the intelligence was wrong. When you ask George Bush, knowing what he knows today...

MR. MEHLMAN: Yes.

MR. RUSSERT: ...would he do the same thing, he said, "Yes, I'd still go to war..."

MR. MEHLMAN: Absolutely.

MR. RUSSERT: "...even without knowing about weapons of mass destruction."

MR. MEHLMAN: And the reason he said that is the question I asked a minute ago: Would we be safer if we'd waited? The lesson of 9/11 is that we don't wait until after the attack to respond. Think about what the last 30 years has proved to us. For 30 years terrorists have made war on the West, and for 30 years we've responded after the fact and the attacks have gotten worse and worse. What happened on September 12th is that this president concluded that you win the war being on the offensive and that America's at war. And the president's absolutely right: If we had waited until he had weapons of mass destruction, we'd be much less safe than if we got rid of him when we did.

So, is Mehlman actually acknowledging that President Bush was essentially planning for war with Iraq the day after September 11, 2001? There's no mention of Afghanistan here (whom, if memory serves me, we invaded first and then subsequently forgot for the most part). The context is all Iraq. Just askin', that's all I'm doin'...