Of course, Iran is avowed enemies, and Bush has not acted. Indeed, because Bush has tied so many of our troops down in Iraq, we _cannot_ act against Iran in a military way...

This even puts aside the fact that Saddam was contained. He _wanted_ NBC weapons, but wasn’t going to get them unless the sanctions were lifted-- something that wasn’t going to happen without our saying they could...

First things first: France, Russia, Germany, and China (notice that 3 of those listed are permanent security council members) were working to undermine the sanctions and render real enforcement null and void.

Second, how the heck would you have acted against Iran with ground troops (which I assume is what you're proposing, because that's what we're mainly using in Iraq, not the Air Force or Navy)? We'd need permission from someone else to stage through their territory. Afghanistan would be useless for this, as it's landlocked and we need permission from too many other countries to supply our forces there.

Are you going to get permission from Russia to stage through there and the Central Asian countries so we can take out the nuclear bomb program they went ahead and BUILT for Iran in the first place?

Or were you planning on managing an amphibious landing from some other country across the Persian Gulf? None of them have any cause to go to war with Iran.

Finally, about 150,000 of our 500,000 active army troops are currently in Iraq. This isn't nearly all we could bring to bear.

Oh, and what I said about causus belli? Well, noone else in the region has any, but Iraq themselves now have one, because Iran keeps sending aid to the terrorists fighting there.

Invading Iraq, and having forces there, has done a lot to make an invasion of Iran more possible, not less. It puts a lot of US troops in a country with a LAND border with Iran, and a cause to go to war there.

That the Iranians are fighting us there seems to indicate that they think our presense there is of more strategic consequence than you do.

Oh, and another thing: Saddam Hussein _had_ nuclear feedstocks; we've gathered together a lot of enriched uranium and shipped it to the US for safekeeping (at which point the liberals all complained that there was unenriched yellowcake still on the ground in Iraq... never mind that these were the same guys arguing that the administration was making up the evidence that Iraq was seeking yellowcake).

Iraq had large army arsenals with large stores of chemical munition delivery shells, empty, co-located with chemical processing equipment and the chemical feedstocks for producing binary nerve agents. The nitpickers said "it doesn't count" because it wasn't finished.

Iraq was also working on long-range delivery systems (ballistic and cruise missiles) of dubious accuracy that would be useless without chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.

They also had chemical weapons, completed, left over from the last decade, of which the critics said "they didn't count because they were declared or under seal." Never mind that they couldn't ENFORCE anything about weapons that were declared or under seal, because Iraq would not cooperate with inspectors unless we had the same amount of troops we have there now, sitting in Kuwait on high alert status preparing to invade.