Iran is not Iraq? Iraq was not Iraq!

So today I heard Bush say on the radio that "Iran is not Iraq." Now I'm not going to comment on whether this is something that Rove has to tell Bush repeatedly to avoid confusion (oh wait, I just did that, tee hee). What I want to talk about instead is the obvious problem with this statement. The Iraq that the American government talked about in 2002 and 2003 was a place that was bursting at the seems with chemical and biological weapons. It was a place where nukes were under development. Now unless you've been watching Fox "News" you will now know that Iraq had no such weapons and no significant programs for acquiring them. Iraq's military might charitably have been described as a hollow shell by 2002. It was certainly not the superweapon-possessing monster it was made out to be by the US government.

Now fast-forward a few years, Iran is working on nuclear capabilities and active missile programs. This is common knowledge (Iran is more open about these things than American darling Israel ever has been). I think that it's fairly incontrovertible that the Iranians are farther along in their nuclear program now than Saddam ever was (in 1981 when Osirak was bombed, in 1991 before the embargo, or in 2003 on the eve of his ouster). Iraq was not the threat that it was supposed to be, all the post-war evidence supports this.

So what does Bush mean by this statement? Probably that he simply doesn't have the troops to go to Iran, the military is way over-extended, and they need something to keep North Korea believing that the US means business in East Asia too. I'm not sure, I do find it curious that the American President is still trying to paint Iraq as some kind of imminent danger after this claim has been shown to be false so many times over.