In its report due next week, the September 11 commission will disclose new evidence suggesting Iranian government officials may have helped facilitate the terror attacks by providing Al Qaeda members with safe passage and “clean” passports as they traveled from Osama bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan through Iran, NEWSWEEK has learned.

Citing a recently discovered December 2001 memo buried in the files of the National Security Agency, the commission report states that Iranian border inspectors were instructed not to place stamps in the passports of Al Qaeda fighters from Saudi Arabia who were traveling from bin Laden’s camps through Iran, according to U.S. officials and commission sources familiar with the report.

The commission report does not address which Al Qaeda members specifically benefited from the clean passport policy. It also emphasizes that the panel has found no evidence suggesting that Iranian government officials had advance knowledge of bin Laden’s plans to attack the World Trade Towers and Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001.

But, citing the NSA memo, the report discloses for the first time that eight to ten of the so-called “muscle hijackers” on September 11 are believed to have traveled through Iran between October 2000 and February 2001—the same period of time that Iranian border guards were facilitating the movement of extremist jihadis entering and exiting the Afghan training camps.

--MSNBC

Predictably I've seen some rehashing the old canard of "why are we only going after Iraq and not Iran and North Korea", indignantly crying "Iran has WMD programs and was helping al Qaeda, not Iraq! Why didn't we attack them?!?!?!?!"

Firstly I find it highly dubious that the Left that opposed removing Saddam after 12 or so years of sanctions and clear evidence that he wasn't living up to his part of the agreement would, if confronted with evidence of an Iranian weapons program and evidence that Iran aided al Qaeda, be all fine and dandy with invading and removing Iran's government. There would have been cries of "let's give sanctions a shot!" Because of course sanctions have worked so well against Saddam, and North Korea, and Cuba. (This is what, year 41 of the sanctions against Cuba working wonders?)

We went to war with Iraq because we had come to the end of the line on options with them. We had imposed sanctions and they were being circumvented by a corrupt oil-for-food program. We imposed no fly zones and our planes were being shot at regularly. We had tried restoring inspections but Saddam simply jerked around with them at every turn. Saddam refused to provide the cooperation that was required. He was bickering about when U2s could fly over and whether rockets that clearly violated the terms of the agreement really did and whether they'd be destroyed. We now know that he had ongoing WMD-related activities that he was not allowed to have. This was not a man being deterred by our efforts.

The Left complains that President Bush is too simplistic and then they turn right around and complain that he doesn't impose the exact same sanctions/punishments/retribution in every circumstance out that even remotely similar. North Korea can still be negotiated with given the help of China. Iran has a large movement of its own that given time could overthrow the government without any help from us at all. Iraq had none of these things. There was nobody to keep Iraq in line. There was no negotiating with Saddam, he had long ago shown himself to be a dishonest negotiating partner. There was no movement within non-Kurdish Iraq that could have overthrown the government that was oppressing them so thoroughly. That is why we attacked Iraq and not Nation X, Y, or Z. They all may be well-deserving of a good ass whoopin' but we don't use that as our first course of action. We tried dealing with Iraq peacefully. If he had come out after the Gulf War and fully disclosed his weapons programs and fully complied with all UN resolutions and given up his imperialistic goals we never would have had to invade Iraq. If he hadn't stymied our efforts to enforce the peace at every turn we would not have had to invade Iraq. In the end we ran out of peaceable options with Iraq and we had to do what we did. We haven't reached that point with the other countries yet. You'd think that a party that prides itself on the "nuance" of its candidate would be able to see the logic of treating different situations differently.

It's easy to call your opponents simplistic warmongers when you oversimplify their rationale for waging war to the ridiculously simplistic.