Mr. Secretary, if what you say is true, why hasn't the US already attacked Iraq?

One of the major features of Powell's presentation was the allegation of ties between Al Qaeda and Sadaam's government:

Powell also said that an al Qaeda terrorist network headed up by Abu Musab Zarqawi, a high-ranking Osama bin Laden lieutenant who fled to Iraq from Afghanistan, had been operating freely in Iraq for more than eight months and was using Baghdad to coordinate its activities. Zarqawi has been linked to October's assassination of U.S. diplomat Laurence Foley in Jordan and the alleged ricin plot that was broken up in London last month. His whereabouts are unknown.

Powell is essentially suggesting that elements of Al Qaeda are alive and well and working, with the blessing of Sadaam, in northern Iraq. But, if that is the case, and the US government believes it to be true. Why haven't we already gone in to take out these elements? We've bombed suspected Al Qaeda installations in Pakistan, for God's sake, yet we have left a suspected Al Qaeda facility operating freely in Iraq for eight months without doing anything about it? Bush has already established the principle that the US has the right to go pretty much anywhere it wants to get the people who were behind 9/11. His administration is now asserting that some of these people have taken up residence in Iraq. It says it knows where they are, what they are doing, and who they are working with. YET IT HAS DONE NOTHING ABOUT IT! This is either a monumental failure in Bush's much vaunted war on terrorism or it is a lie. Which do you think it is?