A few points:

Wouldn't it be great if diplomacy and sanctions were an option? But we've seen how this has worked on Iran so far in the nuclear issue. Not.

Earlier in the day, Bush gave a not-for-quotation briefing to journalists, and after the speech some of them provided permitted synopses of his comments. On the subject of Iran, Bush feels that he's currently in a weak position vis-a-vis Iran, and he's hoping that a victory in Iraq would strengthen his hand. Bush himself is no longer so dismissive of diplomacy and sanctions as he once was; he's trying to fight his way to a stronger negotiating position.

"tripwire": The Middle East is not Europe. Our troops in Europe were stationed between two power blocs composed of conventional states, and one of those blocs was ours. The same tactic now has the result of placing individual soldiers in the crosshairs between sectarian and political factions, all of which see us now as the biggest obstacle standing between them and winning the brass ring in Iraq.

To portray my position as saying that Iraq was " stable, harmless, or would never affect the interests of the U.S. if left alone" is the usual reframing into a black-and-white extremist position. Nonsense, in other words. Judging our strategic position is a matter of evaluating relative threats. Maintaining the status quo as it existed in Iraq pre-invasion doesn't mean they were no threat, simply that Iraq was a lesser and containable threat, and keeping it there for a few more years would've given us the breathing room to deal more effectively with Afghanistan and a host of less-visible threats. The cost-benefit analysis reveals quite clearly that invading Iraq was a very poor use of our available resources.

"Bush's entire theory of the war on terror, agree or disagree, is that we can't afford to have the battle lines be the U.S. borders any more." is simply fearmongering rhetoric. What battle lines? This is asymmetrical warfare, not trench warfare. Seems to me that having our military focused on one piece of land thousands of miles away risks providing cover for individual terrorists to sneak into the country while our attention is elsewhere.

Which leads to the question of "unacceptable security measures". It seems to me that because of the lack of resources creating by the commitment in Iraq, the government is resorting to only high-visibility measures such as airport screening that make it look like they're taking action to protect us; while at the same time we've long known that incoming cargo is not being effectively screened, our ports are insecure, and on and on. I'd consider substantive measures to address those real vulnerabilities to be more acceptable than the defacto system of internal passports and personal inspections that have taken us a fair distance down the road to a police state.