In the past week, there’s been a lot of “Bush is doing with Iran what he did with Iraq” talk, mostly in liberal quarters — a not-so-veiled accusation that the administration is asserting things about Iran and its nuclear program without the right kind of evidence. Jay Rockefeller, for example: ““To be quite honest, I’m a little concerned that it’s Iraq again…This whole concept of moving against Iran is bizarre.”

What’s bizarre is this take on things. Iran’s relationship with the Shiite extremists in Iraq is not a secret that needs to be discerned or disproved by superior intelligence. It’s something openly discussed by all the players in the matter. And when it comes to Iran’s WMD, once again, nobody is relying on intelligence to inform us that the Iranians are in full pursuit of nukes. Iran’s own president says it himself, constantly and repeatedly.

You want to hate Bush over Iraq, fine. But if anything, the administration has spent the last few years soft-pedaling the growing Iranian threat, not overstating it. A few moves in the past few weeks doesn’t change the fact that we haven’t done much, if anything at all, to stop Iran from going nuclear. And we’ve done almost nothing about the Iranian support for the Shiite radicals that has put American lives at risk and helped breed the chaos in Baghdad.

Whatever Iran is doing, it’s not good. And whatever the Bush administration is doing, it’s not overreacting.