Today, one of the Fox pundits was claiming that recent events had shown that we could persue the war on terror and fight in Iraq.
His timing was unfortunate, because the The New York Times has a revealing chart on what could have been achieved had we not gone to war. Basically, the US could have funded all of the programs neccesary to fight weapons proliferation, border security and public diplomacy as well as add two divisions to the military.
http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2004/08/07/opinion/20040808_opart.html