Baghdad refuses to cooperate with weapons inspectors, saying it no longer has any banned weapons and wants all U-N sanctions lifted. And there are differences among Security Council members over the usefulness of sanctions, with Russia, China, and France all advocating an early lifting. Unlike previous showdowns with Iraq, this time the Clinton Administration is saying little in public about the matter. In 1998, the President often used public appearances to restate his determination never to allow Baghdad to use weapons of mass destruction again. There's the economy.
Oil prices are extremely high.
There's domestic politics - both in the United States and Russia. There's elections in both of those countries. There's concern about the suffering of the Iraqi people. There's just a whole lot of aspects of this question. It's a very intractable problem at this point.