Dean's narrow view ignores gains of Iraq war

WASHINGTON — Howard Dean may end up as a footnote in history, but he has already earned a place in the dictionary as the illustration accompanying the word smug. He claims that not only was he right that we are not safer with Saddam captured; not only has he already been vindicated by history, all 21 days of it; but he has been so obviously vindicated that his opponents, bowing to his superior wisdom, have stopped their attacks on this point.

They have not. He has been peppered with questions about this statement, most recently during the Jan. 4 Iowa debate. How could he not? The idea that we are not safer (a) because we are still losing troops and (b) because al-Qaida has not been extinguished amounts to an open-court confession of cluelessness on foreign policy.

The first is the equivalent of saying that we were not safer after D-Day because we were still losing troops in Europe. In war, a strategic turning point makes you safer because it hastens victory, hastens the ultimate elimination of the hostile power, hastens the return home of the troops. It does not mean there is an immediate cessation, or even a diminution, of casualties (see: Battle of the Bulge).

The other part of the statement — we cannot be safer because we are still threatened by terrorism — is even more telling. It rests on the wider notion, shared not just by Dean but by many other Democrats, that so long as al-Qaida is active, we are never any safer. This rests on the remarkable assumption that we have a single enemy in the world, al-Qaida, and that it and it alone defines "safety."

It is hard to believe that serious people can have so absurdly narrow a vision of American national security. The fact is that we have other enemies in the world.

Saddam was one of them, and he is gone. Libya was another, and it has just retired from the field, suing for peace and giving up its weapons of mass destruction. (Moammar Gadhafi went so far as to go on television to urge Syria, Iran and North Korea to do the same.) Iran has also gone softer, agreeing to spot inspections, something it never did before it faced 130,000 American troops about 100 miles from its border.