The Safety Dance--I
BY JAMES TARANTO
Tuesday, December 16, 2003 12:35 p.m. EST
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"The capture of Saddam has not made America safer." You can expect to hear that quote a lot next summer and fall if Howard Dean is the Democratic presidential nominee. It's tailor-made for GOP campaign commercials.
Give Dean this: He is, in a certain perverse way, eloquent. It's not easy to cram so much idiocy, mendacity and arrogance into nine little words, but he did it.
Dean's assertion is impossible to support rationally.<font size=3> If you believe, as we do, that liberating Iraq was vital to American national security, then obviously Saddam's capture has made America safer. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that the left-wing critique is correct: Iraq is a "distraction," diverting troops, resources and attention from the war against al Qaeda.
If this is true, then the way to make America safer now that we're in Iraq is to finish the job so that we can free up the men and resources we're currently spending there and put them back to work in Afghanistan or wherever al Qaeda lurks. In other words, even people who thought liberating Iraq was a strategic mistake should be cheering every tactical victory there--if, that is, they really care about our national security.
Saddam's capture was a necessary step, arguably the most important step, toward final victory in Iraq. Does Dean really believe a victorious America will not be safer than a defeated one, or one stuck in a quagmire, would be? Joe Lieberman has a nice line: <font size=4>"Howard Dean has climbed into his own spider hole of denial if he believes that the capture of Saddam Hussein has not made America safer." The question is whether Democratic voters will join him there.
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