Howard Dean's Saddam Spin
Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean has been rightly lambasting for asserting last Sunday that the capture of Saddam Hussein had not made America safer, isn't backing down. Instead, he's subtly shifting the definition of "safer" to imply that we are not a bit safer until the War on Terror has been completely won.

"The capture of one bad man doesn't mean the president and Washington Democrats can declare victory in the war on terrorism," he said. Real dangers ranging from stateless terrorists to North Korea's capacity to make nuclear weapons remain, he said, and must be confronted.

"The truth is, Americans are no safer from these serious threats than they were the day before Saddam Hussein was captured. We are no safer today than the day the planes struck the World Trade Center."

But that's not what he said on Sunday. On Sunday, he said the capture of Saddam had not made American any safer, period. But of course it DID make America safer - from Saddam.

Yeah, Saddam had been reduced to a dirty bum hiding in a hole in the ground, but he was a well-financed bum, with $750,000 in cash, connections to anti-American terrorist groups in Baghdad, and no reason not to find ways to harm Americans and America. We are safer today because there is now NO chance Saddam will take some of his fortune and give it to al Qaeda to finance another major attack on America. No, capturing Saddam didn't solve the problem of stateless terrorists or resolve the problem of North Korea's nuclear program. But, then, no one has claimed it did.

Dean has built a straw man when he says "The capture of one bad man doesn't mean the president and Washington Democrats can declare victory in the war on terrorism." But neither President Bush nor any Democrats I've heard have claimed "Saddam-in-a-cell" equals "Final-victory-in-War-on-Terror."

Dean knows that, just as he knows it is absurd on its face to claim capturing Saddam hasn't made America at least a little bit safer. But by redefining "safer" to mean that the War on Terror must be completely over, and all outstanding issues, problems and threats resolved, Dean has created a bizzaro world where he can dismiss any progress by saying it has not made us safer because some other threats remain.