Strong and wrong

From the Washington Post via WorkingForChange:

Nevertheless the president's insistence that the world is safer without Saddam is a powerful political position for one reason: it can't be disproved. There is simply no way to rerun the past year and do a double-blind crossover study of what would have happened if we hadn't invaded Iraq.

Are we better off? Compared to what? Are we safer than we would have been with a long, continuing pressure of world forces? Safer than if we'd focused on al Qaeda instead?

For that matter, who is safer? The people Saddam persecuted? Surely. But the 1,000 American soldiers who died? The 20,000 Iraqis?

And, if that math is perplexing, no one can truly calculate safety without seeing the future. Are we safer for having taken our eye off Iran and North Korea? Safer for taking our dollars away from homeland security? Are we recruiting more enemies than we are defeating? Will we only know when and if there is another attack?

What? Who? When? Bush stands before the United Nations and every other political forum and states with certainty that Iraq is on the way to being “secure, democratic, federal and free.” Kerry charges that “terrorists are pouring across the border” and calls the invasion a “crisis of historic proportions.”

But most Americans have no way to either refute or to affirm the central question raised: are we safer? Indeed in the face of so many troubling unknowns and such fearful uncertainties, facts fall by the wayside. We are left relying on our beliefs, including our beliefs about human nature, about the way the world works.

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