Charles Krauthammer takes a good swing at Howard Dean’s ridiculous comment that we are no safer after the capture of Saddam Hussein: Why We Are Safer.

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 Hussein 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 Qaeda 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 Democrats, that so long as al Qaeda is active, we are never any safer. This rests on the remarkable assumption that we have a single enemy in the world, al Qaeda, and that it and it alone defines “safety.”