Among Liberal myths, one of the most oft-repeated is that attacking an enemy not only serves no useful purpose, but actually makes the enemy more dangerous. This sort of auto-defeatism is only believed by the most short-sighted or gullible in the post-9/11 world. An animal can hide and hope that danger will pass it by, but humans don't have that luxury. Doing so just puts the danger off for another day by allowing it to feed somewhere else... this time. Hiding allows the enemy to grow even stronger -- but most animals aren't known to make complex analyses of present cost vs. future benefits. Sometime in the distant past, our remote ancestors figured out that running from enemies only gives them power -- the power of fear, and the very real power of an enemy allowed to grow stronger, unchecked. They learned to work together to defeat their enemies. It's unfortunate that as we've progressed in so many ways, some of the most important lessons we ever learned as a species have largely been forgotten.

If we had not toppled Saddam Hussein, what would be happening right now? What would the future have been? It's not easy to create alternate futures with any degree of accuracy, but we can extrapolate from what we know. Leaving aside whether allowing the ongoing brutal repression of 25 million people practiced on a daily basis by Saddam's regime was right, there were many reasons why he was too dangerous to leave in power. Some facts were already known, and others have come into clearer focus since the Butcher of Baghdad fled his palaces to cower in a spider hole. The clearest fact of all is that if we had not acted, Iraq would have posed a terrible danger to us, much sooner than later.

When Afghanistan fell to the Coalition in December of 2001, al Qaeda and the Taliban did not stop to sign a formal surrender. They fled into the mountain country, into Pakistan, into Iran, even into Iraq. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi fled to Baghdad for medical treatment. We knew that Saddam harbored Abu Abbas, who murdered American Leon Klinghoffer when his terrorists seized the cruise ship Achille Lauro in 1985. Klinghoffer was shot, then dumped overboard in his wheelchair. Saddam also gave safe haven to Abdul Rahman Yasin, the only person indicted for bombing the World Trade Center in 1993 who got away. Abu Nidal, head of the terrorist group that bears his name, was another "guest" of Saddam. He was likely murdered after refusing to train the al-Qaeda refugees from Afghanistan. The Czech government still insists that Mohammed Atta, who led the 9/11 hijackers, met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague. The only evidence to the contrary is that Atta's credit card and cellphone were used in the US during that time (and no one ever uses another's cellphone or credit card). Russian president Vladmir Putin warned President Bush that Saddam was planning to launch terrorist attacks against the US. If we had not removed Saddam Hussein from power, those attacks would very likely have been carried out -- there was certainly no terrorist shortage in Baghdad. Saddam had supported and would have continued to support global terror. Support doesn't necessarily mean planning or collaborating with the terrorists in attacks. Support means giving them safe haven, allowing them to train for missions (even supplying that training at places like Salman Pak, Saddam's terrorist school), and furnishing them with false identities and target information. It also means giving them money and material with which to carry out their missions -- in this case, possibly biological and chemical weapons.

France, Germany, Russia and China -- the four countries which had lucrative oil deals with Saddam's regime -- had been lobbying for years to get the sanctions dropped so they could get at Iraq's oil. Saddam's propaganda -- including deliberately allowing children to die from lack of medicine in poorly-furnished hospitals so he could claim the sanctions were to blame -- was eroding support for them. As Newsweek reported in April 2003, "The situation at Saddam General, recently renamed An Nasiriya General Hospital, is similar to hospitals throughout Iraq. They're short of everything after years of sanctions, in which the regime insisted it was unable to buy enough medicine and medical supplies -- even while stockpiling huge hoards of cash and building enormous palaces." Palaces were not all that Saddam built. David Kay and Charles Duelfer have both reported that Saddam's WMD programs were far from destroyed -- they were merely driven underground. Saddam was waiting until the UN sanctions were dropped before resuming his manufacture of biological and chemical weapons. It's doubtful he expected it to take twelve years. Instead of using the oil-for-food money to take care of his people, Saddam created a "clandestine network of laboratories and safehouses" where scientists could do advanced work on Brucella, Congo Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever, aflatoxin and botulinum. He could have been producing anthrax within a week, mustard gas in two months and sarin within two years. David Kay also discovered that Saddam had a renewed interest in reconstituting Iraq's centrifuge enrichment program in 2002. Parts that might have been hard to come by were buried or hidden -- like the centrifuge buried under a rosebush in a Baghdad backyard. According to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson's book, Saddam sent Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, dubbed "Baghdad Bob" by the press during the Iraq war, to approach a Nigerian official in 1999 to discuss trade -- "an overture the official saw as a possible effort to buy uranium." Oddly enough, Wilson -- sent by the CIA to investigate the possibility that Saddam attempted to acquire uranium -- never mentioned this until he wrote his book. Had we not removed Saddam from power, he would have replenished his supplies of chemical and biological weapons within a year or two -- and even had nuclear weapons before long.

Elsewhere in the world, events would not have taken place as they did. Libya's Moammar Ghaddafi would not have given up his support of terrorism and his WMD programs -- which were much further advanced than our intelligence had predicted. Within a year or two, Libya would have been drawing near to completion of its nuclear research, while world attention was focused on Iran's nuclear capabilities. The Pakistani nuclear proliferation ring would not have been stopped, because it was only discovered when Ghaddafi gave up information about it. The total corruption of the UN's Oil-for-Food program would not have been uncovered, either. Although most of the so-called "mainstream" media has treated the story as though it were written on a McDonald's napkin in crayon, the fact is that Saddam was making huge profits from kickbacks on the oil-for-food program. He used the money he stole from his people to buy palaces and weapons, create and sustain hidden weapons programs, and suborn men and women of influence around the world. Benon Sevan -- head of the oil-for-food program, the man who was supposed to ensure the integrity of the program -- is named as one recipient of Saddam's oil vouchers. Kofi Annan's own son is implicated in the scheme. We never would have known the extent of the scandal and corruption in the United Nations if Iraq had not been freed of Saddam... because the story was broken by an independent newspaper operating as part of a free press in the new Iraq. So far, only FOX news has devoted any real time to reporting this story in the Western media.

Within a few years at most, the sanctions would have collapsed, and a vindicated Saddam, his hatred of the US as strong as ever, would have been free to act. The corruption in the UN would have gone unnoticed. France, Germany, Russia and China would have claimed their promised oil fields, and their sales of weaponry to Saddam would have increased, openly and legally. Add in arms sales from North Korea and other countries, including the nuclear material Saddam was so long denied. The Pakistan nuclear ring would have continued to supply rogue nations with the knowledge to build nuclear weapons. With Saddam's stockpiles of WMDs replenished and his ties to terrorists intact, the US and our allies would have been in grave danger. Libya, Iraq and Iran would all have created nuclear weapons by then, and a mid-east nuclear exchange would have been all but inevitable, with Iran and Iraq resuming hostilities (perhaps after destroying Israel). A nuke-armed Libya would be in control of North Africa, by threat if not force. Already shamed by giving Saddam an ultimatum and then backing down, we would have been unable to stop the escalating violence except by war against most of the Middle East... our threats of force would have been seen as laughable. Much of our resources would be tied up in fending off repeated terrorist attacks on our own soil -- terrorists trained and armed by both Iraq and Iran. More than likely, we would have become more isolationist, allowing dictators to control entire regions unchecked, so long as they left us alone. Which they would... for a while.

Of course, it's possible that this grim future would not have come to pass. It's possible that Saddam would have had a spontaneous change of heart and freely given up his weapons, his support of terrorism, and even his brutality towards his own people. He might have turned over details of the Pakistan nuclear ring and evidence of the UN's corruption. It's equally likely that he might have picked up a guitar and taken Jerry Garcia's place in the Grateful Dead, however. Bookmakers in Las Vegas wouldn't have given you odds for either, had you been foolish enough to bet.

Lucky for us, President Bush wasn't. If Saddam had come clean and given everything up, the war would not have taken place. The Pakistan nuclear knowledge market and Ghaddafi's WMD programs would still be in operation, however. Anyone who thinks that removing Saddam from power didn't make the entire world safer in the long run is refusing to look at the facts.