It was the best of wars. It was the worst of wars. But did the war in Iraq change anyone's mind? Those who urged the war into being retain their conviction that it was right, as those who sought to prevent it maintain it was wrong. We, whether committed to war or to peace, must understand this: There was no war. There is no peace.

War requires two opposing forces to fight each other. In Iraq, only one army bothered. The other vanished. Operation Iraqi Freedom began with a failed attempt to assassinate Saddam Hussein on March 20 and climaxed on April 9, with the felling not of the dictator but of one of his many statues in Baghdad. There are two things on which most of us, pro- and antiwar, should agree. The first is: It is good that Saddam Hussein is no longer president of Iraq. The second is: It is bad that the US military has taken thousands of Iraqi lives and now occupies Iraq.

Anyone in the antiwar camp who cannot see that Iraq without Saddam is a good thing for most Iraqis should abandon the public debate. But as fortunate as his disappearance must be for Iraqis, it should be a matter of indifference to the American people. Saddam Hussein never launched a war against them. His weapons of mass destruction, wherever they may have been, destroyed no American lives or homes. No one, outside the mental factories where propaganda is fabricated, believed Saddam threatened America or its people. The United States now governs another people without their approval, which is bad for Iraq, bad for America and bad for those parts of the world for which Operation Iraqi Freedom may provide, in the minds of our masters in Washington, a precedent.

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