First of all, lemme just say that I think the news people made up the term “spider-hole”. Secondly, I’m glad we caught Saddam. He was obviously a twisted bastard and I’m glad he’s going to stand trial. Buuuuttt…..

Everybody needs to stop doing the dance of joy and realize that we’re still stuck in Iraq. Once the public tires of seeing the “Saddam goes to the dentist” clip, they’re going to realize that we’ve still got 20-25 body bags transfer tubes coming home every week.

As far as the political implications of this, I think it’s too early to tell. The conventional wisdom is that it hurts the Dean campaign. Of course, people said similar things after Bush landed on that aircraft carrier. So far, Dean’s been doing the right thing. He’s giving credit where it’s due, and then hanging back to see where this story goes. Lieberman, on the other hand, is a little toady who will take any opportunity to bash Dean at this point.

Call me optimistic, but when all is said and done, this could benefit the Democrats quite a bit. The problem with this whole “war on terror” thing is that Bush has been constantly moving the goalposts to easy targets. He knows as well as anybody that we can’t really rid the world of terrorism, any more than they can rid the world of selfishness, greed, or lust. That’s why he’s been making this all about personalities.

When the war on an idea is framed in a way that it’s the United States versus a boogeyman (Bin Laden, Hussein), a “war on terror” is something that people can easily wrap their heads around. Rather than carefully explain what it means to be “at war” against an undefined concept, it’s easier for Bush to just get behind a podium and taunt the evildoers like he’s a pro wrestler. But now that Hussein is caught, they’re going to have to move the goalposts again.

The worst thing about the way that Bush has been framing the debate is that liberals have been falling into this trap again and again. By punctuating our arguments with “Where’s Hussein/bin Laden?”, we’ve been going for the easy win. While the temptation is to respond to Hussein’s capture with “Now that we’ve caught the guy who killed thousands of Iraqis, can we go after the guy who killed thousands of Americans?”, we need to turn Hussein’s capture into the living embodiment of the failure of Bush’s foreign policy.

Saddam’s gone, but terrorism isn’t going to go away. As the terrorist attacks continue, the senate message needs to be that George Bush doesn’t understand terrorism. His fixation on Saddam Hussein was a detriment to the war on terror. Not only did they spend too much time obsessively searching for one man and his fictional WMD’s, but they took time and money away from the fight against the Islamic Fundamentalists who attacked us on 9/11 (of which Saddam isn’t a part). Sure this is a victory in a broad sense, but don’t ever forget that this has nothing to do with terrorism or 9/11.