The strategic reason for crushing Saddam was to reverse the tide of global terror that incubated in the Middle East.
 
    Is our pre-emptive policy working? Was the message sent by ousting the Baathists as well as the Taliban worth the cost?
 
    Set aside the tens of thousands of lives saved each year by ending Saddam's sustained murder of Iraqi Shia and Kurds, which is of little concern to human rights inactivists. Consider only self-defense: the practical impact of American action on the spread of dangerous weaponry in antidemocratic hands.
 
    1. In Libya, Colonel Qaddafi took one look at our army massing for the invasion of Iraq and decided to get out of the mass-destruction business. He has since stopped lying to gullible U.N. inspectors and -- in return for U.S. investment instead of invasion -- promises civilized behavior. The notion that this terror-supporting dictator's epiphany was not the direct result of our military action, but of decade-long diplomatic pleas for goodness and mercy, is laughable.
 
    2. In Afghanistan, supposedly intractable warlords in a formerly radical Islamist, female-repressing culture of conflicting tribes and languages have come together. Under our NATO security umbrella and with some U.N. guidance, a grand conclave of leaders freed by U.S. power surprised the Arab world's doubting despots with the elements of a constitution that leads the way out of the past generation's abyss of barbarism.
 
    3. In Syria, a hiding place for Saddam's finances, henchmen and weaponry -- and exporter of Hezbollah and Hamas terrorism -- Dictator Bashar al-Assad is nervously seeking to re-open negotiations with Israel to regain strategic heights his father lost in the last Syrian aggression. Secret talks have already begun (I suspect through Turkey, Israel's Muslim friend, rather than the unfriendly European Union); this would not have happened while Saddam was able to choke off illicit oil shipments to Syria.
 
    4. On the West Bank, incipient Israeli negotiations with Syria -- on top of the overthrow of the despot who rewarded Palestinian suicide bombers -- further isolates the terror organizations behind Yasir Arafat.

Under the pressure of Israel's security fence, and without the active support of Egypt and Saudi Arabia (each eager to retain protection of a strong-willed Bush administration), Palestinians now have incentives to find an antiterrorist leader who can deliver statehood.
 
    5. In Iran, the presence of 130,000 U.S. troops near the border was not lost on the despot-clerics in power, who suddenly seemed reasonable to European diplomats seeking guarantees that Russian-built nuclear plants would be inspected. Colin Powell has been secretly dickering with the so-called reform ayatollah for a year in hopes of being on the right side of a future revolution. The old ''Great Satan'' crowd has just barred four-score reformist Parliament members from seeking re-election. That panicky crackdown in Teheran is a sign of the rulers' weakness; the example of freedom in neighboring Iraq will help cause another part of the axis to fall.
 
    6. In Iraq, where casualties in Baghdad could be compared to civilian losses to everyday violence in New York and Los Angeles, a rudimentary federal republic is forming itself with all the customary growing pains. After the new Iraq walks by itself, we can expect free Iraqis to throw their crutches at the doctor. But we did not depose Saddam to impose a puppet; we are helping Iraqis defeat the diehards and resist fragmentation to set in place a powerful democratic example.
 
    7. In North Korea, a half-world away from that example, an unofficial U.S. group was shown nuclear fuel facilities at Yongbyon to demonstrate that the world faced a real threat. But the U.S. has given China to understand that nuclear-armed Pyongyang would lead to missile defenses in Japan and Taiwan, a potential challenge to China's Asian hegemony. Our new credibility is leading China to broker an enforceable agreement like the kind Libya has offered, with economic sweeteners tightly tied to verification.
 
    The columnist Jim Hoagland cautions that it is too early to proclaim that nonproliferation is ''spinning into control.'' But taken together, this phased array of fallout to our decision to lead the world's war against terror makes the case that what we have been doing is strategically sound as well as morally right.

    The mood has changed dramatically.
 
    "We have bred monsters. We alone are responsible for it," Saudi Gazette columnist Muhammad Talal Al-Rasheed wrote Nov. 30. "We are the problem and not America or the penguins of the North Pole or those who live in caves in Afghanistan. We are it, and those who cannot see this are the ones to blame."

    The writer could never have written that a year ago without risking his job or drawing death threats. Likewise, Saudi commentators these days dare to criticize the kingdom's strict brand of Islam known as Wahhabism. Deeply embedded in the authority of the ruling family, the topic--even the word Wahhabism itself--was taboo a year ago.

Phenomenal
 
    Among the instant cliches that sprang up after 9/11 was the notion that a "war on terror" is a meaningless concept. "It is misleading to talk of a 'war on terrorism,'" sniffed the distinguished British historian Correlli Barnett only last month. "'Terrorism' is a phenomenon...You cannot in logic wage war against a phenomenon, only against a specific enemy."
 
    Most of us warmongers were inclined, if only in private, to agree with Professor Barnett. We assumed "war on terror" was a polite evasion, the compassionate conservative's preferred euphemism for what was really going on--a war on militant Islam, which would have been harder to square with all those White House Ramadan photo-ops and the interminable presidential speeches about Islam as a "religion of peace."
 
    But here's the interesting thing. Pace the prof, it seems you can wage war against a phenomenon. If the "war on terror" is aimed primarily at al-Qaeda and those of similar ideological bent, it seems to have had the happy side-benefit of discombobulating various non-Islamic terrorists from Colombia to Sri Lanka. This isn't because these fellows are the administration's priority right now, but rather because it's amazing what a little light scrutiny of international wire transfers can do.
 
    Pre-9/11, almost every country was openly indifferent to terrorism's global support network. In my own native land, Canada, financial contributions to terrorist groups were tax deductible. Seriously. As part of the repulsive ethnic ward-heeling of the multiculti state, Liberal Party cabinet ministers attended fundraisers for the Tamil Tigers, the terrorist group that's plagued Sri Lanka for two decades.

These guys are state-of-the-art terrorists: As the old song says, they were self-detonating before self-detonating was cool. In 1991, they used a female suicide bomber to kill Rajiv Gandhi, the Indian prime minister, and, until the intifada, they were the market leader in "martyrdom operations." It's somehow sadly symbolic of the general third-rate nature of Palestinian "nationalism" that even its signature depravity should be second-hand.
 
    But oddly enough, Canada's indulgence of Sri Lankan terrorism became part of its defense against American accusations that the Great White North was a soft touch for terrorists. If you pointed out the huge sums of money raised in Canada for terrorism, Ottawa politicians would roll their eyes and patiently explain, ah yes, but most of that's for the Tamils or some such; nothing to do with Osama, nothing Washington needs to get its panties in a twist about. As if destabilizing our Commonwealth cousins in the Indian Ocean had mysteriously become an urgent Canadian policy objective.
 
    They were doing what most of the rest of us were doing--buying into the conventional wisdom that the "war on terror" was the war that dare not speak its name. But, funnily enough, intentionally or not, the Tamil Tigers wound up getting caught in the net. Their long campaign reached its apogee in a spectacular bloodbath at Sri Lanka's principal airport two and a half years ago, a couple of months before 9/11, back when nobody was paying attention. By February of last year, they'd given up plans for an independent Tamil state and their chief negotiator in London was suing for peace on the basis of some sort of regional autonomy. It's an uneasy truce, but tourists are returning to the island and the Tamil stronghold of Jaffna is being touted as "the new Phuket" (the Thai resort beloved of vacationing Brits).

    You can find other examples of long-running local conflicts around the world from Burundi to Nepal that seem to have mysteriously wound down over the last two-and-a-quarter years. Might be just coincidence. Or it might be that putting the bank transfers of certain groups on an international watch list has choked off the funding pump for a lot of terrorism. Even nickel-and-dime terrorists need nickels and dimes, and in your average war-torn basket-case state that usually means fundraising overseas.
 
    Professor Barnett was wrong when he wrote that "you cannot in logic wage war against a phenomenon, only against a specific enemy." Sometimes the phenomenon is the enemy. Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang trained in Saddam's Iraq. The IRA has ties to Qaddafi and to Colombian drug terrorists. Even the old line that my enemy's enemy is my friend doesn't quite cover these alliances: Saddam was pally with the Germans, and Gerry Adams and Co. have friends in high places in Washington who wouldn't take kindly to the IRA's Hispanic outreach.

What drew people together is the phenomenon: the mutual lack of squeamishness about blowing the legs off grannies in pizza houses. In that sense, they've more in common with the international piracy and slavery networks of two centuries ago, as the president implied in London in his tip of the hat to the Royal Navy for stamping out the slave trade. The so-called idiot figured it out quicker than the smart guys: In the days after September 11th, he was shrewd enough to identify the real enemy and declare war on it.
 
    Two years on, in all kinds of tiny corners of the globe you never hear about on CNN, the bad guys are feeling the heat.