Getting Saddam Hussein cost 4,400 U.S. military lives, 30,000 severely wounded and more than a trillion dollars in Iraq, compared to a few million dollars and not one life lost getting Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Even if one counts the entire Afghanistan operation before President Obama’s surge, the cost in life and funds was limited compared to getting Saddam. Which was the better strategy in dealing with bad guys in safe havens?

The U.S. went into Iraq because it was a hideout for terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. But Pakistan definitely has nuclear weapons and Osama proved it is not safe for terrorists even without a mass invasion. Most people think the mastermind of the 9/11 attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, was captured in Iraq or Afghanistan but it actually was in Pakistan. After ten years, there is no end in sight for the other wars but the U.S. was out of Pakistan in a few hours.

Republican say George W. Bush deserves some of the credit for getting bin Laden. They are correct but bringing him into the discussion only magnifies the different costs in blood and money between the two. As bin Laden taunted in 2004, “All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses.” In fact, bin Laden drew the U.S. into a sustained conflict that will long outlive him, as he planned from the beginning. Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz estimates the true economic cost of Iraq is $3 trillion, Afghanistan will be $1 trillion and homeland security adds another trillion. While entitlements are the major cause of America’s coming bankruptcy, bin Laden can claim some of that credit too.

President Barack Obama ran for president promising to withdraw from the Iraq conflict. In office, he has adopted almost every policy of his predecessor in Iraq and even upped his ante in Afghanistan. President Bush has been vindicated with this continuity of policy but now these are the policies of the Democratic Party. Republicans can claim a certain satisfaction but they now are left without any foreign policy at all. After his “gutsy call” (neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz’s phrase) to send in special forces to assassinate bin Laden no one can seriously argue that President Obama is not aggressive enough. The poor neoconservative Weekly Standard was caught that week with a front page attack on Obama as “A Leader From Behind,” raising the issue of whether that kind of leadership might not be such a bad idea. The only claim left to Republicans is the Mike Dukakis one that the GOP has greater competence – but that argument could only win ten states.

There is great satisfaction that the U.S. finally got the mass murderer Osama bin Laden. The thousands killed in the September 11 2001 and other terrorist attacks against innocent civilians have been avenged. But the issue now is who will learn the real lesson of bin Laden? Will the U.S. reorient strategy to rely upon special force lightening strikes based upon meticulous intelligence gathering or will it continue to rely upon a mindset of World War II massive armies on the ground? From its first issue almost a decade ago ConservativeBattleline has argued that the terrorist threat must be fought as more of a police than a traditional boots-on-the ground military operation. Before the Iraq invasion we even suggested assassinating Saddam instead. The contrast between the Pakistan raid and the endless problems in Iraq and Afghanistan should end the argument.

As Prof. Angelo Codevilla’s magisterial book Advice To War Presidents, has so well documented, U.S. policy under both political parties has got it backwards. It has been fixated upon land armies rather than counterterrorism, on nation-building rather than allowing internal forces to restrain each other, on relying on universal rather than targeted intelligence, internationalist rather than nationalist, utopian rather than interest-based, ideological rather than calculated, biased to force projection rather than homeland defense, and – in the homeland – relying on rigid top-down expertise in militarized police bureaucracies rather than upon the flexibility and resourcefulness of the nation’s “free citizens” who are supposed to be the first-line defense of the nation’s security.

The progressive’s insatiable urge to view the world as one vast slum to be renewed – as William F. Buckley Jr, once observed – has led today’s liberal to view the popular uprisings in the Middle East as “changing everything.” Democracy is the future, they argue for the umpteenth time, and the U.S. must show the world how. The progressives say that no one was waving pictures of bin Laden in the “Arab Spring” in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Syria and the rest. He is irrelevant, they say. Yes, he is irrelevant but he long has been of secondary importance. U.S. intelligence has said for years that the al-Qaeda presence has been reduced to minimal levels, perhaps as few as 300 members today, with 1,400 U.S. troops and $1.5 billion in Afghanistan spent to control each one. The real cause of the uprisings is that modern communication makes it impossible for these Muslims to ignore they are stagnant and backward – so they demand change.

But what kind of change? In a way, the Islamic world has learned too much about Western democracy. In its progressive welfare state form, democracy seems to them to mean that the majority can simply demand that an elected government give them what they want and they will just receive it. They listen to Barack Obama speeches to Americans saying just that. Arabs naturally conclude that democratic government will magically deliver all the wonderful things they want. Of course, the government does not have the resources and can only move them from the productive and redistribute their taxes to others. But without productivity, there is no money to redistribute, as even the wealthy U.S. is finding with its entitlement crisis. The tooth-fairy democratic welfare state is bankrupt nearly everywhere. How can it work any better in the poor Middle East?

Every poll shows that its people want Sharia law. A responsive majority rule democracy would deliver it to them. They want government to create jobs, raise wages and provide health, education and welfare. Inevitably, they will be disillusioned and their modern women, secularists and Christians will pay the price, financially and with restricted freedoms. In fact, majority rule is a prescription for disaster in the Middle East as has already been demonstrated electorally in Gaza with the victory of Hamas and in Lebanon with the success of Hezbollah. After elections and trillions in aid to Iraq and Afghanistan, every week shows women stoned, Christian churches burned, and civic rights restricted. Even Bush planner Wolfowitz concedes that Iraq is “still so uncertain that it would be hard to say it has inspired people”.

Wolfowitz’s solution is for the U.S. to be more forceful. He concedes we could push too far but his plan for opponents like Iran, Syria and Libya and “even our friends like the Egyptians,” Bahrain and Pakistan, is to find people who want things to “end the right way” and back them, threatening loss of our support if these are thwarted. What if those who think the “right way” are the minority in those countries as the polls suggest? Unfortunately, after President Obama’s abandonment of Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, there will not be many takers anyway. Ask King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia who made it clear his response was cracking down hard on internal dissidents, as has everyone else in the region ever since. Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad has convinced the Alawites, Druze, Christians and secularists to back his crackdown to stop a Sunni majority from taking revenge.

Even the true believers are taking a second look. The hawkish Wall Street Journal editorial board has long insisted Pakistan toe the U.S. line, even publishing an American Enterprise Institute expert proposal to undermine the Pakistan military including using drone strikes against them if they do not cooperate sufficiently. But the Journal also recognized that Pakistan’s army is the only force between the radicals and nuclear weapons. After leading the cheerleading for strong U.S. support of the democratic spring, “less than three months after the fall of the Mubarak regime” the Journal editors were chagrined enough to note that “the caretaker government in Cairo has surprised [us] with its radical shifts in foreign policy,” supporting repressive Iran and Hamas against Israel.

Imagine the “surprise” after there is an elected Egyptian government with the radical Muslim Brotherhood constituting the largest single parliamentary contingent. Jews will not be the only victims. The Christian Copts in Egypt have already suffered several rampages, gutted churches and even a severed ear from the radical Salafists and are anxious they will face the fate of Christians in Iraq. Unfortunately, they moved to Syria but if that regime falls there may be nowhere else for Christians to go.

The hopeful news is that President Obama’s successful special forces police action to eliminate the bin Laden threat could show the way to a better, more limited and effective solution to the terrorist problem. But the guess from here is that he and his progressive friends at Hillary Clinton’s State Department – supported by Wolfowitz’s neocons – will follow the siren call of Middle East democratization and get the U.S. even more tangled in costly foreign adventures. The Libya operation keeps expanding, sanctions have just been imposed on Syria, and Bahrain and Egypt beckon. Progressive idealists just cannot help themselves in their endless pursuit of democratic utopianism. Is there an opening for a conservative with a more realistic foreign policy?

Donald Devine was the director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management from 1981 to 1985 under Ronald Reagan and is the editor of ConservativeBattleline Online.