The only sense in which OIF would have diminished both the nuclear and chemical weapons threats to America was to the degree in which it succeeded in sending a deterrent signal to states considering supporting terrorist groups. This is the consideration which is not only explicitly missing from the pre-war intelligence estimates but largely absent from the subsequent discussion about whether “Bush lied and people died”. The strange omission of geopolitical goals from the story of OIF will continue to have unfortunate results, because the measure of the war’s success or failure never lay in its ability to neutralize atom bomb manufacturing facilities — those are by all accounts operating day and night in North Korea — but the degree to which it has deterred ‘rogue states’ from sponsoring terrorist organizations.