I saw Elizabeth Dole, Republican Senator of North Carolina, on Hardball today. She displayed the usual Republican prowess at evading questions and vomiting up her party's talking points, one of which is a particular favorite of mine. It's the one -- stop me if you've heard it! -- about how "the whole world" thought Saddam Hussein had WMDs. So our invasion, and the resulting deaths of what, 40,000 civilians? 60,000? 100,000? -- was a perfectly excusable misunderstanding. A mistake, like when you knocked over your mother's favorite vase rushing to catch the school bus. "I didn't mean to, Ma! It was an accident!"

Your mom is mad, of course, but what is she going to do? She doesn't want you to be late for school, and you didn't do it on purpose, and punishing you won't put the pieces of her vase back together. So get along, you little scamp, and be more careful in the future!

Such is, apparently, the way things are now in the world. The Bush administration thought Saddam had the weapons, and we didn't know the people running the checkpoint in their car were just a confused family until after we shot them! The Israelis didn't mean to kill and maim hundreds of Lebanese civilians, and destroy their homes, schools and hospitals, and bomb a UN observer post, killing four peacekeepers. Sorry, everybody! It was an accident! We'll be more careful in the future!

It's as if the families of the dead and wounded, the hundreds of thousands of newly homeless, are going to put their hands on their hips, shake their heads, wag a finger and lovingly muss the hair of the people ruining their lives.

But it doesn't work that way, does it. In fact, what happens is just the opposite of what Israel and America want. Every Arab son, daughter, husband or wife lost in the "war on terror" begets multiple new, seething, bitterly motivated terrorists.

Would it be any different here? We lost 3,000 people five years ago, and were so angry about it that we invaded two nations and killed thousands of innocent men, women and children -- 10, 20 times as many as we lost on 9/11. (No one really knows the true number because, as our former top general in Iraq [and recent Medal of Freedom recipient!] famously said, "We don't do body counts.")

But then, our dead were (mostly) American. The soldiers kidnapped by Hamas and Hezbollah, the civilians killed by Katyusha rockets or explosives-wrapped Palestinians, are Israeli. The enemy dead, their missing family members, are lowly Arabs struggling to get by in the rocky ruins of Afghanistan, or the teeming slums of Gaza, or the once-cosmopolitan neighborhoods of Beirut.

And besides, we didn't mean to kill all those mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters! It was an accident! Our bad! We admit it!

When they do it, it's terrorism. When we do it, it's "regrettable."

Although, strangely, the friends and families of the Arab dead, who are no less dead because they died accidently, don't see it the way we do. To them, to ordinary people trying to make a living and raise a family just like the people in the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and Flight 93, the mighty militaries who killed their loved ones are terrorists as reprehensible as al Qaeda, Hamas or Hezbollah. Accidental or not. In uniform, and with the world's most advanced weapons, or not. And, if you consider the casualty counts, on a far larger scale.

But of course, they're wrong. Because it was an accident, and we're really sorry.