Like Pelosi and Obamacare, did we have to invade Iraq to see what was in it?

Liberals really don’t like it when you compare Obamacare to the Iraq War.

For an example, see this piece by Ezra Klein, who supported both.

But when liberals declared victory on Obamacare after the enrollment figures rebounded sharply from early rollout problems, it was reminiscent of nothing more than the various premature “Mission Accomplished” declarations concerning Iraq.

Indeed, I said so at the time. Months later, the consensus among the American people that Obamacare is a net negative hasn’t changed, something the November elections are likely to confirm.

Obviously, trying to expand health care access (even in a way that is deeply flawed) and bombing a foreign country (even when a war is necessary and just) are very different things.

Nevertheless, both the Iraq War and Obamacare are examples of multi-trillion dollar government social engineering that aren’t terribly popular with the taxpayers who were asked to foot the bill for them.

As it turns out, many of my fellow conservatives don’t like it when people compare the war and Obamacare either. Like liberals who insist the American people are wrong about Obamacare, they keep insisting the American people were wrong about the Iraq War.

One unfortunate example is the conservatives who claim a recent New York Times story about chemical weapons exposure in Iraq proves George W. Bush was right.

Superficially, this makes a certain amount of sense. These were weapons of mass destruction; they were found in Iraq; ergo, Bush was right about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

The Obamacare enrollment celebration also superficially made a lot of sense too. After HealthCare.gov was a disaster, it became a real possibility that Obamacare would sign up too few people to be viable even in the short term.

When the worst-case scenario was easily averted, ergo it made sense to celebrate Obamacare’s success. Until you thought about it, that is.

First, Obamacare involves a product that people are legally mandated to buy, for which they can receive subsidies.

Second, a possible failure to hit enrollment projections was never a major part of the case against Obamacare.

“If anything,” noted Jeffrey H. Anderson in the Weekly Standard, “opponents argued that Obamacare would surpass those numbers, as employers would dump people into the exchanges against their will, thereby costing American taxpayers even more than the CBO was projecting.”

Similarly, the main argument against the Iraq War wasn’t that Saddam Hussein never possessed any dangerous weapons. It was that he did not possess the capability at the time of the 2003 invasion to threaten Americans.

The Bush administration itself, including the president, acknowledged failing to find the weapons of mass destruction it expected. And unlike its more overzealous supporters, the Bush White House did not claim the weapons described in the NYT story as vindication.

Many conservatives who supported the war at the time have said as much.

“With the benefit of minute hindsight, Saddam Hussein wasn’t the kind of extra-territorial menace that was assumed by the administration one year ago,” observed William F. Buckley, Jr. “If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.”

“The United States overestimated the threat from Saddam Hussein in 2003,” conceded David Frum. “Without an active nuclear-weapons program, he was not a danger beyond his immediate vicinity. That war cost the country dearly.”

Frum coined the phrase “Axis of Evil” as a Bush administration speechwriter and penned the “Unpatriotic Conservatives” cover story attacking outspoken antiwar conservatives for Buckley’s National Review.

Still, many conservatives would prefer to quibble over the meaning of “active” weapons programs. Weren’t the WMD claims at least truer than Barack Obama’s promise that if you like your doctor or insurance plan, you can keep them?

Yes, I’m willing to bet that Obamacare supporters who were genuinely surprised when the health care law proved more disruptive to existing arrangements than originally advertised are smaller in number than the Iraq hawks who were surprised about the decrepit state of Saddam’s weapons programs.

After all, this disruption is actually central to theory of how Obamacare is supposed to work.

But it is bordering on “if you like your doctor” dishonesty to pretend that the weapons that were found in Iraq confirm the warnings issued before the war.

That’s why the Bush administration had to fall back on the argument that we had to invade Iraq to see what’s in it.

If the American people understood that Obamacare would mainly be a Medicaid expansion plus churn from canceled insurance plans to new Obamcare-compliant ones—raising many people’s premiums while at best achieving modest reductions in the uninsured population—it may not have passed.

If the American people understood that Saddam’s weapons were mostly discarded leftovers from decades prior, the Iraq War might not have happened.