With the possible exception of Saddam Hussein, nobody’s more upset about the success of Patriot missiles stationed in Kuwait than the enemies of missile defense here at home.

Alex Stone of The New Republic rips into Karl Zinsmeister for highlighting some of the Patriot’s recent achievements, and especially for the observation that if missile defense can work in a theater operation then it can also protect the United States from intercontinental attacks. Stone calls this “remarkably disingenuous” and “so absurd it strains the imagination” — and he’s plain wrong, for reasons the foes of missile defense should well appreciate.

Let’s start with a quick review of the Patriot’s recent record. By the end of March, Iraq had fired 13 missiles at U.S. and coalition forces, and only one of them came close to hitting its mark when it struck a shopping mall in Kuwait City and caused a few minor injuries. Of the rest, one blew up shortly after launch, three were allowed to crash harmlessly into the desert or the Persian Gulf, and eight appear to have been intercepted by Patriot missiles. (My source for this information is the Center for Defense Information — an organization that opposes missile defense.)

Stone reports the results this way: “The success rate of the PAC-3 [the most advanced version of Patriot, but not the only one deployed in Kuwait right now] is less than 50 percent — hardly something to write home about.” I’m not sure how he arrives at this figure. Perhaps when a Patriot battery takes multiple shots at a single target, as is the standard practice, Stone doesn’t give the Patriots full credit for success. In other words, if Iraq launches a missile and U.S. forces send up three Patriots in response, only the one that actually takes out the target is scored as a “hit.” That’s a success rate of 33 percent.

It’s also the wrong way to look at the problem. Success should be determined by how many Iraqi missiles penetrate our defenses. By this measure, only one has gotten through, and it fortunately didn’t cause much damage.

The Patriot’s record is not perfect. In one terrible accident, a Patriot missile shot down a British Tornado fighter. Stone castigates Zinsmeister for failing to report this event, though Stone himself neglects to mention the fault may lie with a malfunctioning beacon on the plane. There have been two other troubling incidents as well: On Wednesday, a Patriot missile destroyed a Navy jet; on March 25, a Patriot radar locked onto an American F-16, but disaster was averted.

These are significant problems, and they need to be addressed in the coming months. But they are also solvable problems. The Army, which operates the Patriot system, will also want to review the missile’s performance against its legitimate targets. Following the first Gulf War, it became clear the Patriots didn’t hit as many targets as was originally believed. Part of the problem came from the fact that Saddam’s Scuds were so poorly maintained that they broke up in flight. By the time Patriots reached them, they often didn’t have anything to hit. What’s more, much of this analysis was based on sketchy videos, which means it wasn’t precise. “We won’t ever have a totally accurate score sheet for the Patriot,” Lt. Col. Rich Lehner of Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency told me last fall, referring to the Gulf War. It’s also worth nothing that the Gulf War-era Patriots were actually built as air-defense missiles, and they were pressed into anti-missile operations — a different purpose entirely. And finally, we must acknowledge that Patriot was a political success: It kept Israel out of the conflict, even though it was sorely tempted to retaliate for the 39 Scuds that Saddam sent its way (killing two people and injuring about 200).

Stone is free to argue that we shouldn’t allow the Patriot’s recent accomplishments in a theater operation trick us into thinking that it means we’ve solved every problem associated with national-missile defense. And he’s correct. Patriot missiles cannot defend the homeland against warheads launched from China, North Korea, and Russia. This will require anti-ballistic missiles that can operate at much higher speeds in outer space. There’s also a growing appreciation for the importance of airborne lasers, which are currently in testing and, if deployed, would be able to target enemy missiles in their boost phase.

Yet the enemies of missile defense have long used the Patriot’s performance more than a decade ago as a reason for not pursuing national missile defense. If the Patriots couldn’t hit Saddam’s clunky Scuds, they would say, then surely they can’t hit the much more advanced missile of more capable adversaries.

That’s not an entirely unfair point — it’s certainly not “remarkably disingenuous” or “so absurd it strains the imagination.”

Now that Patriots really do appear to be compiling an impressive record, however, couldn’t Stone and the rest of the anti-missile-defense crowd at least acknowledge this — and be glad that we’re saving lives because of it?