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"I truly am not that concerned about him," he said of bin Laden in March 2002.

And so, as swiftly as he vanished into Pakistan, bin Laden all but vanished from the president's speeches.

Bin Laden killed 3,000 Americans in a single morning and didn't have the decency to surrender on schedule, so President Man-Child got bored and moved on.

To Iraq.

By early 2002, the White House already was planning the Iraq war -- even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 and posed no military threat to the United States.

Afghanistan was left to wither.

We sent a big enough force to remove the Taliban from power, but it was too small to secure the peace or prevent the Taliban from regrouping across the border in Pakistan.

The Taliban has gotten stronger every year since 2002 and now controls much of the countryside it abandoned in late 2001.

And Afghanistan is desperately poor, violent and unstable -- just like it was when the Taliban took power in the first place.

The only industry doing well in the post-Enduring Freedom Afghanistan is opium. Oh, and Kabul has a golf course and a boutique hotel.

And al-Qaeda?

Two years ago, a National Intelligence Estimate report, which reflects the collective judgment of the United States' myriad intelligence agencies, said al-Qaeda was on the run and in disarray.

The July 2007 NIE says al-Qaeda's core leaders have rebuilt their organization in the relative safety of Pakistan -- the country we let bin Laden flee to in 2001. Al-Qaeda is organized, strong, and, in the words of the report, the "most serious terrorist threat to the Homeland."

Which brings me to ...

Loser move No. 3: President Bush doesn't know the difference between a goal and a plan.

For the sake of not boring you to death by rehashing old arguments about why the United States went to war in Iraq, let's just imagine the following:

Let's imagine the Bush administration didn't link Saddam Hussein to 9/11 by falsely insinuating his affiliation with al-Qaeda.

Let's imagine the Bush administration didn't cherry-pick intelligence for the purpose of falsely inflating Iraq's WMD abilities.

Let's imagine administration officials were just joshin' when they said Iraq would be a cakewalk, and that Iraqis would greet Americans as liberators.

Let's imagine every word the president told us prior to the war was true.

Let's assume adorable fairies with magic wands and little spangly ballerina outfits are, as you read this, filling your bathtub with gold and candy.

Even if all of the above were true, the war in Iraq would still be a ginormous catastrophe.

Because the president didn't just fail to plan adequately. He refused to plan at all.

Bush and his top advisers didn't just reject a State Department effort to prepare for the occupation -- they rejected the idea that the State Department should have prepared.

It never occurred to the White House that Iraqis might not accept the U.S. invasion, or that Muslim extremists would attempt to fill the power vacuum left by Saddam's removal.

Iraq now has no effective national government. It's in a civil war, likely followed by a breakup. Sunni Arabs, who dominated under Saddam, don't want to live under a government dominated by Shiite Arab theocratic political parties any more than you or I do.

Iraq's Kurds are headed toward declaring independence. If so, they'll end up fighting the Arabs and Turkomen who won't want to live in a Kurdish state. It's already illegal to fly the Iraqi flag in the Kurdish part of the country.

Or maybe our NATO ally (well, for now) Turkey will invade Iraqi Kurdistan with the 150,000 or so troops it has already massed on Iraq's northern border. Turkey doesn't want the Kurds to have their own state, for fear it will encourage the Kurdish separatists who live in eastern Turkey to break away and join it.

You know how President Bush always says if we don't fight 'em there, we're gonna have to fight 'em here? Iraq is now a training and testing ground for violent radicals who get their rocks off by attacking our planes, trains and gathering places -- just like Afghanistan was in the 1980s. We're gonna have to fight them there and here. For years.

And then there's Iran. Thanks to the War on Terror™, Iran is stronger than it's been at any point since the Islamic Revolution 28 years ago. In the spring of 2003, Iran offered to negotiate away its nuclear program and its support of terrorism in exchange for normal relations and a promise that we wouldn't invade. Not only did we say, "Hell no," we yelled at the Swiss for delivering the message.

Now, Iran's thought to be two or three years away from a nuke -- a nuke it will never negotiate away.