Five years ago, America had a rare opportunity in Afghanistan. It stood astride a country exhausted by chaos, tired of bloodshed, and hungry for peace. At that moment, having driven the Taliban out of Kabul, the United States could have relied on the Afghan people as allies. At that moment, Afghans themselves would have manned the barricades against saboteurs and terrorists to protect Americans helping to rebuild their country. Liberated from security concerns, the United States could have exercised to the utmost its undoubted genius for creating prosperity. The military victory could have been a platform for starting on America’s real work: putting a devastated Muslim country back on its feet with no strings attached—just think how that news would have rippled beyond the borders of Afghanistan and throughout the Islamic world.

Instead, the Bush Administration committed an astonishing strategic error. It abandoned Afghanistan, as if the military victory had been the whole game there, which was roughly like a football team leaving the field after winning the coin toss.

What’s worse, the United States ran off to open a new military front in—of all places!—Iraq: a country exhausted by the grim “peace” of a long lockdown and bursting with readiness for war. After all, Hussein’s clench reflected not just his personal savagery but also the intensity of the contradictions he was keeping in check. The post-Soviet era in Eastern Europe should have warned President Bush what would happen if he simply knocked the lid off the pressurized tank that was Saddam’s Iraq—and perhaps he and his Neocon advisers did have some inkling. If so, they willingly accepted the destruction of Iraq and the death of numerous young Americans—the final count remains to be seen—as the worthwhile cost of ousting … one man. The real cost of that move was to drag America into a war on the terrorists’ terms

Yes, on the terrorists’ terms. Think about it. At this point, the United States has two options in Iraq: to pull out or stay in.

If, as some demand, America simply pulls out and lets the chips fall where they may, the chips will fall explosively. Never mind about plunging Iraq into a civil war: that’s already happening. It’s a regional war we must worry about now, a war that will in retrospect make the current violence in Iraq look like a mere soccer riot. If Iraq survives as a single country, it will be under a regime a lot like Saddam Hussein’s—because let’s not kid ourselves, whoever shoves all that violence back into a bottle and corks it will surely be a brutal dictator using every conceivable horror to keep his enemies squashed. Oh, he might be a nominal ally of the United States at first (so was Saddam, at first!) But he might just as easily be some radically anti-American Islamist. If the invasion of Iraq yields this final result, it will surely go down as one of the worst blunders in the history of American foreign policy.

So it looks like we have to stay the course until we win, just as George W. Bush has insisted. Right?

Ah but wait: let’s look at this option a little closer. Win? What would winning consist of in Iraq? We’ve already invaded the country—destroyed its army—ousted its its ruling party—hunted down and executed its former ruler—installed a government of our own choosing… good God, if this is not victory, what is?

The Bush Administration has answered that question by defining us into the following corner: we can’t count this as a win until Iraq and its surrounding region is stable, safe, democratic, and at peace—and loves us. Only then will we be able to leave in triumph.

What must the other side do to “win”? Keep the war going. That’s all. Just keep drawing blood, wherever and whenever. America can defend the prime minister, the top generals, and a few elite leaders; but it can’t protect everyone. Terrorists, by definition don’t have to kill the few top leaders. Killing just anyone will do. That’s the essence of the strategy: to strike any person America leaves undefended.

To accomplish this, they need only a small force, the smaller the better. In fact, the ideal army for each mission is a single alienated individual with no close friends.

And what do we need, to defend against such attacks?

A global security force that is everywhere, all the time, on alert; a people who never sleep, who watch one another and are willing to be watched at all times themselves, by government agents, who must also be watched—and so on and so on. In short, to protect ourselves against people who, according to Bush, hate our freedom, we have only to give up our freedom.

The United States has the biggest bombs ever built, but it’s warring with individuals who could be killed just as thoroughly with rusty box-cutters, if only we knew who and where they were.

If this is the game, America’s overwhelming military superiority counts for very little. This is the trap into which the Bush Administration has walked America, the strategic error at the core of the war on terror.

Oh, but it gets worse. Every few days, President Bush vows that we won’t “give in to the demands of terrorists.”

What demands are those? Did the 9/11 hijackers issue demands? I didn’t hear of any. Did the Bali bombers? Did the London bombers? Nope, never, not at all—haven’t you noticed? These new terrorists don’t have demands. They only have an agenda. You would think our side would try to guess that agenda in order to design a ur response that would thwart it.

For example, what did those criminals hope to accomplish by running airplanes into the World Trade Center? Was it step one in a plan to conquer New York? Of course not. Did they think it would help Osama Bin Laden seize control of D.C.? Surely not! Did they think it would force American women into burqas? Impossible that anyone could think so, that anyone could think the terrorists thought so. What then were they after?

Surely, they did it to give themselves stature in the Muslim world and to spark a war between the East and West. How are they doing? They seem to have come a long way. But they could not have done it on their own, not merely by destroying the World Trade Center and killing 3000 people. That’s enormous for a crime, but on the scale by which wars are measured, it isn’t much. They needed a particular response from American leaders.

And they got it. George Bush gave the terrorists exactly what they were looking for. Instead of moving at once to marginalize them, define them as criminals, and rally Muslim contempt against them, he declared war. He abandoned the word “terrorist” in favor of the phrase “state-sponsored terrorist.” That is, from day one, he defined the Islamist terrorists as country-sized. Suddenly that scattered smattering of alienated thugs was playing in the same league as the United States. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union had the nuclear tonnage to destroy the entire world. Bush promoted the terrorists of 9/11 to the space the Soviet Union had left vacant by its fall. And so the terrorists achieved their first goal.

Bush and company then went on to compound their blunder. In the leadup to invading Iraq, they announced emphatically and repeatedly that we would invade no matter what, with or without allies. Well, in that case, even countries that wanted Saddam gone had no incentive to join the effort of unseating him; after all, everyone knew there were some risks to invading Iraq. Why incur those risks, if the United States was going to do it anyway? Self-destructive posturing by the Bush team ensured that the United States would go into Iraq essentially alone and come out of it weaker than we started, no matter what the military outcome.

Yes, weaker, because once we invaded and occupied Iraq, the terrorists had us right where they wanted us. Having evened the military odds, they could now begin to chip away at America’s moral advantage. Look at the calculus that obtains today. They behead innocent people, we turn them into bloody grease spots with cluster bombs. They kidnap and torture, we kidnap and sexually humiliate. There came a time (and we’re still in that time) when our government and its right-wing apologists found themselves reduced to arguing that we were better than Saddam Hussein. How did we ever get to a point where we could brag of being better than Saddam Hussein? For heaven’s sake, we’re also better than that guy in Milwaukee who killed and ate boys—so what?

It wasn’t the terrorists who reduced us to this standard. They only made it possible for us to sink so low. It was the Bush Administration that took us down.

Historians looking back may well rate George W. Bush the president who lost America, because this man locked us into a struggle that gives our adversaries the power to decide how long the blood flows.

There is no easy way out of the quandary now, but even the hard ways are closed to us unless we jettison the leaders who have been steering our ship of state in the last five years. The mid-term elections were a start, but now the presidential election is coming up, and let’s not squander this opportunity. No Republican of any stripe, no Democrat who helped the Bush Administration get us into this debacle–that should be our standard. Let’s acquire leaders untainted by the decisions of the current administration, leaders who are free to repudiate that failed strategy called “the war on terror” and get this country back on a course that leads to real security.