President Bush is fond of saying that, despite the terrible (and mounting) price in blood, treasure, and national prestige, the war in Iraq has made America safer because Saddam Hussein is now in prison instead of in power -- which sounds like a pretty reasonable argument to most people, I think. But what if those same people were to learn that our nation's most deadly enemy, Osama bin Laden, is still walking around loose today precisely because the president ordered our armed forces to focus on Iraq instead of al-Qaeda in late 2001? Just how reasonable would Mr. Bush's argument sound to them then?

Over at at TOPDOG04.COM, the blogger known simply as "Mike" (who, like many others, wants to know "why this catastrophic failure has not been a campaign issue") carefully lays out the relevant facts in a well-documented Tora Bora-Iraq timeline, and, in the process, raises perhaps the most critical question of Election 2004: Why, just months after al-Qaeda's brutal attacks on New York and Washington, did President Bush decide to trade the most dangerous terrorist in the world for a quagmire?

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