Over on the right side of the fence, we’re hearing plenty of voices arguing that al-Qaida wants to see George Bush defeated. From where I sit, it seems equally or more likely that bin Laden and company would love to see Bush re-elected (he’s been their best recruiting agent, in Iraq and elsewhere).

But really, to speculate on this subject either way is to go down a rathole. Who cares which candidate al-Qaida might favor? Osama doesn’t vote. All that matters is, which candidate will best protect the American people, bolster the American economy, and help build a safer and more peaceful world for our kids?

But the prospect of an October surprise now looms scarily over the electoral landscape. And the most important thing we can do is to inoculate ourselves in advance against it.

The nightmare scenario goes something like this: Sometime in October, al-Qaida strikes inside the U.S. Either (a) Americans rally behind the president, even though the occasion of a second attack might cause us to feel the administration had failed us; or (b) though there might well have been little any president could do to stop the attack, many Americans blame Bush — and that evokes a patriotic chorus of rally-round-the-prez from our leaders and our media, with sanctimonious cries of “Remember Madrid!”

It barely matters, then, whether the reaction goes for or against Bush. Either way — if we accept, as U.S. intelligence reports, that “influencing the elections” is an al-Qaida goal — the result will be an al-Qaida success. Unless we’re somehow able, ahead of the fact, to draw some lines in the rhetorical sand.

The “influencing elections” debate began in earnest in March, when the Madrid attacks and subsequent fall of Bush ally Jose Maria Aznar’s government led American conservatives to complain that Spain’s voters had capitulated to al-Qaida in a shameful act of cowardice. Never mind that the overwhelming majority of Spanish voters had long opposed their government’s policy of supporting the Iraq war; never mind that the last-minute swing against the incumbent government was sparked by disgust at the spin games it played in the immediate aftermath of the attack (when it tried to pin the blame on Basque terrorists). Details, details!

There was and is a blunt agenda at work in this gross distortion of the record: the party of Cheney and Rove is laying the groundwork to argue that, in the wake of an al-Qaida attack, it is our patriotic duty to vote for Bush. Otherwise, you know, the terrorists have won.

In a better world, the right thing to do here would be for Republicans and Democrats to agree, in advance, that neither side will attempt to make political hay out of circumstances surrounding another terrorist attack on the U.S. before the election.

I can’t help thinking, though, that such a move would really be unilateral disarmament on the Democratic side — because the Bush administration has broken every promise it has ever made about not turning terrorism into a political football. Since the war on terror is the only issue on which polls show Bush with any remaining appeal to the American public, it has become the administration’s political cornerstone. And it is being micromanaged for Bush’s personal political advantage.

Here’s Tom Ridge, touting the glories of the president’s policies out of one side of his mouth and insisting that his Homeland Security Department “doesn’t do politics” out of the other! When all accounts suggest that it was an oversensitivity to political winds that led our intelligence astray in the Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco, here’s the new choice to head the CIA — a partisan GOP bulldog! And don’t you Democrats dare oppose him, or we’ll hang you by your obstructionist thumbs!

No, I don’t think it’s possible, given these players, to steer the debate onto the high road and keep it there. Instead, we’d all better keep on high alert between now and Nov. 2 — not only for possible attacks, which remain a true danger, but for the outrageous distortions of the American political process that could result from them.

Of course, we can be thankful for little things: At least the trial balloon of postponing elections in the event of a terror attack seems to have been definitively exploded.

Is it mere chance that, while the bunting is still being pulled down at the Fleet Center, the nation is galvanized by another threat warning from the Department of Homeland Defense? Or is there, as we’re hearing, something truly, definitively different about this threat report — something, beyond the specificity of the named targets, that distinguishes it from the previous, transparently manipulative Tom Ridge scares?

The only reasonable answer anyone not sitting in or near the Oval Office can provide is, we don’t know. And that’s precisely the problem the Bush administration has created for the nation.

This morning on NPR I heard Larry Johnson, described as a former counter-terrorism official at the CIA and State Department, debunk the threat report. The information behind this weekend’s alert for key financial buildings in New York and Washington — which, we’re told, have been cased by al-Qaida — apparently came from an al-Qaida communications operative captured by Pakistan in mid-July. If you read this New York Times report on him, you’ll learn that the casing of buildings started even before 9/11. Maybe these were al-Qaida’s alternate plans for the 9/11 attack itself. Maybe they were considering a follow-up. Maybe the plans were shelved, maybe they weren’t. As far as we know, the new information is specific about location but tells us nothing about timing. Which is why the timing of the current warning — aimed for maximum damping of any post-convention Democratic bounce — smells so fishy.

Perhaps the Bush administration knows more than we do. But between its weapons-of-mass-destruction debacle and its record of timing bogus scares for maximum politial gain, this gang is no longer in a position to say, “trust us.”

Johnson’s argument, which the Times report corroborates, is that the Bush administration’s warning is a cover-your-ass exercise that does nothing to make us safer but that does help reveal to al-Qaida exactly what our defense preparations look like. Oh, and of course it also helps Bush politically by underscoring his message that Americans need to be very, very afraid and only he can protect us.

Bush, Cheney and Ridge have set up themselves and the nation they are supposed to be protecting in a classic boy-who-cried-wolf situation. Unfortunately, as Johnson observed, there really is a wolf out there, and he’s probably quite amused and delighted by all the Bush administration’s self-serving alarms.

At a time when more than anything else we need to be able to trust our government, our government has tossed that trust away for a mess of political pottage. Beyond his economy-choking, job-limiting economic policies and his deceptively justified, incompetently executed “war of choice” in Iraq, President Bush has lost credibility in the most basic realm of defense against another 9/11. Which is why throwing this administration out on its ears is a necessary prerequisite to restoring Americans’ safety. A government whose word we doubt is a government that can’t protect us.

Funny how it goes: John Kerry seizes the spotlight by announcing his running mate, and the Bush administration trots out Tom Ridge to warn us of more terror attacks. This time, the warning comes with more detail: Osama bin Laden himself, it seems, is plotting another attack on the U.S. But President Bush may find that this timely reminder of the original, genuine global terrorist threat backfires. Because every time we hear the name Osama, we should remember whose policies have left the al-Qaida leader at large.

Over the past year, I’ve made a point of repeatedly referring to the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a strategic mistake. Put aside issues of morality, of justification for the war, of possible deception by U.S. leaders; just consider the issue on the global chessboard for a moment. The next time you hear someone ask whether the U.S. is safer or not as a result of the Bush administration’s war on Saddam Hussein, you can definitively answer “no.” The evidence can be found in today’s report in the New York Times that bin Laden and company intend to attack the U.S. this year in a plot directed from their hideouts on the Afghan/Pakistani border.

This should hardly come as a surprise. These, after all, are the people who attacked the U.S. on 9/11. In the wake of that attack, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and deposed the Taliban regime that harbored our enemies. But we never finished the job; we left bin Laden free, we left Mullah Omar free, we let Afghanistan drift back into a state of opium-growing, warlord-dominated semi-anarchy. We chose to invade Iraq instead.

We now know a lot more about all the blindered, blinkered reasons that led the Bush administration to this disastrous mistake. What I’ve never understood, and still don’t understand, is why the rest of the U.S. government, and to some extent the U.S. media, have not furiously and persistently asked the obvious, and still hanging, question: Why didn’t we go full-tilt after bin Laden in spring of 2002?

Would it have caused too many casualties? That didn’t seem to be a deterrent factor when it came to invading Iraq. Hundreds of American soldiers have died, and are still dying, in Iraq; such a tragedy might be more justifiable if we felt, as we cannot now, that the sacrifices had a direct connection to the 9/11 attacks — and to preventing their sequel.

Was it out of deference to our shaky alliance with Pakistan? But what good is that alliance if it does not help us capture our most lethal enemies?

I understand that the mountainous border zone between Afghanistan and Pakistan is treacherous terrain. It’s historically isolated. Its tribal inhabitants are suspicious of foreigners. But we didn’t get to choose our opponents; 9/11 chose them for us. What if we had invested some portion of the blood and treasure squandered on the Iraqi adventure on a full-bore campaign to “smoke out” bin Laden and rebuild Afghanistan? How would the “War on Terror” look different today? And would we still be facing these ominous warnings of al-Qaida attacks?

I am not one for conspiracy theories. But when we can’t answer these questions, we’re left to less savory speculations. What is actually happening between the Bush administration and the Pakistani government? (We’ve all now seen the reports that the Bush administration is asking Pakistan to round up “high value targets” during the week of the Democratic convention.) Why has finding bin Laden been so impossible? What could possibly be higher-priority for the U.S. than apprehending those responsible for 9/11?

The supposed “grownups” in the Bush Administration have neither answered these questions nor taken responsibility for their mistakes. Our one chance of ever getting the full story is to vote them out and give their replacements a chance to investigate.

Today’s news accounts of the surprise and clandestine handover of sovereignty in Iraq yesterday — in particular, David Sanger’s excellent New York Times analysis, which dispassionately laid out how tenuous the whole affair was — left me with a depressing sense of deja vu. Sanger quoted Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s comparison of the Iraqi insurgents’ attacks with the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive. Rumsfeld was arguing that the Iraqis, like the North Vietnamese, are aiming their attacks as much or more at American resolve as at targets in their homeland.

But the Vietnam comparison that is more apt today is the sorry saga of “Vietnamization.” Cast your mind back to the Nixon administration’s desperate efforts, even as its timbers were beginning to splinter on the Watergate iceberg, to extricate American troops from their no-win deployment in Southeast Asia. The “peace with honor” policy involved handing power over to a hand-picked government friendly to U.S. interests but unloved by its own people, and replacing American military forces with native troops, regardless of their combat-readiness or willingness to fight.

Does this movie sound familiar? The echoes of “Vietnamization” in the Bush administration’s Iraq strategy are eerie — and terrifying, because Vietnamization was an utter and total failure, one that everyone involved pretty much knew was inevitable, but that proceeded because it was the only fig leaf handy to cover an embarrassing strategic defeat for the United States. As in Vietnam, so in Iraq: The U.S. military can “win the battle” (as we “won” the Tet offensive), but if the leaders in Washington haven’t identified clear, realistic goals, there is no way to win the war. (Hint: just as “terror” is not an enemy you can target, “freedom” is not a government you can support.)

The Vietnam adventure was cursed because the South Vietnamese government it sought to preserve was corrupt and unpopular. It didn’t matter that the North Vietnamese were Communist despots if enough people in Vietnam perceived them to be nationalists taking on the imperialist U.S. Similarly, in Iraq, it won’t matter that the insurgents are actually murderous Baathist thugs or suicidal Islamic fanatics if enough Iraqis think that they’re nationalists taking on the imperialist U.S.

Handing power over to a weak and compromised interim government seems less a promising strategy than an election-year desperation move. With Americans still dying every day in Iraq, we have no choice — Bush supporters and opponents alike — but to hope and pray that it works. Unfortunately, it seems much more likely that Bush and Rumsfeld and Cheney (the latter two of whom had ringside Beltway seats for Vietnamization the first time around) have marched themselves straight into Santayana hell, where they are doomed to repeat the United States’ worst mistakes.