Good job of staying on message by Dewayne Wickham in USA Today. Wickham reminds us of last year, when Bush told Matt Lauer that the war on terror couldn’t be won, that we can only “create conditions so that … those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world, let’s put it that way.” He worries that Bush has now morphed into thinking that we can win after all, if we win in Iraq.

…it wasn’t the hunt for Osama bin Laden and his ilk that sparked the war in Iraq. It was the Bush administration’s desire to settle old scores with Saddam. And it’s an illusion because it masks the president’s failure to pursue the man who ordered the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on this country as aggressively as he does the fight in Iraq.

Think about it.

When was the last time you heard Bush speak more than fleetingly about other fronts in the broader war? Virtually all of the troops and resources devoted to the war on terror have been sent to Iraq. If you listen closely to what Bush has been saying recently as he has stumped the country trying to reignite support for the war in Iraq, it sounds as though he thinks the war on terror will end when the U.S. declares victory in Iraq.

“These terrorists view the world as a giant battlefield — and they seek to attack us wherever they can. This has attracted al-Qaeda to Iraq, where they are attempting to frighten and intimidate America into a policy of retreat,” the president said Sunday night in an Oval Office address to the nation.

That’s the new “domino theory.” It’s born of the Bush administration’s warped war policies — a jingoism that used the war on terror as an excuse to topple Saddam’s brutal regime. Unlike the broader war on terror that Bush once said we couldn’t win, the president is certain we will prevail in Iraq.

I worry that he is obsessing on the wrong fight.