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Three years after 9/11, the U.S.-led war on terror is disastrously off-track, bogged down in a needless war in Iraq that has diverted the nation's attention and resources away from the enemy that vows to attack again.

Al-Qaida and its leaders have not been obliterated. Long before that job was done, a Bush administration obsessed with the evil of Saddam Hussein was busily shifting America's response from Afghanistan - and al-Qaida - to Iraq.

Iraq had no role in 9/11. Yet today, Saddam is gone from power. Osama bin Laden is not.

Worse, unlike immediately after 9/11, if bin Laden were captured or killed today, the threat he represents would not lessen.

By shorting U.S. forces in Afghanistan, whose ruling Taliban sheltered al-Qaida training camps, to attack Iraq, where the only suspected al-Qaida camps lay in territory the Saddam regime did not control, the Bush administration handed bin Laden a political victory.

Bush transformed a retaliatory attack that all the world supported into an invasion that looked to much of the world like a war of aggression, and to Muslims like a religious crusade.

Bin Laden's claims seemed to be confirmed: that the United States would attack Muslim lands, occupy its holy sites and take control of the oil. His followers grew in number and, with or without him, a protracted war of terror against the West was assured.

Afghanistan, meanwhile, was left unreconstructed and open to terrorists again. Iran and North Korea, emboldened by limits on a U.S. military stuck in Iraq, accelerated nuclear weapons programs. In America, homeland security remains alarmingly underfunded, and $150 billion already appropriated for Iraq grows by about $5 billion each month.

A depressing assessment of the Iraq invasion's impact on the war on terror appears in October's Atlantic magazine. Writer James Fallows, having talked over many months with people "at the working level of America's antiterrorism efforts," reports:

"As a political matter, whether the United States is now safer or more vulnerable is of course ferociously controversial.... But among national-security professionals there is surprisingly little controversy. Except for those in government and in the opinion industries whose job it is to defend the administration's record, they tend to see America's response to 9/11 as a catastrophe."

One the president should not be allowed to worsen - or repeat.