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The late William Fulbright wrote a very important book during Vietnam called The Arrogance of Power. For those who lived through that war, the arrogance displayed by the political leadership has a disquieting connection to our current efforts to remake the Islamic world. When you become so fixated on a position that outside arguments are not permitted, there is a danger of sliding into arrogance and then hubris. The histories written about the escalation of Vietnam talk about how sureness of purpose becomes hubris. With arrogance, you offend your fellow citizens. With hubris, you tempt the gods to remind you that you're just human. The reminder in Vietnam was particularly brutal. The results of that closed-minded policy are the names of 50,000 American dead on a black granite wall not far from my office. The pain from that war has not mellowed with time.

My fear is a new wall for this new war. I had hoped never to see such division among Americans again in my lifetime. But the apprehension we all feel over the new policy of preemption may be a sense that ideologically based policy — be it authored by McNamara or Rumsfeld — still has to be rooted in candor and truth. The lies told to expand our war in Vietnam were of the same nature as the lies told to convince us to pursue all-out war against Saddam. Lies get you in, but not out. Like Vietnam, there is no exit strategy for Iraq. Unlike Vietnam, much more is at stake than national pride and our soldiers' lives.

The threat of a holy war is what will kill us in our homes and as we travel. When an airliner becomes a weapon of mass destruction, our fears begin to dictate how we live. Defeating this fear is the real war, the real objective. When President Bush's advisors sold him a preemptive war in Iraq, he lost his focus. His "big muddy" became the Euphrates. None of the feared weapons of mass destruction have been found. When the president realized that the aircraft carrier victory tour was a bit optimistic, the stated reasons for war in Iraq melted away.

Just as the war against Saddam cannot be won by the United States alone, the war on terrorism cannot be won without the rest of the world. By prosecuting war in Iraq on exaggerated and "sexed-up" intelligence, we have forfeited our national credibility at a time when we need other leaders and their compatriots to believe in us most. We cannot afford to make any more mistakes. Our intelligence and public officials have to find the intestinal fortitude not to lie about public policy on such important matters. If President Bush can finally face the truth about his Saudi friends and rededicate himself to the war on terrorism, there is still an opportunity for him to win that war.

Our national leadership may have squandered the worldwide sympathy for America in the aftermath of the 9-11 attacks. For a moment, there was a chance to attack the root causes of Islamic discontent — corrupt and dictatorial regimes, Mullahs who are exploitive scam artists, and governments that keep a jackboot on freedom across the Gulf. Yes, they need a wake-up call with a new democracy in their midst. The problem is that democracy should have been installed in Afghanistan already; it was taken over as a terrorist state. Twice we have left the job in Afghanistan unfinished. Twice we have let the terrorists take control. Two years have passed since the greatest intelligence failure in our history. The president who promised to take the war to those who aided terrorism continues unfulfilled. The corrupt regime of Saudi Arabia continues to have enormous influence over the administration despite more and ever-clearer proof of complicity in the murder of 3,000 Americans. It really is remarkable that an American president with such a checkered business career — funded in part by Saudi money — would go to extraordinary lengths to protect the interests of the same Royal Family that passed money to the 9-11 hijackers.

In the twenty four months since the planes were turned into weapons, we have set out on a military crusade to remake the Islamic world. The most promising administration effort in Afghanistan remains unfinished, and now the Taliban are killing our soldiers again as they try to turn time back centuries. The opium poppy crop has made the warlords we paid to fight the Taliban rich enough so that they haven't stayed bought. The bizarre war in Iraq, sold to the world on exaggerated evidence of a direct weapons threats to the United States, has turned into a boon for private contractors like Halliburton and a nightmare for the loved ones of our soldiers. Before we attacked, Saddam Hussein pledged our sons and daughters would come home in body bags. We should have listened, because when its comes to death, Saddam always kept his word. In that little Iran-Iraq War he started in 1980, more than a million Iranians and Iraqis perished.

According to CIA officers we have interviewed, the agency had warned the administration that the vacuum left behind by our invasion could create a playground for terrorists. The president ignored that intelligence and decided to attack with no real coalition. The CIA experts were right, and the state Saddam ruled with an iron fist has come unglued. With the floodgates open, every wanna-be terrorist with a grudge decided to summer in Iraq. If diverting the American public's attention from the failures of the war on terrorism was the purpose of the Iraq invasion, the White House succeeded. Now we're focusing on the mess in Iraq.

Republicans and Democrats both urged the president to internationalize the force so that Americans wouldn't be the only ones blown up. Now the administration is reluctantly submitting a resolution to let the United Nations join the party. It is the least we can do since we are now asking the UN to help clean up a mess of our making. Unfortunately, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld are not paying for this hubris. Instead, it is helpless Iraqis, American soldiers and the NGOs that are just trying to bring some hope to the Iraqi people. So far, the effort in Iraq has destabilized much of the region and increased the number of young men volunteering to kill Americans. The Taliban is back in Afghanistan. And the Mullahs in Iran, worrying very little about reform, are looking at Iraq as the greatest Islamic prize of all.

I spoke to an Islamic terrorist based in Tehran. His words should send a chill through every American. "Your president has done something no single religious leader here could do. He has united us in purpose. By offering the Iraqi youth no hope, no alternatives, no purpose, the United States has opened the door for those of us with an alternative. Our form of Islam is the future of the region. You have 140,000. We have tens of millions."

It seems two years into the war on terrorism we are not even close to the end of this river of blood.