Tonight, marking five years since the attacks of September 11, 2001 President George W Bush declared: "Today we are safer, but we are not yet safe." Aiming for the rafters with his rhetoric, Mr. Bush continued:

Since the horror of 9/11, we’ve learned a great deal about the enemy. We have learned that they are evil and kill without mercy, but not without purpose.

We have learned that they form a global network of extremists who are driven by a perverted vision of Islam: a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance and despises all dissent.

And we have learned that their goal is to build a radical Islamic empire where women are prisoners in their homes, men are beaten for missing prayer meetings, and terrorists have a safe haven to plan and launch attacks on America and other civilized nations.

The war against this enemy is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century and the calling of our generation.

Five years after the attacks Mr. Bush has found renewed vigor to go after the enemy. We have come to expect this from our President. He is a late bloomer. His 7-minutes of infamy on September 11, 2001 and his fiddling while New Orleans drowned have taught us that this President is slow to catch on.

In responding to the terrorist attacks on America, Mr. Bush did not fiddle. Instead he invaded the wrong country. Today he confessed that people often ask him why on Earth he would do such a thing:

I am often asked why we’re in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The answer is that the regime of Saddam Hussein was a clear threat.

My administration, the Congress and the United Nations saw the threat.

And, after 9/11, Saddam’s regime posed a risk that the world could not afford to take.

The world is safer because Saddam Hussein is no longer in power.

I wonder if the American public will continue to take Mr. Bush at his word on Iraq. Will the American people believe Saddam was a threat just because Mr. Bush says so? I wonder what evidence there is that the world is safer because Saddam Hussein no longer is at the helm in Iraq. The Pakistani journalist, Ahmed Rashid, wrote in a Washington Post opinion column today that he believes Mr. Bush is losing the war on terror and we are definitely not safer:

In North and South Waziristan, the tribal regions along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, an alliance of extremist groups that includes al-Qaeda, Pakistani and Afghan Taliban, Central Asians, and Chechens has won a significant victory against the army of Pakistan. The army, which has lost some 800 soldiers in the past three years, has retreated, dismantled its checkpoints, released al-Qaeda prisoners and is now paying large "compensation" sums to the extremists.

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If this is indeed a long war, as the Bush administration says, then the United States has almost certainly lost the first phase. Guerrillas are learning faster than Western armies, and the West makes appalling strategic mistakes while the extremists make brilliant tactical moves.

As al-Qaeda and its allies prepare to spread their global jihad to Central Asia, the Caucasus and other parts of the Middle East, they will carry with them the accumulated experience and lessons of the past five years. The West and its regional allies are not prepared to match them.

However, Mr. Bush is oblivious to the facts on the ground. There is an election to win in November and the "facts" must be fixed around the rhetoric.

Mr. Bush wants to convince Americans that the war in Iraq was not a distraction. How well he sells this point will determine the fate of the Republicans in November. So, a little fear mongering is in order:

Whatever mistakes have been made in Iraq, the worst mistake would be to think that if we pulled out, the terrorists would leave us alone.

They will not leave us alone. They will follow us.

Mr. Bush is correct here. Pulling out of Iraq will not solve the problem of terrorism. However, neither will staying. Invading Iraq did nothing to diminish the terrorist threat to the United States. All evidence however suggests that the invasion in fact provided a wonderful recruiting tool for the extremists. Iraq had no connection to al Qaeda before Mr. Bush embarked on three years of chaos. After wasting the blood and treasure of the United States and Iraq for three years, Mr. Bush now wants to convince us that staying in Iraq somehow is holding a tide of terrorists back. Only a moron would believe that.

The real war against extremism is not in Iraq. It is, and has been for decades, in the streets of Third World Muslim countries. In this war the United States has often colluded with, and actively aided, the extremists against the secular forces.  To this day, the United States, and the Bush Administration in particular, ignores the toxic brew of extremism that emanates from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other so called allies. This brew has been mixing since well before 2001. 9/11 was America’s tragic exposure to the toxic mix that Muslims in the Third World have suffered through for decades.

Mr. Bush had the opportunity in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to join the battle against the extremists and on the side of the majority of Muslims. He squandered that opportunity. He chose instead to alienate the entire Muslim world in order to fulfill his own ideological goals. Mr. Bush, by his actions, has created a world that is more dangerous now than it was 5 years ago. Yet he claims that we are safer now than before.

Delusions cannot be substitutes for facts.