By Charley Reece reese.king-online.com

President Bush is so mismanaging his "war" on terrorism that if somebody doesn't rein him in, he's likely to become a disastrous embarrassment.

His lectures to the Europeans, in which he treated them as if they were naive children who just did not understand what a Great Satan resides in Baghdad, were embarrassing. Only European civility kept him from being laughed off the podium.

Mr. Bush is apparently unaware that the British, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Spanish and the Italians have had far more experience in dealing with terrorism than he has. Furthermore, their assessment of Saddam Hussein as a non-threat to anybody except perhaps his neighbors is far more accurate than Bush's delusional views of Saddam as Hitler.

The British have been dealing with the Irish Republican Army, the Spanish with their Basque separatists and the Russians with Chechen terrorists, while France, Germany and Italy have had their share of bombings, assassinations and kidnappings. Their assessment of the Middle East is far more accurate than Bush's, since they are not so heavily influenced by Israel and its network of supporters.

It's bad enough that Mr. Bush seems to be intent on persuading the entire Middle East to hate us, but he has now produced thousands of anti-Bush demonstrators in the Western European countries. And no wonder. He seems to have been unhinged by the Sept. 11 attacks.

His first response — that we would go after the people who were behind the attacks — was entirely appropriate. But before too many days went by, he elevated the terrorist attack, with overblown rhetoric, into a global war, allegedly in defense of freedom and Western civilization itself. Listen, Mr. Bush, al-Qaida is no threat to Western civilization, and you are a long way from being a Roosevelt or a Churchill. Despite your aspirations to lead the world on a holy crusade to stamp out evil, you were simply born way too late. Many people in Europe and elsewhere are rightly concerned that you are going to blunder the world into a serious war.

As for his trip to Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin is playing Bush like a fish. Putin studied and analyzed Bush the same way he no doubt did a prospective recruit to spy for the KGB. He discovered what would please and flatter Bush and gave it to him. Bush now thinks of Putin as one of his pals. Putin, however, is pursuing his own agenda, which is to form a Russian-European relationship that will offset the United States. Since the Europeans are themselves sick of American presidents acting as if they have been elected emperor of the world, Putin's strategy is right on track.

In the meantime, the Bush administration is bombarding the American people with fearmongering — warnings of this and warnings of that, all of them unsubstantiated and so vague as to make the warnings useless. It's designed, of course, to maintain the illusion that we are at war. Obviously, we are not. Except for the anthrax scare, which is apparently the work of a domestic crank, there have been no terrorist attacks since Sept. 11, and the 37 Americans who have so far lost their lives in this "war" were killed in small skirmishes or in accidents.

It's a safe bet that there will be other terrorist attacks, but no terrorist act or series of acts has ever in the history of the world resulted in the overthrow of any government, democratic or otherwise. Mr. Bush needs to balance his ambition and rhetoric with his ability and understanding. They are dangerously out of sync.

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