Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld took to the road this week trying to sell the message that Iraq is part of the war on terrorism and that anyone who thinks differently is morally or intellectually challenged.

With the president himself batting clean-up on Thursday, the dynamic duo and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made the rounds of the conventions of the biggest national veterans' organizations -- the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Reno, Nev., and the American Legion in Salt Lake City -- peddling the Bush administration's beleaguered line of bull to guaranteed friendly audiences.

Rumsfeld's message to the American Legion in Salt Lake City was that critics of the Bush administration's policies on Iraq and terrorism were guilty of "moral or intellectual confusion about what is right or wrong."

Cheney's soundbites out of the Reno gathering of the VFW included assertions that the federal court ruling that warrantless wiretapping was unconstitutional was "dead wrong" and will be reversed on appeal. That "sound policies by the president" have prevented any more terrorist attacks on the United States since 9/11 and that the terrorists, whom he declared "in the last throes" last year, are now "weakened and fractured, yet still lethal."

These statements reflect the administration's persistent moral or intellectual confusion about what is true and what isn't.

From Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, we hear how well things are going in Iraq, under new democratic local management.

In fact, Iraqis are dying by the thousands every month, Iranian-backed Shiite Muslim militias are growing stronger, ordinary Iraqis are lining up for passports to flee a civil war that the administration won't admit is happening, and the American death toll is rising above 2,600.

They declare that we cannot and will not leave Iraq before Jan. 20, 2009. They claim that whatever American ground commanders ask for in the way of troop reinforcements, they get.

In fact, we are bogged down in a no-win and no-way-out war in part because our military commanders have been browbeaten into fighting it on the cheap, with perhaps half the number of troops they needed to get a grip on a fractious people before the place dissolved into chaos, anarchy and sectarian bloodshed and revenge-taking. When we crack down in one place -- now it's Baghdad -- trouble crops up someplace else in a frustrating game of whack-a-mole.

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld claim that their invasion of Iraq has made us safer.

In fact, Hezbollah has survived an ill-conceived and U.S.-backed Israeli campaign in Lebanon, Iran is defiantly pursuing nuclear weapons, the Taliban and al-Qaeda are on the march in Afghanistan, and terrorist cells keep popping up like poisonous mushrooms in Western Europe and elsewhere.

You want to know where we really stand today? We're somewhere between the devil and the deep blue sea, and it's not the critics of the administration's policies who are suffering from moral and intellectual confusion. They're not confused, just amazed by the arrogance, incompetence and grotesque inability to do anything right that's been exhibited by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld.

We can't win in Iraq with the current U.S. force and the current strategy and tactics, even using the White House's fluid definition of victory, which for the moment is that we'll somehow train and equip a force of Iraqi soldiers and police who'll take control of the country and allow us to begin bringing our soldiers home.

Those Iraqi soldiers who are taking over security in broad stretches of the country ran out of ammunition this week in a fierce gunbattle with militiamen of radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and were executed by their captors. Other Iraqi units refused orders to deploy to Baghdad in the wake of the debacle.

So what's the administration to do to divert the attention of Americans on the eve of a mid-term congressional election and looking hard at the presidential sweepstakes in 2008?

If I were betting on a likely next move, I'd put some money on a really big "wag the dog" scenario. I'd rub my crystal ball and suggest that some people high in government are going to start cooking the intelligence on Iran, just as they cooked the intelligence on Saddam Hussein's ties to al-Qaeda, his chemical and biological weapons and his "reconstituted" nuclear program, none of which actually existed.

Our leaders know that the U.N. Security Council, where permanent members Russia and China are sure to veto actions against their business partner Iran, will never vote for tough sanctions on Iran. If they can squeeze the American analysts hard enough or have some Iranian exiles (sound familiar?) cook up dubious intelligence about a rapidly accelerating Iranian nuclear weapons program, they might have an excuse for a pre-emptive attack on Iran's nuclear facilities.

Not a ground invasion this time, though. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have so tied down, thinned out and depleted our Army and Marine Corps that there's no way that we could invade Iran and hope to succeed, or perhaps even survive. Which leaves us with nothing more than the Air Force/Navy option: We can bomb the ayatollahs back to the Stone Age, destroy their deeply buried and well hidden nuclear facilities and uranium enrichment operations with pinpoint accuracy and no collateral damage, and then watch the discontented Iranian people rise up against the clerics who've impoverished and repressed them.

Dude, have they lost their minds completely? Have the neoconservatives learned nothing from Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon?

Yes, I fear that it could be so, and if we go down that road, gasoline is going to cost more than Chanel perfume by the gallon, the entire Middle East will go up in flames and the conflagration will wipe out our moderate Arab friends.

We will end up in even deeper kim-chi than we are already in.