The front-page headline in the print New York Times is: Bush Condemns Saudi Blasts; 7 Americans Are Dead. For the past year-plus Bush was distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and related groups, but's that's not the headline; the story is Bush, Our Avenger. And we wonder why his popularity persists.

Maureen Dowd gets it:

Busy chasing off Saddam, the president and vice president had told us that Al Qaeda was spent. "Al Qaeda is on the run," President Bush said last week. "That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly but surely being decimated. . . . They're not a problem anymore."

Members of the U.S. intelligence community bragged to reporters that the terrorist band was crippled, noting that it hadn't attacked during the assault on Iraq.

"This was the big game for them — you put up or shut up, and they have failed," Cofer Black, who heads the State Department's counterterrorism office, told The Washington Post last week.

Of course, the other way of looking at it is that Al Qaeda works at its own pace and knows how to conduct operations on the run....

Buried in the rubble of Riyadh are some of the Bush administration's basic assumptions: that Al Qaeda was finished, that invading Iraq would bring regional stability and that a show of American superpower against Saddam would cow terrorists.

Bob Graham, the Florida senator running for president, said at the Capitol yesterday that Iraq had been a diversion: "We essentially ended the war on terror about a year ago. And since that time, Al Qaeda has been allowed to regenerate."

Doing a buddy routine with Rummy yesterday in Washington, as the defense secretary accepted an award, Vice President Dick Cheney was as implacable as ever. "The only way to deal with this threat ultimately is to destroy it," he said.

So destroy it.