Bush & Rummy & State: not paying attention.

In his typically self-congratulatory, smug way, Instaputz writes this morning,

AL QAEDA SAYS WE'RE WINNING: That's not news, really, if you've been paying attention.

Hey! That's great news! Oh, wait, it's not news. For people in-the-know, like Putz.

Anyone told Donald Rumsfeld?

...we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror. Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

Anyone told the President?

The president who has campaigned for months as the candidate who can win the war on terror said in an interview broadcast Monday that he doesn't think such a war ever could be won.

"I don't think you can win it," Bush said in the interview on NBC's Today show. "But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."

Anyone told the State Department?

Four years into the "global war on terror", terrorism appears to be thriving, according to the 2005 edition of the annual "Country Reports on Terrorism" released here Friday by the U.S. State Department.

....

Iraq itself "remains a key front in the global war on terror", according to the report, but has not yet become "the safe-haven for terrorism that Afghanistan was before September 11", despite efforts by al Qaeda and other predominantly Sunni groups to achieve that goal.

Still, Iraq accounted for nearly one-third of the 11,111 terrorist attacks tallied by the State Department during 2005, and for some 55 percent of the 14,600 people killed as a result of those attacks.

Those global totals were an all-time record; indeed, the total number of incidents cited in the 2004 report was 3,129 -- less than a third of the 2005 tally.

But we're "winning." What does "losing" look like?