KEEP YOUR EYES ON THE PRIZE, HOLD ON. My buddy Lawrence Kaplan tries to salvage the Bush Doctrine from the Iraq war. His argument is that critics of the war risk learning too much from the failure in Iraq: the antidote to tyranny is democracy, even if it didn't turn out so well in Baghdad, and dangerous dudes will still need to be preempted. One really, really important -- and revealing -- aspect of this argument is shown by its very absence. A word that doesn't appear in Lawrence's piece is al-Qaeda. You remember them: they killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11, and they're into killing many, many more. The Bush Doctrine started as a way to stop them. In his January 2002 State of the Union, Bush opted to conflate the threat from al-Qaeda into a threat from Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-Il and Ayatollah Khameini . It wasn't just cynicism, it reflected a misdguided but deep belief, as Doug Feith later put it, that "Terrorist organizations cannot be effective in sustaining themselves over long...