by Dick Morris

Iraq is developing a nuclear bomb. Saddam Hussein's laboratories are turning out weapons of mass destruction. State-sponsored terrorism could generate a disaster that will dwarf 9/11.

Week after week, we've heard these messages from President Bush as he leads the nation in the battle against terror. We're listening - but is he?

After these warnings, we are, in effect, put on hold. Where is the war on terror? Are we winning the race against Saddam's nuclear capabilities?

In all of April, Bush has spoken out on terrorism once. The rest of the month has been consumed with a futile Middle East initiative and with a daily, trivial, bite-sized message on domestic policy each day - volunteerism, Head Start teacher training, charitable tax deductions and the like. Small-bore issues are fine in peacetime. But we are at war.

Bush is losing his momentum and his ratings as his focus wanders from the urgent mission Americans want him to pursue. As his approval ratings drop below 80 percent for the first time since 9/11, he is breaking his concentration and seems off-message and off-stride.

The CBS/New York Times poll of April 15-18 and the Fox News poll of April 16-17 both have his job approval down to 76 percent. Stratospheric still, but the drop is ominous.

As Bush flirts with the absurd idea of a moral equivalency between Arab killers and Israelis trying to stop the terror, you can only shake your head and wonder: How did he lose his way?

Was he seduced by the diplomats? After he met with Tony Blair, he must have become convinced that America would not get the requisite backing from our European and moderate Arab allies for his invasion of Iraq unless he did his bit for global peace by seeking a settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Why do Europeans care so much about the Middle East? With their huge domestic Arab populations, they worry that instability on the West Bank could mean violence in Paris, London and Rome.

Why did the moderate Arab regimes care? One suspects because they wanted to divert America from using the momentum of Afghanistan to invade Iraq.

Facing the cowboy image of U.S. military power so popular in Euro-society salons, Bush sent Powell to the Middle East to show that he was a good global team player. Finessed by the diplomats like his father was at the end of the Gulf War, when he spared Saddam, he was lured into losing his way.

But part of the reason for Bush's loss of focus is political. His advisers are concerned that, while he has popular support in the war on terror, he's losing the domestic traction he needs to win Congress in 2002. So every day Bush trots out a new domestic-policy initiative - mimicking Clinton's strategy of an issue a day.

By trying to gild the lily and lift Bush's domestic relevance, his handlers are distracting attention from their own key mission: the war on terror.

Our president has, in effect, told us that the clock is ticking while evil regimes labor to acquire weapons of mass destruction with which to destroy us - then he's left us to wait while he diverts his attention from the approaching possibility of catastrophe.

He cannot play with the emotions of the American people. We expect action and we expect it with the same sense of urgency the president himself generated in his own speeches.

This column originally appeared in the New York Post.