If John Kerry manages to short-circuit George W. Bush's presidency, we may be able to reflect back on an accusation that echoed through the debates as one of Kerry's keys to victory.

"He rushed to war without a plan to win the peace," is how the challenger boils down his broad -- some would say fuzzy -- critique of the U.S. venture in Iraq, ordered by and now defended so stoutly by Bush. It is an indictment that deftly combines a charge of poor judgment (rushing to war) with one of incompetence (failing to plan adequately for the aftermath).

This is a line of attack that resonates with many Americans. They look at the White House's decision to invade Iraq without the support of a broad group of allies and without the blessing of the United Nations. They look at the finding, affirmed in recent days, that Saddam Hussein's regime did not have the stockpiles of WMDs that top U.S. officials had cited as posing dangers that simply had to be eliminated through the use of military force.

And even more to the point, they look at the ongoing mayhem in Iraq -- the thousand-plus American service personnel who have lost their lives, the many thousands more wounded, the huge costs, the insurgency that has made war reconstruction formidably difficult if not impossible -- and not surprisingly seek to assign blame.

Holding the president accountable for colossal screw-ups occurring on his watch obviously is one of the most important tasks of an election challenger, and by extension the voters.

Heaven knows, though, that in the case of Iraq Kerry has had his work cut out for him.

For example, the same report by U.S. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer that tallied Iraqi WMD stockpiles at zilch also chronicled Saddam's corrupt efforts through the oil-for-food program to weaken the sanctions that had defanged him. Lift the sanctions, and who could doubt that Saddam would soon be trying to get his weapons programs fired up anew? Even Kerry has never been able to assert that he didn't see the Baghdad butcher as a threat.

Bush routinely scores when he notes that Kerry had access to the same pre-war intelligence, and on that basis voted to give the president authority to wage war. About all Kerry can say in response is that the conditions Congress set for going to war weren't met, and that the intelligence itself was bogus.

One of Kerry's taller hurdles has been to convince people that his criticism of Bush's war-making is not just a grand exercise in self-promotional second-guessing. Many Americans must say, when they hear Kerry blasting away, consider the source. So it's interesting to see how folks who are avowed supporters of Bush's objectives in Iraq explain why the situation there has turned out to be such a bear.

The magazine National Review, founded by William F. Buckley Jr. and long edited by him until his retirement this year, is atop the food chain when it comes to conservative thinking. It catches your attention when, as the magazine does with its current cover article, it frames the big question regarding Iraq: "What Went Wrong?"

Richard Lowry, Buckley's successor in the editor's chair, answers in a detailed and nuanced piece. He confronts what he calls "this hard fact: The Bush administration didn't know what it was getting into in Iraq, and then found itself stumbling into exactly the sort of heavy-handed occupation many American officials had wanted to avoid."

In a nutshell, Lowry underscores the unintended consequences of a war that caught Saddam by surprise and collapsed his government in a matter of three weeks. Large elements of the regime, uncrushed, lived to renew the fight.

As combat waned, the top priority should have been on maintaining security and order. But that job was botched. The commanders -- Gen. Tommy Franks is singled out -- who had taken Baghdad so speedily weren't much interested in seeing their troops on police duty. And nobody anticipated the scale of the looting that would throw whole sectors of Iraqi society into disarray and allow the insurgency to catch fire.

There was lots of planning for the post-war, contrary to Kerry's charge -- but it mostly missed the mark. Poor intelligence led to one miscalculation after another, and those errors have compounded into a train wreck of violence and destruction. The prospect of credible elections -- a necessary first step for an American disengagement that isn't to be counted as a defeat -- looks dicey at best.

Kerry performs tough, honorable duty in bringing the case against Bush as war president. Yet Lowry's article also makes this point: The Bush team undertook "a series of choices that could never be entirely right." He says that gives the U.S. experience in Iraq an overtone of tragedy.

Americans are about to decide whether to forgive their president for erring on the side of caution in trying to defend the nation's interests, even with tragedy in the mix, or whether Kerry has proven Bush and his aides to be rash bunglers who deserve a swift kick out of office.

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