The real benchmark.

It's the benchmark of all post-Sept. 11 benchmarks - the destruction of al-Qaeda, the terrorist network responsible for the deaths of 3,000 innocent people on U.S. soil.

Six years after President Bush solemnly swore to hunt down and destroy al-Qaeda and its command structure, a new administration intelligence report says the network has regained its former strength and is more lethal than at any time since the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "They are showing greater and greater ability to plan attacks in Europe and the U.S.," the report concludes.

Four years ago, the Bush administration shifted America's military might and its political focus from a necessary and uncompleted war in Afghanistan to an unnecessary and, increasingly, unwinnable war in Iraq. It was an epic strategic blunder that allowed al-Qaeda to regroup and rebuild its ability to strike at the United States.

The administration's response to this report is hardly reassuring. Instead of pledging a renewed effort to capture Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, al-Qaeda's top leaders who now have a secure refuge in Pakistan, Bush held a White House news conference to make, once again, his stay-the-course case on Iraq.

"There's war fatigue in America," Bush said. "I understand that. It's an ugly war." He's right. It is ugly. And unnecessary. And every bit as much a diversion from the job of finding, thwarting and destroying al-Qaeda as it was when Bush decided to invade Iraq more than four years ago.

Meanwhile, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that he has a "gut feeling" that America is at high risk of attack this summer from the resurgent al-Qaeda. No hard evidence, mind you. No intercepts of a satellite call from bin Laden's hidey hole along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Just a nasty feeling in his stomach and, perhaps, a tingling in his toes.

The prospect of another terrorist attack on U.S. soil is dismaying. So, too, is an administration so thoroughly unprepared and clueless that it relies on gut feelings and that fails to grasp, even after years of flailing in the tar pit of Iraq, the critical need to regain its focus and footing in the fight against al-Qaeda and global terrorism.

Congress must now make the choice that the administration seems incapable of making. It must not allow this president to drag on a war that can't be won and that has no end. It must insist that American troops begin withdrawing from Iraq, and that the administration rededicate itself to the destruction of a global terrorist network and its leaders who still pose a threat to America and its friends.