You can make a career out of stating the obvious. Here goes:
"Fight them over there so that we don't have to fight them over here" would make much more sense from a terrorist perspective. An American dead in Iraq is just as dead as an American killed in a fundamentalist muslim state known to have harbored 9-11 terists, such as but not limited to Afghanistan.
What's the difference to a terist, though? The difference is that in Iraq, the battleground was very lately, and for a very long time, an extremely secular society hated by Al Qaeda, by all reports. Terists aren't widely renowned humanitarians. We can't put it past them that they would wish death and destruction on the populace of Iraq in order to radicalize them and turn them towards islam, and at the same time against America.
If this were indeed a terist strategy, it also worked to provide waves of cannon fodder to fight America in Iraq. And though these Iraqi insurgents might fight for any number of reasons, some antithetical to Al Qaeda's aims, those reasons die as they die.
So perhaps it is Bush that has fallen into a trap. We have often been dogged by suggestions on the one hand that Al Qaeda wanted to embroil the region in a larger jihad. But consider that many insurgents are presumably not jihadis but Baathists or simply out for numero uno, or nationalism, or sect, or who knows what. But then forget about that, because their motivation doesn't really matter. What matters is that it is not Al Qaeda's... And what might be?
They want us to fight them over there, so that they don't have to fight us over there in those other places where they actually live. And if that's no bad enough, it's not even them we are fighting most of the time, on this field of their own choosing, but other forces entirely.
So the Taliban regroups in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda does who knows what somewhere between Afghanistan and Pakistan and parts unknown, while the US fights a war that its rulership wanted to fight anyway, but perhaps, actually and incredibly, might actually not have chosen to fight to the exclusion of fighting the real original Al Qaeda "types." Yeah... Suppose BushCo really did believe that Al Qaeda would stream into Iraq as if it were all that attractive to fight in or defend on its own merits. And suppose that Al Qaeda didn't exactly show up to do much more than prime the pump. If that.
Bush has done sanity a favor, albeit in typically Orwellian fashion, by dropping "Stay the Course." The next thing we collectively need to get over, our President for the next two years included, is the notion that Iraq is flypaper to anyone but us. It might not hurt public relations with Iraq, which should ostensibly be of some value to quieting the place down, to stop talking about their country as flypaper altogether. Call it honey. Enlist the honeybees to help keep the invading hornets at bay, but don't talk so much about the honey being ours to use as hornet bait, let alone fuel for our SUVs.
In short, be a donkey not an ass.