An Iraqi friend in Egypt told me a chilling story this week.

The Iraqi Embassy in Cairo is still full of Baathist leftovers from Fallujah and Tikrit who have been lying low as they’ve watched Iraq descend into chaos. But now these Baathists are openly exulting that things are going so badly for the Americans that they may be able to make a comeback.

The fact that leftovers from Saddam Hussein could have reason to cheer is chilling. Yet President Bush tells us, “Our strategy is succeeding.” And John Kerry has so far been unable to demolish the president’s claim that Americans are safer after one Bush term.

Debunking that misconception should be a slam dunk as the situation in Iraq darkens. First, however, Kerry needs to disabuse himself of the urge to lay out his own Iraq plan. The challenger need only note that the Bush team has dug such a hole in Iraq that a President Kerry could assess how to dig out only upon taking office.

To make rash promises about pulling out troops would be dishonest. So, too, are Kerry’s pledges to persuade NATO partners to send troops to Iraq so U.S. soldiers can exit. Happily, he now seems to be muting such misplaced optimism.

Rather than lay out a “plan,” Kerry should define in stark terms how the Iraq war has sidetracked the war on terror and made it harder. And then he should tell the American public how he’d get the war on al-Qaida back on track.

Iraq never was part of the war on terrorism, despite constant White House efforts to imply the contrary. Forty-two percent of Americans think Saddam was connected to 9-11. It isn’t true. Secretary of State Colin Powell affirmed that this week; even the president has said it, but constant hints to the contrary have sold much of America on this fiction.

Kerry must debunk this lie. Al-Qaida was not in Iraq before the war (one tiny cell was in Kurdistan outside Saddam’s control), but it is there now. Kerry must repeat like a mantra: Al-Qaida is in Iraq because of the Bush team’s incompetence. The team bungled the postwar.

It didn’t provide enough troops, or money, to stabilize the country. The civilian staffers it sent to run the occupation knew little about Iraq and never stayed long enough to learn.

A new classified National Intelligence Estimate gives a dark picture of Iraq’s prospects for stability. A bitter Nebraska Republican and Iraq expert, U.S. Sen. Chuck Hagel, denounces the lagging U.S. rebuilding effort in Iraq as “beyond pitiful.”

The U.S. military in Iraq has no handle on quashing the insurgency, nor are Iraqi forces anywhere near ready. Iraqi government officials tell me privately that the United States still isn’t sufficiently supplying their fighters.

White House incompetence in Iraq is blatant. The issue is not, as Dick Cheney would have it, whether a vote for Kerry is a vote for Osama bin Laden. The issue is whether a vote for the team that messed up Iraq is a vote that will make bin Laden cheer.

More Bush incompetence will doom Iraq to implosion. Kerry can promise only a realistic look at what can be salvaged and an end to the illusion of Iraq as a beacon for the Middle East.

That does not mean a President Kerry should avoid helping Iraqi or other Arab democrats. But it must mean he won’t give democracy a bad name by implying that the United States is out to impose our model on the region.

However, candidate Kerry must do more than criticize Bush. He has an antiterrorism program that he hasn’t spelled out clearly and loudly enough.

Under President Bush, homeland security has been woefully underfunded. Chemical and nuclear plants go unprotected. First responders — police and firefighters — are underfunded and undertrained.

U.S. programs to help with safeguards for fissile material abroad, especially in Russia, are also underfunded. This is where terrorists will get the material for dirty bombs.

Afghanistan was left with insufficient NATO troops so Bush could focus on Iraq. Afghan President Hamid Karzai can’t even leave Kabul lest he be assassinated; bin Laden is still on the loose; al-Qaida has metastasized and recruited more members. As old leaders are hunted down, new ones appear. Kerry has said he’d change all of the above.

Made us safer? Bush? The case against this fiction is a slam dunk. So make it, candidate Kerry. Then we can have a serious presidential contest.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.