WASHINGTON -- The Bush foreign policy team always had contempt for Bill Clinton's herky-jerky, improvised interventions around the world.

When it took control, it promised a global stewardship purring with gravity, finesse and farsightedness.

But now the Bush ''dream team" is making the impetuous Clinton look like Rommel.

Our unseen tormentors are the ones who seem canny and organized, not us. As they move from killing individual U.S. soldiers and Iraqis to sabotaging power plants, burning oil pipelines, blowing up mosques, demolishing the U.N. headquarters and now hitting the Baghdad police headquarters, our enemies seem better prepared and more committed to creating chaos in Iraq -- and Afghanistan -- than we are to creating order.

If we review the Bush war council's motives for conquering Iraq, the scorecard looks grim:

We wanted to get rid of Osama and Saddam and the Taliban and al-Qaida. We didn't. They're replicating and coming at us like cockroaches.

Bushies thought freeing Iraq from Saddam would be the first step toward the Middle East road map for peace, as well as a guarantee of greater security for Israel. But the road map blew up, and Israel seems farther away from making peace with the Arabs than ever. The U.S. has now pathetically called on Yasser Arafat to use his power to help after pretending for more than a year that he didn't exist.

The neocons wanted to marginalize the wimpy U.N. by barreling past them into Iraq. Now the Bush administration is crawling back to the U.N., but other nations are suspicious of U.S. security and politics in Iraq.

Dick Cheney and Rummy wanted to blow off multilateralism and snub what they call ''the chocolate-making countries" of France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg. But faced with untold billions in costs and mounting casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, Americans are beginning to see the advantages of sidekicks who know the perils of empire.

The Pentagon wanted to sideline the CIA and State and run the war and reconstruction itself. Now, overwhelmed, the Pentagon's special operations chiefs were reduced to screening a 1965 movie, ''The Battle of Algiers," last week, as David Ignatius reported in The Washington Post, to try to learn why the French suffered a colonial disaster in a guerrilla war against Muslims in Algiers.

The neocons hoped democracy in Iraq would spread like a fever in the Mideast, even in our double-dealing friends like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. But after the majestic handoff of democracy to the 25-member Iraqi Governing Council, it seems the puppets (now nervous about bodyguards) don't even want to work late, much less govern.

The vice president wanted to banish that old '60s feeling of moral ambivalence, of America in the wrong.

Our unilateral move in Iraq, with the justifications on WMD and links to Saddam getting shakier each month, has made us more hated around the world than ever.

MAUREEN DOWD is a columnist for the New York Times.