Back in 2004, when the book “Imperial Hubris” came out, I thought the author offered too depressing a view of U.S. prospects in the so-called “war on terror.”

The writer, former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, argued that the politicians of both parties in this country are so staggeringly incompetent that we have little choice but to largely abandon the Middle East and instead focus on achieving security and energy independence here at home.

I realized at the time that the current Republican president is an intellectual sluggard and that his Democratic predecessor was untrustworthy. Yet I foolishly held out hope that there might be someone inside the Beltway who had some small competence in the area of the military and politics.

But time, of course, has proven Scheuer right. With the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks come and gone, any impartial observer would have to concede that George W. Bush has managed to lose almost as many American lives in Iraq as were lost in the World Trade Center and that in doing so he has made the situation there worse regarding U.S. interests.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, we had that ABC-TV miniseries “The Path to 9/11” to remind us of the unbroken string of bureaucratic incompetence that got us into the current mess. Various Clinton administration acolytes are protesting mightily the fictionalized representation of the failed attempts to get Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s. But Scheuer, who headed the CIA’s bin Laden team at the time, says the reality was even worse than what was depicted on screen.

“The real key here is the fact that bin Laden could have been eliminated with a high chance of certainty 10 times between May 1998 and May 1999,” Scheuer said.

In one case, the Americans had a good chance to arrest bin Laden in his Afghanistan compound, where the al-Qaida leaders lived with their families. But the Clinton people vetoed the mission when a surveillance photo revealed a swing set in the compound, Scheuer said. Mohamed Atta, who was later to lead the Sept. 11 attacks, was in the compound at the time, but the raid was aborted because harm might come to women and children.

The irony, Scheuer said, is that Clinton was bombing Serbia at the time and killing many civilians. “The fact is that bin Laden is alive today because of Bill Clinton,” he said.

Not that Bush has been better. In the aftermath of Sept. 11, he had an opportunity to corner and crush al-Qaida in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. But Bush failed to use adequate force and then abandoned the effort to go fight bin Laden’s enemy, Saddam Hussein.

Bush’s ostensible aim was to bring democracy to Iraq, but “it’s astounding to me why any American politician thinks it’s worth a single American life so (Afghans) and Iraqis can vote,” Scheuer said.

Me, too. But then I’m a realist. And this realist’s assessment is that the bipartisan bungling of the Beltway crowd proves conclusively that our political class can barely govern America, let alone the Middle East. It wasn’t long ago that we let the Europeans do the heavy lifting in the region, from protecting oil supply lines to arming the Israelis. Scheuer says we should give the burden back to them.

“Saudi Arabia is only our third- or fourth-most important supplier of oil,” he said. “Europe is very dependent and so are the Japanese. But they’re so used to us carrying the ball for them. Their default position is: ‘Let the Americans do it.’ “

Instead, America should give up the goal of running the Middle East and concentrate instead on such obvious steps as securing our borders and making sure that the nuclear weapons of the old Soviet Union are accounted for. With all of the focus on the Middle East, the Bush crowd has largely abandoned efforts to help the Soviets track down all of their nukes, he said.

“If we didn’t do nuclear arms and didn’t do borders, then how serious are we?” he asked.

Not very serious at all, I’d say. Ten years ago, al-Qaida was a tiny group of troglodytes with few resources and fewer prospects. But thanks to Clinton and Bush, al-Qaida has managed to spur the deaths of almost 6,000 Americans, bog down the finest army in human history and stage a raid on the U.S. treasury that is seemingly without end.

Has any government ever accomplished so little with so many resources and advantages? If so, I’ve yet to hear of it.