Tomorrow night the first debate of the 2004 presidential campaign will take place in Florida. George Bush and John Kerry will square off over questions of foreign policy, which, in this election, is another way of saying that they will be talking about the war in Iraq, terrorism and national security.

You almost have to pity John Kerry in this situation. If one looks at the war in Iraq, for example, one sees such a shambles that it’s got to be hard to know just where to begin. He could start with bad intentions.

Bush’s former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill has said the administration was eager for a fight as soon as they took office. This is backed up by former terrorism expert Richard Clarke, as well as by the court-ordered discovery that Vice President Dick Cheney was poring over maps of Iraq’s oil fields with the members of his secretive energy task force.

But that’s only the beginning.

What about the condescending certainty with which one member after another of the administration asserted that Saddam Hussein most definitely had “weapons of mass destruction.” They didn’t seem to be guessing and they allowed no room for doubt. Indeed, they even sent the immaculately pin-striped Colin Powell to the United Nations to play the Bush version of the prosecutorial Adlai Stevenson during the Cuban missile crisis. The only difference was that the missiles Stevenson was talking about were real. Now Powell says we won’t be finding any WMD in Iraq.

Then there was the Bush charge that Saddam was aiding and abetting the terrorists responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. Dick Cheney is still huffing and puffing about that. Trouble is it’s not true. Neither the Senate Committee on Intelligence nor the 9/11 Commission can find the link.

Or how about the way that Bush’s insistence on saying things he couldn’t back up with demonstrable facts has all but wrecked our relations with most of the world? He told the U.N. that if it wasn’t going to live up to its responsibility and purge Saddam then he’d do it himself. The U.N., of course, was in the process of discovering that Saddam did not, in fact, possess WMD, but never mind. Bush showed them — and now Kofi Annan, the U.N.’s secretary general, has declared the Iraq war illegal in terms of international law.

It doesn’t stop there.

Remember how we were assured by Bush and his gang that American troops would be greeted as liberators? Over 1,000 dead Americans later we can’t even claim to have military control over Iraq. Large parts of the country are reportedly too dangerous for our troops to enter. This means that national elections that have been promised there in January are in jeopardy.

And where’s the money gone? Last year over $18 billion was appropriated for Iraqi reconstruction. Only $1 billion has been spent so far. Other billions earmarked for reconstruction have been shifted to security because the place is still such a violent mess. This has even a die-hard party loyalist like Richard Lugar exasperated.

Finally, there’s the way that Bush has been stumping around the country insisting that the news media is too negative about what’s happening in Iraq, that his “strategy” is working. But last week we learned that, in July, Bush received a special intelligence report telling him that the situation there is really pretty dicey.

A best case scenario is we settle for a lid on things, otherwise we could be looking at a civil war. The president has neglected to mention this rather grim assessment in his speechifying. Is that because he’d rather not face up to what he’s wrought, or could it be that, since the intelligence doesn’t jive with what he prefers to believe, he just ignores it. There seems to be a pattern here.

Yes, John Kerry has his work cut out for him. Not least because, in spite of such an abundance of ammunition speaking, if not to Bush’s calumny, his incompetence, a large number of American voters seem not to mind. Polls show the two candidates running in a close race with Bush in the lead. So Bush can send young men and women to war for reasons that are certifiably false and divert tens of billions of tax dollars from domestic needs to foreign nation building that he once scorned — and millions of Americans, who might otherwise pride themselves on plain speaking and results, rise to his defense.

Pundits like to attribute Bush’s appeal to his ability to seem like someone you’d like to sit and have a beer with. Since Sept. 11, this persona has been deepened to become the saga of an ordinary guy confronted by extraordinary events. It’s a macro situation that many people can relate to on their own micro level, particularly if they have inadequate health insurance, have lost a job or find themselves unable to pay the mortgage.

At this point, Bush becomes not just a personification of a regular American, but of the shadow side of ourselves. His incompetence doesn’t seem to matter so much. All of us have miscalculated, made mistakes and even fibbed at times if we thought that might deflect some of the blame. All of us, at times, have been held to standards that were not of our making and that we couldn’t achieve.

Bush gives us permission to indulge ourselves in the anger and the grief of this. And it’s why, tomorrow night, we may not need a political debate so much as a national therapy session.