Defense Secretary Robert Gates is worried there is confusion among Europeans that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are connected. Perhaps the secretary should take that worry to his boss, President Bush, who has been trying to connect the two for nearly five years.

“I worry that for many Europeans the missions in Iraq and Afghanistan are confused. … I think they combine the two,” Secretary Gates told reporters aboard a plane en route to an international security conference in Germany. At the conference he sought to rebuild European support for the NATO mission in Afghanistan.

The U.S. sent troops into Afghanistan in 2001, soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, to hunt down Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the attacks. The talk at the time was of removing the Taliban, thereby ending al-Qaida’s safe haven in the lawless mountainous region of Afghanistan. Given the severity of the Sept. 11 attacks, much of the world supported the United States and its mission in Afghanistan. This was the beginning of what came to be called the global war on terror.

After quickly declaring victory over the Taliban – but leaving the al-Qaida leader in hiding – the Bush administration turned its attention to Iraq. The administration steadily built a case linking Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, to al-Qaida; a case, it turns out, built on flimsy if not outright false information.

In a 2005 speech at the Fort Bragg Army base, President Bush said Iraq had become “a central front in the war on terror.” “You know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror,” Bush told CBS News’ Katie Couric in September 2006.

No wonder Europe is confused.

As he continued talking to reporters, Secretary Gates got closer to identifying the problem. “Many of them, I think, have a problem with our involvement in Iraq and project that to Afghanistan.” In other words, because other countries think the U.S. was mistaken to invade Iraq, they now question the mission in Afghanistan. That is a tragic consequence of the Bush administration’s strained attempts to tie the two together. The legitimate and necessary military action in Afghanistan, which took a back seat to the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, was doomed to failure by the unnecessary sideshow in Iraq.

Rather than blaming others for not understanding the situation, the Bush administration needs to take a hard look in the mirror.