Sometimes a little incident can tell you a lot. In April, the US State Department released its annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" report, based on data from the CIA, FBI and other agencies, which claimed that the number of terrorist attacks in 2003 had declined to the lowest level since 1969.

Senior administration officials touted this as evidence that America was winning the war on terror. However, when social scientists Alan Krueger and David Laitin looked at the data, they found all sorts of anomalies. In a comment piece in the Washington Post, they pointed out that the report did not count some significant terrorist acts, such as the November bombings in Turkey that killed 61 people. Even by the State Department's own calculations, the number of "significant" terrorist attacks rose between 2002 and 2003.

Last week, the State Department sheepishly admitted its report was in error. Rather than showing that terrorism declined last year, the corrected report will show it increased. Oops.

This risible mishap will provide further fodder for those on the left who believe that the administration lies routinely and with impunity. I do not think that is the case. A report like this would not fool an intelligent 10-year-old. If the State Department was really bent on deception, it would not have appended a handy index of "significant" terrorist events, allowing anyone to check its calculations and find them in error.

This is evidence not of duplicity but of incompetence. Again.

When the Bush foreign policy team came into office, the widespread assumption was that they would be cautious but competent. Sort of like the last Bush administration. Instead, this one has been great at enunciating bold policies - such as pre-empting terrorism and spreading democracy - and terrible at executing them. Look at the hash the administration made of diplomacy before the invasion of Iraq. It could not even bring the Turks on board. Nothing better exposed its ham-handedness than the speech by Dick Cheney, vice-president, in August 2002 declaring there was no need to send United Nations weapons inspectors back to Iraq. Just weeks later, when George W. Bush asked for the inspectors to be dispatched, his sincerity was widely suspect. Things did not improve much during the occupation of Iraq. Paul Bremer, the US proconsul, managed to alienate pretty much all Iraqi politicians. It was seldom clear who, in Washington, was overseeing his heavy-handed decision-making. Contributing to the sense of disarray has been constant flip-flopping on such basic questions as the role of the UN and of Ahmed Chalabi in Iraq, which reflect deep divisions within the administration.

Meanwhile, the administration has utterly failed to develop a coherent approach to dealing with looming nuclear crises in Iran and North Korea. Administration hardliners have argued for a policy of regime change. Soft-liners have suggested striking a deal with Pyongyang and Tehran. Rather than consistently following either policy, the president has dithered while atomic production lines have geared up.

What is the problem here? Everyone I have talked to, inside the government and out, Republican and Democrat, points to a dysfunctional inter-agency process. The National Security Council is supposed to co-ordinate various departments and produce a coherent policy. It has not done its job. The State and Defence departments are constantly at odds, and neither Condoleezza Rice, NSC chief, nor Stephen Hadley, her deputy, is willing or able to knock heads together to produce a unified approach. In the fruitless search for internal consensus, they usually wind up deferring difficult decisions. When goof-ups occur - whether the failure to provide an accurate account of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction or, more trivially (if less excusably), the failure to count the number of terrorist attacks in 2003 - no one is held responsible. The only senior national security official to leave the administration, George Tenet, did so apparently because of pressure from outside investigators, not from the president.

In fairness to Ms Rice and Mr Hadley, they have a difficult job dealing with such outsize personalities as Donald Rumsfeld, defence secretary, and Colin Powell, secretary of state, to say nothing of their strong-willed deputies, Paul Wolfowitz and Rich Armitage. Ultimately it is up to Mr Bush to hold his aides accountable and force them to work together. Because he has often failed to do so, the blunders keep on coming.

Mr Bush can take some comfort from the fact his hero, Ronald Reagan, presided over similar bureaucratic chaos, and it did not prevent him from achieving his main objectives - reviving the economy and defeating communism. But Mr Bush is taking his Reagan Redux approach a bit too far if he insists on emulating the Gipper's weaknesses as well as his strengths.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and writes a column for the Los Angeles Times; his work appears here by special arrangement with that paper