In their remarks to the American Legion convention this week in Salt Lake City, President Bush and his Cabinet members have made it clear that their efforts to boost the administration's poll numbers and, more important, to maintain Republican control of Congress this November will be based on a campaign of fear.

Fear of misremembered history, a misunderstood enemy and, most of all, of any suggestion that most of the American people should have to sacrifice anything at all - other than their Constitution and Bill of Rights - in this struggle.

The danger of terrorism is real. The causes are varied and complex, more so than the administration's statements would suggest. Facing the threat will require the unity of the American people and the support of the world, things that are difficult to arrange when officials confuse dissent with disloyalty, brush aside standards of international law and launch disastrous invasions of countries that had nothing to do with the attacks we have suffered.

The president, echoing the Tuesday remarks of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, said Thursday that the war on terror generally, and the war in Iraq specifically, are the heirs of the 20th century's battles against Nazi and communist totalitarianism.

Good fodder for a convention of veterans. But despite the rhetorical appeal of comparing today's enemies to Hitler and Stalin, which allows the administration to falsely compare its critics to yesterday's appeasers and fellow travelers, the analogy does not hold.

A more apt comparison to the situation in Iraq, despite many differences, would be the quagmire of Vietnam. That war was chosen and waged in the belief that it would halt the spread of a unified, global communist conspiracy.

That was a serious misunderstanding of the situation in Vietnam, where the enemy was much more of a home-grown nationalist movement than a tentacle of Moscow or Beijing. Not that the Soviets and the Chinese weren't happy to see America's blood, treasure and global standing spent there.

Today's violence in Iraq is similar, and similarly misunderstood. It is overwhelmingly a nationalist, religious and tribal bloodletting , one which nonetheless pleases the leaders of al-Qaida and Iran no end as it again bleeds America of its might and undercuts its ability to claim the right.

The bright spot of the president's speech was his display of an understanding that today's terrorist threats are the collateral damage wrought by our strategy in the Cold War. In that global struggle, we backed any number of thuggish, repressive regimes in the Third World as long as they took our side against the thuggish, repressive regimes supported by the Soviets.

Those regimes only served as incubators for today's terrorist movements, Bush rightly noted, and he went on to say:

"So America has committed its influence in the world to advancing freedom and democracy as the great alternatives to repression and radicalism. We will take the side of democratic leaders and reformers across the Middle East."

Wise words. But, as is the case with so much of what the administration says, our actions do not match.

The United States continues to support repressive governments in Egypt, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, the last of those being the origin of Osama and most of his hijackers.

The Iraqi elections, as amazing as they were in attracting a large turnout, so far have mostly empowered rival religious and ethnic parties with little motive or ability to build a united country.

The celebrated victory in Afghanistan is far from secure, our forces having been prematurely pulled away to fight the war of choice in Iraq, leaving the weak Afghan government harassed by Taliban and al-Qaida die-hards.

Worst of all is the stark disparity between the dark picture the president paints and our puny efforts to face it.

If the threat of global Islamic extremism is as bad as the president says it is - and it's plenty bad - then it makes no sense to starve our ability to fight with giant tax cuts. It is horribly unwise to oppose any steps to reduce our dependence on the petroleum that funds terrorist movements. It seems incoherent to refuse to consider the return of a military draft when the president celebrates a nation with willing patriots "in abundance."

And it is certainly time to clean house at the top levels of the Pentagon.

Most of all, it is wrong for the president to stand before the American Legion and defend sending the brave men and women of the armed forces into battle undermanned, under-equipped and poorly protected, extending tours of duty and imposing faith-breaking stop-loss practices, while the rest of us are encouraged to live as if nothing was amiss.

Nothing, that is, but a government that seeks to hold power, not by uniting us, but by making us afraid.