Can we trust this year's speech?

This time, at least, there were no blatant lies in the national-security section of the State of the Union address. The speechwriters, no doubt watched over by a hyperalert Condoleezza Rice, made sure to avoid a reprise of last year's scandal over false claims of an Iraqi hunt for yellowcake. Instead, however, the scribes piled on so many half-truths and evasions, often in disingenuous phrasings, as to erase the customary distinction between mere deceit and sheer falsehood.

Let's take them one by one.

"We must continue to give our homeland security and law enforcement personnel every tool they need to defend us."

Yet this is precisely what President Bush has failed to do. His homeland security budget for fiscal year 2004 was smaller than the budget for FY 2003. He has yet to order a serious effort to develop or procure WMD-detecting sensors. Security of cargo on ships and commercial airliners is riddled with holes. The borders are sieves. Most local police and fire departments lack the money, gear, and training to prevent, or to deal with the aftermath of, terrorist attacks.

"Nearly two-thirds of [al-Qaida's] known leaders have now been captured or killed."

Good. But the remaining one-third constitutes a distressingly large number still at large—not least Osama Bin Laden, President Bush's "Wanted Dead or Alive" poster-villain of last year's chest-pounding address. More worrisome still is that phrase "known leaders." The real concerns, as Donald Rumsfeld's hand-wringing memo of last October acknowledged, are the unknowns (or, as he put it in a different context, the "unknown unknowns"—the stuff we don't even know we don't know) and the haunting question of whether, through our (for the most part quite proper) tactics in tracking down terrorists, we might be spawning new recruits in the process.

"[In Afghanistan], our coalition is leading aggressive raids against the surviving members of the Taliban and al-Qaida."

Now we are. The Taliban are not so much "surviving" as returning, re-entering the country through the many doors we left open—and exploiting the discontent we allowed to seethe—after proclaiming that mission complete. To its credit, the Bush administration has renewed its attention to Afghanistan, even to the point of getting NATO to help, but it took a while.

"[In Iraq] men who ran away from our troops in battle are now dispersed and attack from the shadows."

First, that happened because the Bush administration decided the war was over after the statue of Saddam toppled and because the occupation forces weren't nearly large enough to secure the country in any serious way. Second, as the CIA and others have observed, the insurgents attacking U.S. troops aren't just Saddam loyalists and foreign jihadists. They're also Iraqis—Sunnis and, more and more, Shiites—who simply don't like the occupation.