The president's latest dumb speech.

In his speech this morning before the American Legion's national convention, President George W. Bush may have gone a bridge too far. It was the first of several speeches he plans to deliver in the coming days to rally support for the war in Iraq (and, not incidentally, for Republicans in November). But one passage in particular reveals that the campaign is getting desperate:

The security of the civilized world depends on victory in the war on terror, and that depends on victory in Iraq.

Here's the question: Does anybody believe this? If you do, then you must ask the president why he hasn't reactivated the draft, printed war bonds, doubled the military budget, and strenuously rallied allies to the cause.

If, as he said in this speech, the war in Iraq really is the front line in "the decisive ideological struggle of the 21^st century"; if our foes there are the "successors to Fascists, to Nazis, to Communists"; if victory is "as important" as it was in Omaha Beach and Guadalcanal—then those are just some of the steps that a committed president would feel justified in demanding.

If, as he also said, terrorism takes hold in hotbeds of stagnation and despair, then you must also ask the president why he hasn't requested tens or hundreds of billions of dollars for aid and investment in the Middle East to promote hope and livelihoods.

Yet the president hasn't done any of those things, nor has anyone in his entourage encouraged him to do so. And that's because, while the war on terror is important and keeping Iraq from disintegrating is important, they're not that important. Osama Bin Laden is not Hitler or Stalin. Baghdad is not Berlin. Al-Qaida and its imitators don't have the economic resources, the military power, or the vast nationalist base that Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union had.

So, the speech sends the head buzzing with cognitive dissonances. There's the massively exaggerated historical analogy (which should have been obvious, if not insulting, to the World War II veterans in the audience). And there's the glaring mismatch between the president's gargantuan depiction of the threat and the relatively paltry resources he's mustered to fight it.

Such dissonances could further diminish, not revive, his support.

President Bush is right about one thing: It would be a mistake to withdraw all our troops from Iraq—though, even here, he's right for the wrong reason. The danger is not, as he warns, that al-Qaida would take over Iraq. That's an exceedingly improbable scenario. First, al-Qaida's numbers in Iraq are small. Second, other well-armed militias, both Sunni and Shiite, would ferociously resist any such attempt to take power.

The real danger is that Iraq might devolve into anarchy and total civil war, the likes of which would make the present turmoil seem placid by comparison. Killings could soar into the hundreds of thousands, even millions. Neighboring countries, whether for aggrandizement or security, would feel compelled to intervene—Iran siding with the Shiites, Saudi Arabia bolstering the Sunnis, Turkey suppressing the Kurds—and, from there, one good spark could set off a horrendous war across the whole region.