Quite a brouhaha is erupting over exactly what Secretary Rumsfeld meant by what he said to the American Legion the other day about terror appeasers. The Associated Press initially characterized the speech as comparing modern opponents of the war on terror to naifs of the 1930s who failed to recognize the grave danger posed by rising fascism in Europe. The Pentagon now says that reporters read too much into Mr. Rumsfeld’s remarks and that the secretary did not mean to compare today’s appeasers to the appeasers of the 1930s. The AP has even recast its story to soften its interpretation of the relevant passages in Mr. Rumsfeld’s speech. We liked the AP’s first version better.

According to the first version of the AP story, Mr. Rumsfeld “accused critics of the Bush administration’s Iraq and counterterrorism policies of trying to appease ‘a new type of fascism.'” What Mr. Rumsfeld actually said is different. After contemplating the failed history of appeasement in the 1930s, the secretary suggested that “We need to face the following questions: With the growing lethality and availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow vicious extremists can be appeased? …” Mr. Rumsfeld raises a good point. However, he would have been entirely correct had he uttered the words with which the AP paraphrased his remarks.

The AP reporter wrote that “in unusually explicit terms, Rumsfeld portrayed the administration’s critics as suffering from ‘moral or intellectual confusion’ about what threatens the nation’s security and accused them of lacking the courage to fight back.” Mr. Rumsfeld did speak of how in the 1930s, “a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among the western democracies.” He also spoke of the present fight against terror and Islamic fascism as a “‘long war,’ where any kind of moral and intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can severely weaken the ability of free societies to persevere.”

By our lights, the AP’s version is closer than Mr. Rumsfeld’s more diplomatic locution to the realities of today’s home front. The secretary may be seeking to play down the significance of his comments, but the fact remains that America is in the middle of a long war and, five years after September 11 and more than three years after the invasion of Iraq, it can be easy to lose sight of the goal, as well as the danger posed by the enemy, a pseudo-religious nihilistic death cult all too reminiscent of the fascists of the 1930s. To regain the political high ground from opponents of this war who draw faulty parallels to Vietnam, the president and his advisers will need all the straight talk they can muster about the 1930s.