The violence we are seeing in Iraq is familiar. The terrorist who takes hostages or plants a roadside bomb near Baghdad is serving the same ideology of murder that kills innocent people on trains in Madrid, and murders children on buses in Jerusalem, and blows up a nightclub in Bali and cuts the throat of a young reporter for being a Jew. We’ve seen the same ideology of murder in the killing of 241 Marines in Beirut, the first attack on the World Trade Center, in the destruction of two embassies in Africa, in the attack on the USS Cole, and in the merciless horror inflicted upon thousands of innocent men and women and children on September the 11th, 2001.

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Why it requires the president of America to put all this in focus for the country and the world is one of the mysteries of America’s great democracy, but President Bush last night stepped up to the task in a way that millions of Americans will understand. For all the efforts of his interlocutors to get him to apologize for 9/11, to confess either error or sin, to blame American agencies or even the opposing political party, he would have none of it. Neither did he identify the enemy as a religion. For September 11, he blamed Osama bin Laden and the political ideology for which he stands, put those attacks in the context of a world war against all free countries, and vowed to stay on the offensive in a long war. He spoke of America as “a liberating power.”

Mr. Bush’s rejection of the idea that we are in a Vietnam-like quagmire was straightforward. “I think the analogy is false,” he said, adding: “I also happen to think that analogy sends the wrong mes sage to our troops and sends the wrong message to the enemy.” It was the closest he came to a direct criticism of Senator Kerry, who has been trying for months now to spread the notion that we are, in Iraq, in the kind of “mess” in which he spent so much energy as an aspiring politician trying to convince the country we were mired in during the 1970s.

The president made it clear that he nursed no doubts about Iraq. He avoided getting tangled up in the question of why we haven’t yet found the kinds of weapons of mass destruction we’re certain Saddam had (because he used them against the Kurds) and said he’d have led the country into Iraq even if he’d been sure Saddam didn’t possess weapons of mass destruction. He vowed to stick to the timetable for transition to a sovereign government in Iraq and, come 2005,to the ratification of a constitution and to free elections there. He took time to make it clear that America’s own emergence as a nation was not as easy struggle.

Mr. Bush was extraordinarily articulate in speaking of what the promise of a free and democratic Iraq means for the Middle East and the rest of the world — and went to far as to say there is no reason why Arabs could not govern themselves in freedom.

At a time when Senator Kerry is talking of de-Americanizing the war and seeking to hide behind the skirts of the United Nations — as if America were the problem in the Middle East — Mr. Bush made a point of stressing his belief in the nobility of the fight that American military men and women, and also civilians, are doing in Iraq. It was a welcome meeting with the press and worth waiting for.