Senator Kerry’s speech yesterday to the American Legion convention in Nashville was a stark reminder of why our nation is far safer under President Bush’s leadership that it would be under President Kerry’s. We may chafe occasionally at Mr. Bush’s missteps in the war, but Mr. Kerry’s arguments, taken one at a time, just weren’t credible, and they have a disconnected quality that has dogged nearly everything Mr. Kerry has said since the beginning of this campaign.

Mr. Kerry, for example, repeatedly invoked the name of Senator McCain. “We worked together for our country,” Mr. Kerry said yesterday. What in Sam Hill is he talking about? It’s just weird for Mr. Kerry to be invoking Mr. McCain’s name while campaigning; after all, Mr. McCain has been busting a gut to make sure that Mr. Kerry isn’t elected, saying as recently as Monday night, “I commend to my country the re-election of President Bush.”

Then Mr. Kerry accused Mr. Bush of “ignoring the advice that was given to him, including the best advice of America’s own military.” Said Mr. Kerry, “I wouldn’t have ignored my senior military advisers.” Maybe Jane Fonda forgot to tell him that civilian authority over the military is American bedrock. What’s more, the general who led the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Tommy Franks, has endorsed Mr. Bush and will speak tonight at the Republican National Convention.

Mr. Kerry second-guessed Mr. Bush’s decision to disband completely the Iraqi military. That’s sure to be an appealing campaign pitch: “Kerry for President. He would have kept Saddam’s army intact to terrorize another generation of Iraqis.” Mr. Kerry carped about Mr. Bush’s decision to launch the Iraq war when he did, saying,” I would have given the inspectors the time they needed to do the job.” But U.N. weapons inspectors had 12 years between the end of the first Gulf War and the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003.

After 12 years, they still couldn’t be sure that Saddam Hussein had accounted for all his weapons, and they had plenty of evidence that the Iraqi regime was trying to conceal its weapons activities. How much more time did they deserve? Meanwhile, the United Nations was being duped as Saddam looted an estimated $10.1 billion from the world body’s oil-for-food program. An onlooker couldn’t be blamed for thinking Mr. Kerry would have left the Iraqi threat in the hands of the U.N. indefinitely, at least until more Americans died in another terrorist attack.

In a departure from the prepared text released by his campaign, Mr. Kerry yesterday referred to Osama Bin Laden as a “criminal.” That is the language of terrorism as a law-enforcement issue rather than a war. It’s been Mr. Kerry’s approach all along, but it’s fundamentally weak. This is attested to by the report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, which disclosed that President Clinton’s national security adviser, Samuel Berger, “worried that the hard evidence against Bin Laden was still skimpy and that there was a danger of snatching him and bringing him to the United States only to see him acquitted.”

Mr. Kerry spent more time second-guessing Mr. Bush than detailing how he would go forward in his own presidency, which boiled down to the notion that “we need to bring our allies to our side” and “share our burden.” This insults such allies as Britain, Italy, Spain, Poland, and Ireland, who have been at America’s side in the war and whose soldiers and military police have died in Iraq. What Mr. Kerry is talking about is not “allies” but France and Germany.

The senator can speak all the French he wants, but the leaders of France and Germany are not going to be brought to our side unless we give them something in return. Both countries have vast commercial interests in Iran and have taken a stance more friendly to terrorism against Israel, in stark contrast to the Bush administration – or, for that matter, any of its predecessors. Voters are entitled to wonder what Mr. Kerry is going to give to France and Germany to “bring” them to our side.

It all doesn’t amount to much of a case for Mr. Kerry on the national security front. In the middle of a war, he’s running as the candidate who would give the fault ridden U.N. more than 12 years to deal with a terrorist threat, who would court the favor of the French, and who would have preserved Saddam Hussein’s military intact. If this is what Mr. Kerry means when he promises to fight a “more sensitive” war on terrorism, it’ll be interesting to see him defend these positions in the debates.