“Twelve years ago, when our country needed new leadership, Americans elected a Democrat who gave us eight years of peace, prosperity, and promise.” — Senator Clinton, July 26, 2004, speech at Democratic National Convention

“We are at war.” — the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, in a December 4, 1998, memo, quoted on page 357 of the report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States.

With all the drama over whether Senator Clinton would get to speak at the Democratic convention, you’d think there might have been some more attention paid to what she actually said. Maybe people are just cutting her slack. Mrs. Clinton had a lot of personal issues to work through in the late 1990s, so perhaps she can be forgiven for a certain lack of precision when it comes to recalling the details of her husband’s presidency. In Washington, sometimes a lack of precision about recalling details can be useful. And we’ll leave the matter of “prosperity” for another day.

Still, with the release just days earlier of the report of the commission on the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the senator from New York rose to a breathtaking level of either distraction, denial, or callousness when she described her husband’s presidency, even with the benefit of hindsight, as eight years of “peace.”

Those eight years, after all, included the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, on February 26, 1993. Six people died and more than 1,000 were injured in that attack. Those eight years included the truck bomb attack on Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, on June 25, 1996, in which 19 American servicemen were killed. The eight years of Clinton “peace” included the terrorist attacks on the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on August 7,1998. The Nairobi attack killed 12 Americans and 201 others; the bombing at Dar es Salaam killed 11 people. The eight years included the October 12, 2000, attack on the United States Ship Cole, which killed 17 American sailors. Not to mention the Americans — more than a dozen of them — killed in terrorist attacks in Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza during the Clinton years. Much of this is laid out in excruciating detail in the report of the commission on the September 11 attacks.

Even President Clinton’s own director of central intelligence, George Tenet, asserted back at the time, “We are at war.” Mrs. Clinton’s attempt to describe “war” as “peace” is transparently, brazenly irresponsible, coming as it does as honest Americans are trying to assemble the facts with care before electing a commander in chief who can bring in a victory in the war on terrorism.

There were other events that fractured the “peace” that Mrs. Clinton would have the voters believe was in place during the Clinton presidency. In Somalia, 18 American soldiers were killed on October 3, 1993. The American retreat from Somalia after the bodies of American soldiers were dragged through the streets there was one of the events that Osama bin Laden has cited as an example of American weakness. American troops intervened in Haiti, Kosovo, and Bosnia. We stayed out of Rwanda, and half a million died in a genocide there in 1994.

All Americans of goodwill hope for peace. But pretending a peace when it does not exist is a sure way to guarantee more deaths in the war on terrorism. It distorts the reality of the threat. It lulls Americans into a false sense of security of a sort that Americans other than Mr. Tenet displayed before September 11, 2001. Some would now wish us to return to that false sense of security. But there is no escaping the reality. Americans can differ over tactics, strategy, and aims in the present war. But Mr. Tenet was right, and Mrs. Clinton was wrong. This is a war. It is not peace. And the war began for our enemies and their victims well before President Clinton left office.

In the past several years, Mrs. Clinton has been casting some admirably hawkish votes in the Senate. And we have no desire to turn the 2004 election into a referendum on the Clinton presidency. Senator Kerry is not so reluctant, to judge by the prominent roles given Mr. and Mrs. Clinton during the Democratic convention. Mr. Kerry in his speech on Thursday night vowed intelligence reforms “so policy is guided by facts, and facts are never distorted by politics.” Coming from the same podium where Mrs. Clinton had declared that the Clinton presidency was eight years of peace, Mr. Kerry’s warning about facts being distorted by politics seemed, well, a little slick. In the long run, opportunity for Mrs. Clinton lies to the right of Mr. Kerry.