Now that everyone is weighing in with their analysis of why President Bush won the election, here’s mine: Much of the American public is scared, deep down, about the political and cultural uncertainties of 21st-century life.

Americans are scared about the terrorist threat and scared about the cultural changes in today’s globalized world. George W. Bush, with religious certainty, told them that things would be OK.

John Kerry couldn’t persuade enough people that he would keep them safe.

We know from history that fear drives people toward leaders who project strength. The president put forward a clear storyline that did just that. He told them we were taking the anti-terror war overseas so we wouldn’t need to fight it here. He assured voters that 75 percent of Osama bin Laden’s people “have been brought to justice,” a number that was baseless but soothing.

Kerry said he’d reduce the terror threat to the point where it didn’t dominate our lives. Bush implied we could end the threat if we killed off enough jihadis. The strong, simple message was the most convincing.

Now that the election is over, let’s hope the president doesn’t really believe his own slogans. They show little comprehension of the actual terrorist threat.

The first slogan to scrap is the one about fighting the terrorists in Iraq so they won’t come here.

That bromide implies that there is a fixed number of terrorists. If we can just corral them in Iraq, we don’t have to worry about another attack on New York.

This is nonsense. There is no fixed number of jihadis. If anything, our presence in Iraq is inspiring an increase in the global number of terrorists.

Since Saddam’s fall, Iraq has become an ad for recruiting a new pool of alienated Muslim youths. New prospects are being solicited in Europe and the Middle East to head off for Fallujah or Baghdad. Instead of inspiring Arab youths to try democracy, our Iraq venture is inspiring them to sign up with radical clerics.

The second slogan that should be junked is the president’s claim that 75 percent of bin Laden’s “people” have been put out of commission. No one has explained where that number came from. Only a handful of the administration’s lists of “most wanted” terrorists have been killed or captured. Since Sept. 11, al-Qaida has morphed into a franchise operation with different groups operating all over the world.

These slogans are pernicious because they imply that winning the war on terrorism is a game of numbers. Check off names of those killed and captured until the enemy is defeated. The president ought to watch “The Battle of Algiers,” Gilles Pontecorvo’s famous film about the French occupation of Algeria. In that film, a French intelligence officer draws a box chart and checks off one name after the next until all the Algerian resistance leaders have been captured or killed. Then the movie’s postscript scrolls across the screen, telling us that two years later the French were forced to withdraw their troops from Algeria.

Why so? Because the French crushed the rebellion but, in the process, created more new rebels than they had crushed. They won the military battle, but lost the war for hearts and minds.

Ensured of four more years, Bush should now dump the slogans and make sure we don’t wind up as the French did. In Iraq, that means convincing Iraqis that our aim is to ensure legitimate elections that give all communities a fair share of power – then draw down our troops. Without a broad political strategy for Iraq, a military attack on Fallujah will backfire.

In the wider Middle East, it is time – as Yasser Arafat lies near death – for the president to revive a near-dead peace process and promote elections for new Palestinian leaders. Otherwise, no Arab youth will believe Bush’s claim to endorse democratic reforms for the region.

The key to winning the war against Islamist terrorists doesn’t lie with how many terrorists we kill. It lies with whether we put more terrorists out of commission than we create by policy errors. That concept doesn’t jibe with the slogans that got Bush re-elected. But whether Bush grasps it will determine whether he is able to keep Americans safe.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist and editorial-board member for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

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