Washington ? It is a measure of President Bush’s self-confidence that he allows his foreign policy advisers to wage pitched battles and do their own thing in implementing policy even as he moves the nation to the brink of war in Iraq. But the risks of that relaxed approach mount. The president needs to recognize and counter them now.

He can begin to do that in the State of the Union message he will deliver tonight. The speech predictably has emerged as the latest battleground between the State Department and the Pentagon, which have sharply contrasting views on at least two fundamental questions.

One is Iraq’s role as haven for and supplier of the terror network groups within and around al-Qaida. The other is Iraq’s future once that Arab nation has been liberated from its blood-soaked tyranny. Without giving away security secrets or useful diplomatic ambiguity, the president should offer clarity and direction to the nation and the world on both issues.

The nature and front lines of the war on global terrorism have shifted in recent weeks. There are few, if any, clearly identifiable military targets left for U.S. bombers to hit in Central Asia. The most immediate battles in this war are being fought at the moment by prosecutors and police units in Europe, where terror cells possessing elements of chemical and biological weapons are being tracked and broken up.

Bush should note that shift tonight. Instead of focusing on the diplomatic squabbling that has erupted at the United Nations, he should highlight the valuable work that French, British and German counterterrorist units are doing on their soil in a common cause. Europeans can be encouraged to focus on the forest of terrorism as well the individual malignant trees being chopped down.

The diplomats — those of Bush, Jacques Chirac, Kofi Annan and the others — are dealing themselves out of a significant role in resolving this crisis by arguing over timing. So be it.

The president can point up that disappointing reality indirectly by lauding the quiet but highly effective cooperation between the Justice Department and France’s counterterror authorities. He should pay tribute in this State of the Union not to the praiseworthy Tony Blair but to Stephen Oake, the British police officer who gave his life in a Jan. 14 raid on a terror cell in Manchester.

The Arab immigrants who were arrested reportedly used surprisingly sophisticated concealment mechanisms to hide ricin, the deadly poison they had smuggled into or manufactured in Britain. The British and the CIA are probing for links between the Manchester group and Ansar al-Islam, the Baghdad-supported terror group operating in Kurdistan.

Evidence that is still tightly held is accumulating within the administration that it is not a matter of chance that terror groups in the al-Qaida universe have made as their own weapons of choice the poisons, gases and chemical devices that are signature arms of the Iraqi regime. The State Department is reportedly not convinced, or at least not comfortable with the president stressing that point. The Pentagon is urging that Iraq’s terror connection be laid out in conclusive detail.

There are also arguments about how — even whether — the president should describe his vision of postwar Iraq and its relationship to democracy in the Arab world. State Department Arabists warn against frightening the Saudis with visions of democracy on their border. But officials who will be in charge of fighting the war want to establish that they are not putting American soldiers in harm’s way only to let Iraq be ruled by another evil dictator.

Iraqis who met with Bush on Jan. 10 were surprised at how little he seemed to know about the embryonic plans for a democratic, federal Iraq or about the organized opposition to Saddam Hussein. Bush has developed a bold vision of regime change without immersing himself in details — or stopping the bureaucratic maneuvering in his own administration aimed at undercutting the leading pro-democracy dissident group, the Iraqi National Congress.

War’s aftermath in Iraq will not be a low-risk enterprise. The country’s internal divisions, the ambitions of its neighbors and the criminal depredations of its present rulers raise the prospect of postwar upheaval. Bush should do what he can to ease fears by making clear Tuesday than an American invasion will bring with it a firm commitment to maintaining Iraq’s territorial integrity.

A year ago Bush rallied a nation still traumatized by the events of 9-11. His challenge this year is broader but not less important. His words must not only illuminate but also shape the path that Americans, Iraqis and the citizens of the world must follow to reach a safer time and place.