This isn't to call Gore a wimp. It is to say only that he and Bush see many things differently -- not least the issue of independent U.S. action vs. subservience to the United Nations. Maybe, after all, it takes a "cowboy" -- that favorite European pejorative -- to get things done in this gunslinger world. A body could get killed waiting for Kofi Annan to assemble a decent posse.

And further: What if President Gore had shown himself the political equivalent of George Patton -- hell-for-leather-ready to wipe out Saddamism? How would he have sold this aspiration to his fellow Democrats? With extraordinary difficulty, that's how, the Cold War Democrats having turned into the party of peace at most prices you can name. It took a Republican president to move, first, his party, then the Congress, then the nation into alignment with a controversial strategy: doing good for Americans by doing good for Iraqis. It's hard to see how Gore could have brought off such a strategy, even in the unlikely event such a strategy had impressed him.

A near-run thing, this Iraq business for sure, and still not finished. For this sort of thing, you want not just political functionaries but gamblers. Maybe also cowboys, who have been known to gamble a little bit. George W. Bush was the right man at the right time. Hip, hip, hooray.