BLIXKRIEG.(Iraq policy )(Column)

The most tasteless passage in last week's State of the Union Message came about half an hour into the speech, as President Bush was enumerating his Administration's successes against Al Qaeda. Three thousand suspected terrorists have been arrested, he said. "And many others have met a different fate," he went on. "Let's put it this way: they are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies." Talk about smoking guns. You could almost see the President blowing across the upturned barrel of his Colt .45.

This was not the first Clint Eastwood moment in the history of the modern Presidency. "Go ahead--make my day," Ronald Reagan said, back in 1985. "Read my lips," added his Vice-President, George H. W. Bush, in accepting the Republican Presidential nomination in 1988. But they were merely promising to veto tax bills. Their bravado came with a twinkle. Bush the younger was talking about extrajudicial killings.

Under certain conditions--when the targets are known terrorists, arrest is not a practical option, and the risk to innocent civilians is small--such killings can be preferable to permitting escape. But for the President to boast of them so flippantly was not exactly an example of the moral clarity that is supposed to be his specialty. "They are no longer a problem." This sounded less like Reagan or Bush the elder than like--Well, let's put it this way. In a chilling account of Saddam Hussein's cruelties in the Times a couple of days before the speech, John F. Burns identified one of the dictator's favorite maxims: "If there is a person, then there is a problem. If there is no person, then there is no problem."

The President's swagger is the sort of thing that Europeans, especially "old" Europeans, have in mind when they grumble that our President is a callow cowboy. But the difficulty goes beyond the personality of George W. Bush. One cannot spend time in any of the other developed democracies without being struck by the damage the Administration's wise-guy unilateralism has done, not only on the issue of Iraq but also on strategically marginal topics like the Kyoto environmental agreement, family planning, and the International Criminal Court. Everyone expected this pattern to change after the attacks of September 11, 2001. It didn't. The opportunity presented by Europe's instinctive solidarity--epitomized by NATO's decision to invoke, for the first time ever, the provision of its charter declaring that an attack against one is an attack against all--has been wasted. It's only natural that Europe, absorbed in creating a continental order based on nonviolent shared sovereignty, and the United States, whose unmatched military power confers unmatched responsibility, should view the world differently. Some degree of American unilateralism is inescapable. But this Administration seldom bothers to observe the minimal decencies. Europeans remain proud of their participation in Afghanistan (just last week, Norwegian F-16s saw action in a battle against a holdout pro-Taliban warlord), but they have been steadily pushed toward seeing the struggle against terrorism as America's war, not theirs.

In the days after Bush's speech there was much discussion of whether he had "made the case." But the real question, whatever Bush says, is whether there is a case. In that connection, last week's most important speech was not the ...