FORWARD Over the past half-year it's become fashionable for Americans — especially liberal-leaning, intellectual types — to admit over cocktails how glad they are that Al Gore didn't win the Florida recount battle back in 2000. We all sleep better, so the confession usually goes, knowing that the guy in the Oval Office is a hard-line conservative and not a squishy liberal. Yes, Bush may be wrong on the budget and the environment, but on the big issues of life and death he is a straight shooter. He speaks directly from the gut, avoids shades of gray and points out the plain truths of good versus evil in the simple, black-and-white cadences of the Texas prairie.

Well, it turns out that the assessment is wrong, and dangerously so. Defending America is not a simple matter of knowing black from white. It's a very intricate business that calls for discerning many shades of gray, balancing conflicting political and economic interests at home, taking charge of complex, intractable bureaucracies. It requires managing complicated alliances around the world in order to secure cooperation, especially in the intelligence-gathering sphere, from a wide variety of sources, some of them hardly more appealing than the enemies we are fighting against.