Tom Friedman is suffering from War on Terror fatigue. He notices that Bill Clinton is received in Germany like a rock star and concludes that our leaders are too "pessimistic." Why? Because we don't follow the EU lead on things like the world court and dealing with Iraq.

For the world, Bill Clinton is another J.F.K. and George Bush is another Thomas Hobbes, a man who, after witnessing Europe's religious wars, became deeply pessimistic about human nature and concluded that only one law prevailed in the world: Homo Homini Lupus � every man is a wolf to every other man.

This is B.S., of course. Friedman seems to have forgotten 9/11/01. The fact that we responded to that event with resoluteness and hellfire doesn't make us pessimists or any of the other insults that liberals and America-haters have hurled at us. Bush is the one who insists that Islam is a religion of peace, and that Saudi Arabia is being helpful in this struggle, after all.

This doesn't mean that a true American president would realize that Saddam Hussein or Kim Jong Il are basically good. They are evil. But other American presidents, like J.F.K., F.D.R. and Ronald Reagan, faced enemies more evil than Saddam or Osama without losing touch with American optimism and communicating that to the world. The Bush team has lost it � and it's a loss for them and for America.

Didn't JFK have the Bay of Pigs, and Reagan the massacre of our Marines in Lebanon? What was optimistic about withdrawing with our tail between our legs?

When the Bush folks sneer at things like the World Court or Kyoto, and virtually every other treaty � without offering any alternatives but their own righteous power � "they project an arrogance and obsession with power alone," said the political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. "This undermines the American idealism that made Europe aspire to emancipate itself from the history that brought us World Wars I and II, it delegitimizes American power as an instrument of justice and international order and it makes it impossible for the rest of the world to stand up and say: `I am a New Yorker.' "

Actually, they sneer because they recognize paper tigers when they see them. Show me when the U.N. or the E.U. has done anything to deal with racism, violence and genocide since World War II. They have been protected by NATO and American power so long that they think it was the inherent goodness of their political correctness that stopped Milosevich.

Al Qaeda's whole strategy is to encourage this, and turn America into a nation of pessimists, by attacking the symbols and sources of American optimism � from the World Trade Center to a Bali disco, to the U.S. diplomat in Jordan who was just shot by terrorists. Who was that diplomat? The C.I.A. station chief? No. He was the head of the U.S. aid mission in Jordan � the American helping Jordan make its future better than its past. The terrorists want us to shutter our windows, reject visa requests from Muslim youth and turn off our beacon of idealism so we will be less attractive as an alternative to their medieval fanaticism. Because the bin Ladenites know something Mr. Bush doesn't: that it is American optimism and soft power � not American hard power � that really threatens them.

No doubt after 9/11 we can't be na�ve optimists anymore. But optimists we must remain. We have to find a way of defending ourselves from others' weapons of mass destruction without losing our own weapon of mass attraction. Our ability to rally the world depends on it.

This is just the same old "the terrorists will have won" baloney dressed up for the New York Times.