As 2001 draws

to a close, what could be more natural than to look back and assess the

first year of the George Bush presidency?

Yes, I know,

it hasn't been a full year yet because of all the problems, but give me

a break. It's New Year's week.

But it's a

little bit different task, in the light of Sept. 11.

Bush is riding

a tsunami of popularity because he set about smoking them out of their

holes, and the effort to do so seems to be going reasonably well.

And he has

managed to set pretty much the right tone in public appearances reassuring,

firm and determined to continue the fight. In crisis management he gets

high marks so far.

The true test

of his leadership will be whether he is continuing that fight two years

from now, and whether he is continuing it with the same level of support

from the American people, the Congress and the international community.

At that point,

Osama bin Laden will have been imprisoned, will be dead or will have disappeared.

We'll have undoubtedly killed several thousand of his brainwashed volunteers,

along with numerous innocent Afghani people.

In the aftermath

of the war there well may have been a My-Lai style incident or two to

explain and deal with. There have been some suspicious goings on with

prisoners, after all. And there will have been all the difficult and expensive

business of putting the country back on its feet again.

We can walk

away from that, of course. We can take the attitude that we went there

to do a job, we did it, and what happens next is somebody else's responsibility.

In other words, we can take the same attitude we did after we helped the

locals kick the Soviets out ... and we all know how well THAT went.

But if Bush

does the wise thing and insists on an active U.S. and U.N. role in restoring

Afghanistan, and if he does the morally right thing and insists that we

take an active role in humanitarian relief, then he'll have to deal with

the whiners back home who don't like the amount of money it's costing.

At the same

time, what will be the state of our long-term war on terrorism? Will we

be fighting in Iraq? Libya? Palestine? Any of a dozen other countries

I can't spell or pronounce?

Will the nations

of the First World still be with us? Will the nations of the Third World

be united against us?

All of the

answers to those and many more questions will have to be tallied up to

put the grades on Bush's report card. And that's just in one arena.

Which brings

us