Playing the U.N. Card

George Bush was considered such a go-it-alone unilateralist by many world leaders that simply taking the podium at the U.N. was enough to win him praise. "This process will assuage Europe and others," U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan told Bush privately before the President's address last week. Bush scolded the diplomats for letting Saddam Hussein snub them for 11 years and stopped just short of calling them irrelevant, yet was congratulated for pledging to work with the world body on a new resolution that would force Iraq to give up its weapons of mass destruction.

But now comes the hard part. Bush...