Newspaper columnists always have a difficult choice to make. Is it better to be unexpected, challenging, entertaining - or relentless, consistent and right? For more than a quarter of a century now, William Pfaff, the trenchant columnist whose work has appeared in the International Herald Tribune, has opted for rectitude rather than entertainment. His crunching prose and unflinching judgments need to be borne out by events. And happily - or unhappily for our troubled world - Pfaff's touch has never been surer than in the years since Sept. 11, 2001. No other Western columnist has steered quite such a steady course. What, in the hours after the twin towers fell, was the most profound lesson? "That the only real defense against external attack is a serious, continuing and courageous effort to find political solutions for national and ideological conflicts that involve the United States."

What, just a day later, did he make of the war on terrorism? "Missiles are blunt weapons. Terrorists - these terrorists - are smart enough to make others bear the price for what they have done, and exploit the result."

Pfaff knew all about Osama bin Laden, and the tumultuous causes within Islamic society that rally Wahhabi Muslims. He saw the attack on America as specific, for clear purpose, rather than random. He protested when all terrorist movements, national, regional, great and small, were rolled mindlessly into a single foggy monster. He kept Israelis and Palestinians to one side, only involving them when a hapless White House followed Ariel Sharon's lead.

And Iraq? It was farce. "Like Freedonia going to war in 'Duck Soup' except that the Marx Brothers meant to be funny - the lugubrious diplomatic nadir, surely, was the British proposal that war might be called off if Saddam Hussein went on television to say "sorry."

It was politically appalling. "The neo-conservatives are fanatics. They believe it worth killing for unproven ideas. Traditional morality says that war is justified in legitimate defense. Totalitarian morality justifies wars to make people or societies better." It would be, and is, a terrible defeat. "There is indeed a war of civilization going on, but it is taking place inside Muslim society. The West is a crude interloper … and the United States a detonator of explosions primed by cultural and poetical frustration. It imagines that it brings progress, but all it has brought so far is deepened chaos."

This collection of pieces ends in December 2003, but absolutely nothing that has happened since disrupts Pfaff's basic theses. On the contrary, the outside events of Falluja and Najaf, like the inside events at Abu Ghraib prison, only lend them more sickening credence. Right and right and right again.

Of course, from time to time, you can quibble. Afghanistan isn't remotely over, but it wasn't the tough nut of initial warnings. NATO hasn't self-destructed on cue. Perhaps instinctively Pfaff always looks on the dark side for his takes on life, and just occasionally the worst fails to happen. But these, in context, are only quibbles, straws swept easily away.

Pfaff's publishers haven't done this collection many favors, to be sure. The old columns are slovenly shoveled into print, not reorganized for clarity. The short paragraphs that work well in daily newspapers seem irritatingly small here. So, say three out of 10 for presentation, and nine out of 10 for steam-rollering, triumphant argument.

The publishers' puffs boldly liken Pfaff to Walter Lippman and George Kennan. For once, they don't push their luck too far. His sense of history, his ability to put different strands together, is exemplary. His writing base, in France, gives him a perspective that spans the Atlantic with true, urgent fervor. His is a unique voice, demanding to be heard.

I can never, for the life of me, see why other, more fallible commentators, sitting in Washington or New York, are revered in the United States while Pfaff, faraway and often unread, lectures a wider but less cohesive world. I can never, either, see why the legions of Fox TV and Rupert Murdoch equate liberalism with wishy-washy scrabblings after belief.

William Pfaff may be a liberal in this artificial pantheon, but there is nothing wishy-washy about his bugle calls and laments. He is precisely what his foes consider themselves to be: a realist. If newspapers are, traditionally, the "first rough draft of history," then he's a remarkable instant historian. The man who got it right.

COLLECTIONS of newspaper essays, let alone op-eds, are usually dreary affairs. What was dashed off for a provocative read over breakfast becomes, more often than not, a prolonged exercise in tedium by the time it is immured between hard covers.

William Pfaff's "Fear, Anger and Failure" is a notable exception. A longtime columnist for the International Herald Tribune, Pfaff has lived for decades In Paris, where he has followed the turbulent relationship be­tween Europe and the United States. In this compilation of essays about the Bush administration and neoconservative influence since Sept. 11, he offers a look at U.S. for­eign policy that is comprehensive, illuminating — and ultimately mistaken.

Unlike some of the more boisterous pundits who championed the liberation of Iraq only to sidle away as it looked like an increasingly iffy proposition, Pfaff, as these writings make clear, has always been skeptical of the ad­ministration's case for the war on terror, beginning with Afghanistan. He underestimates the ease with which the U.S. military could topple the Taliban, but he warns that if the local population sees Osama bin Laden "as the vic­tim of foreign intruders, and collaborates in resisting Chat intrusion, Western soldiers are unlikely to track him down. He probably could hold out indefinitely, and per­haps eventually disappear."

Nothing troubles Pfaff more than the breakdown in transatlantic relations and what he sees as the neoconservatives' ham-handed attempt to divide Europe. He defends German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, who de­cried President Bush's plans for war during his reelection campaign In fall 2002: "Washington drove the Germans ... into the arms of the French." He would like to see a united Europe, led by France and Germany, which might offer more than taken resistance to U.S, alms.

For Pfaff, few words are more contemptible than "neo-conservative." To him, it represents all that has been and remains wrong with U.S. foreign policy: the impulse to crusade abroad on behalf of freedom, no matter how in­salubrious the prospects for liberal democracy. "Advocates of American empire are usually seduced by the no­tion that Washington's imperial authority would be accepted as positive, and that the empire would there­fore be consensual," he writes.

The current morass In Iraq is precisely what Pfaff and other adversaries of neo-conservatism predicted. Certainly, Bush's declaration in a November 2003 speech to the National Endowment for Democracy that 'the establishment of a free Iraq at the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution" seems like a pious hope rather than firm reality. Indeed, Bush administration officials, including national security advisor Rice, have retreated from talk of creating democracy and instead embrace the idea of a stable Iraqi regime* and Iraqi leaders gave themselves the power to impose mar­tial law after the June 28 transfer of power. Unfortunately, Pfaff's disdain for neoconservatives is so palpable that he never offers much beyond a caricature.

Pfaff's criticisms may be acidulous, but his remedy is less than persuasive. He makes much of the realist tradi­tion in U.S. foreign policy, whose champions include col­umnist Walter Lippmann, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and diplomat-historian George F. Kennan. That tradition shuns overt, moralism, shrinks from such terms as "good" and "evil" and maintains that true statesmen should, as far as possible, define their nation's interests quite narrowly. Kennan may have been the author of the anti-communist containment doctrine, but he soon dis­owned it. He has warned against a Manichean concep­tion of international affairs, beginning with the truculent stance of former secretary of State John Foster Dulles down to George W. Bush & Co.

The results of realist thinking, however, have not al­ways been happy. One secretary of State who adhered strictly to this conception of foreign affairs was Henry Kissinger. He venerated great power politics and scorned human rights concerns. The first Bush administration displayed a similar proclivity for realist tenets in refusing to intervene in the Balkans to stop the depreciations of Slobodan Milosevic's marauding Serbs and allowing Saddam Hussein, in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, to slaughter the Kurds and Shiites.

Pfaff, however, believes that utopianism "permeates the rhetoric and thinking of Republicans and Democrats alike." He is as much an enemy of traditional democratic universalism as of crusading conservatism. He chastises former President Clinton for intervening abroad and calls upon the nation's leaders to abandon the delusion that the country can serve as a model for the world. Essentially, he would have the United States behave like a chastened power that acknowledges the limits of its military capabilities and tries to muddle through, while a re­vitalized Europe checks any incipient US megalomania.

If the United States were a declining power, Pfaff’s prescriptions might make sense. But it isn't, and they don't. France can't field an aircraft carrier. Germany faces a crushing welfare burden as its population ages. The United States may have tested the limits of its power in Iraq, but it suffers from few of Europe's ailments. Pfaff would like a united Europe, led by France, to re­gain great power status. You might say that Pfaff, whose reflections carry a distinct whiff of hauteur, has gone native. The State Department has a sensible policy of rotat­ing its foreign service officers every few years to avoid precisely this danger. A stateside stint might do him good. After all these decades in Paris, his reflections are the product of an era of faded glory. And the notion that Europe can, or will, act as a check on the United States is a pipe dream. Nor would Democrat John Kerry or a second-term Bush administration be well advised to adopt realist tenets. It is not clear that realism is always realistic. The United States faces threats from abroad that it can't af­ford to ignore. What's more, promoting human rights has not only been a worthy goal in itself; it also has helped create more stable governments in the Philippines and elsewhere. To substitute a new set of Illusions about for­eign affairs would compound the difficulties confronting the United States. Pfaff has perceptively chronicled the follies on the road to Iraq only to counsel a dangerous amoralism in their stead.