WILLIAM SAFIRE SAYS GET ON WITH IT:

President Bush should reward those countries whose leaders stand with us in stopping the spread of 21st-century terror. Example: move our 70,000 troops and their families from garrisons in pacifist Germany to more strategic, less expensive deployments in Bulgaria and Poland.

Our response to the quagmire of the U.N. Security Council should be to stop pretending it is a vehicle for collective security or moral authority. Presidents Chirac and Putin, who supported Saddam’s refusal to disarm for a decade, delivered the coup de grâce to that dreamy notion. However, we should continue charitable contributions to the U.N.’s humanitarian establishment, useful in postwar reconstruction.

NATO? Because France has long been half-out, America is in the Western alliance’s strong majority. We should urge the move of its headquarters from unstable Brussels to new-Europe’s Budapest. If Chirac carries out his threat to veto the entry of our East European allies into the European Union, we should object to any further military or economic integration with Putin’s Russia.

That brings us to Turkey, whose turnabout has been the unkindest cut of all. . . .Therefore, as Turkey presses its case for admission to the European Union to its newfound friends in France and Germany, we should say nothing. And we should base our judgment on loans to financially distressed Turkey from the International Monetary Fund on pure economic merit. Neither punitive nor supportive, Bush should treat the Turks’ requests as deliberately as they have treated ours.

It is no retaliation for us to provide arms to the free Kurdish forces in northern Iraq to fight Saddam, ending our foolish policy of demurring to Turkish paranoia about such help leading to an independent Kurdistan.

We should do the right thing. They’ll hate that.