After President Bush watched the hit film Black Hawk Down at Camp David not long ago, one scene nagged at him. It depicted military brass in Washington rejecting a request for airborne gunships to protect U.S. ground troops in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993. Without the gunships, in the movie as in real life, American soldiers were cut to pieces. An appalled Bush later told a senior aide he would never allow such a thing to happen. "When you put men and women in harm's way," the commander in chief said, "you fix 'em up with everything they need."

As commander in chief, George W. Bush lives by a simple code. The military needs hardware? Send it to them. U.S. allies are hesitant to engage? Go it alone. Iraq, Iran, and North Korea are rogue nations encouraging terrorism? Condemn them as an "axis of evil." "He sees the world almost in theological terms," says Rutgers political scientist Ross Baker. "He is making a very stark distinction between the benevolent forces in the world and the forces that want to do people harm. . . . His willingness to simplify, at the risk of oversimplification, has given him a remarkable ability to be in touch with the American people. They feel that way, too."

In fact, Bush's good-vs.-evil construct is the principle on which all of his wartime decisions have been based. Most important, it is the core of an emerging "Bush Doctrine" that was cobbled together by the president and his senior advisers in the minutes and days following the September 11 attacks. That doctrine, which holds that the United States needs to exert itself more forcefully in the world, could turn out to be the most sweeping change in foreign policy since Ronald Reagan declared the Soviet Union an "evil empire."

From now on, Bush says, America will search out and destroy terrorist networks, strike equally hard at nations that harbor terrorists, and act pre-emptively if necessary to change "evil" regimes in Iran, Iraq, and North Korea if they continue to back terrorists or develop weapons of mass destruction. So far, his approach is working, which is not surprising to scholars such as Baker. They say that one of the most important attributes of any commander in chief is clarity of purpose, and Bush has demonstrated more of it than perhaps any wartime president since Franklin Roosevelt.

Even his former critics are impressed with his leadership. "No. 1," says Sandy Berger, national security adviser to President Clinton, "the president has to create the right environment for his team. He sets the tone. And the tone is either agitation and frenzy–or the tone is steadiness and calm." Berger also praises Bush for patiently waiting several weeks before launching military strikes. This gave the Pentagon enough time to properly prepare for the war in Afghanistan.

Bush's moral absolutism was clear almost from the first moments of the crisis. News of the first attack came shortly before 9 a.m., when White House Counselor Karl Rove took Bush aside in the corridor of a Florida elementary school, where he was about to speak. A plane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, Rove said, and the cause was unclear. "What a horrible accident!" Bush replied, and he wondered if the pilot had suffered a heart attack.

A few minutes later, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered in the president's ear as he was about to address the schoolchildren, all in full view of television cameras. "A second plane hit the second tower," Card said. "America is under attack." Bush blanched and grimly pressed his lips into a thin line. He announced he would have more to say later and left the room.

He immediately got on the phone with Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser, and others in Washington. A few minutes later, he told his traveling staff, "We're at war."

"When he went into that classroom," Card told U.S. News, "he was the president of the United States, talking domestic issues. He walked out of that room as the commander in chief, where he had the absolute authority to make something happen." En route from Florida to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, a secure location where Bush could consider his next moves and where Air Force One could refuel, Bush and his shocked staff watched television footage of the planes crashing into the World Trade towers. At one point, Bush calmly told Vice President Dick Cheney by secure phone that he approved of shooting down civilian aircraft if they posed another imminent threat. "You have my full authorization," Bush said.

Since taking office, Bush had been extensively briefed by the CIA and others on "asymmetrical threats" including the al Qaeda terrorist network, and took them all seriously. Last spring, he told his senior advisers he would no longer tolerate small measures. "I'm really tired of swatting flies," he said. Bush ordered them to develop a grand strategy for "bringing down" the terrorist networks around the world, but the plan was still under development at the time of the September 11 attacks. Still, he immediately identified members of al Qaeda as the prime suspects.

Cheney told U.S. News: "Lots of time you don't have all the information you'd like, but that's life and you've still got to make a decision and get on with it and not agonize over it. He doesn't look back and lay awake at night, I don't think, in terms of worrying about whether or not he got it right." For his part, Bush tells friends he has not regretted a single decision he has made since September 11.

At key meetings with his war council at Camp David and at the White House over that first weekend after the attacks, he set a bold course. He chose the most extensive list of military options presented to him by the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And he wanted his speech to a joint session of Congress that week to flesh it all out. A battery of advisers weighed in, but Bush knew just what he wanted to say. As the hour of the speech approached, aides Karen Hughes, Michael Gerson, and Dan Bartlett were working on the text in the West Wing and wondered if the Bush-approved final draft leaned too heavily toward reassuring the country. Perhaps, they told themselves, there should be more explicit warnings about the dangers ahead. Bartlett went to the East Wing to consult one last time with the president, who greeted him as he was buttoning up his dress shirt. "What do you want?" Bush said curtly. Bartlett dutifully raised the question about the speech's main theme, but Bush cut him off. "I already made that decision. Final!" the president said, and walked off. He told Congress that America's mission would be accomplished no matter what. "Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies," he said, "justice will be done."

Card says that since Bush believed there were no shades of gray, it was only natural that he devised "a doctrine that you are either with us or against us. If you harbor, protect, defend, feed, comfort, house - you're them." In his State of the Union address January 29, he condemned Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an axis of evil because they were potentially helping the terrorists or developing weapons of mass destruction, even though some State Department experts cringed at the characterization as extreme.

When an aide recently asked Bush whether the crisis had changed him, the president said absolutely not. "Presidents either come to the Oval Office equipped and ready to deal with crises or they don't," he replied, adding: "If you're strong and firm, people follow." Rice told U.S. News: "He wasn't born somebody else on September 11." The question is whether his bipolar view of the world - so valuable in wartime - will provide the nuanced long-term strategy that may be needed to secure the peace.