BEFORE THIS WEEK, no newspaper had ever won more than three Pulitzer Prizes in one year. Yet there was something inevitable about the seven that were awarded to the New York Times. How could it be otherwise? The World’s Greatest Newspaper unleashed all its resources on the biggest news story in 60 years, a story that began — at that terrible moment just before 9 a.m. on Tuesday, September 11 — right in the Times’ back yard. Stunning as the Times’ achievement may be, it is, upon reflection, about as unexpected as the Yankees’ winning another championship.

The full scope of the Times’ work inspires awe: Pulitzers for its photographers on two sides of the world, in New York and in Central Asia; the public-service award for A Nation Challenged, the daily special section whose hallmark was those miniature, luminous "Portraits of Grief"; and two reporting awards for its coverage of global terrorism and the war in Afghanistan. (Against this backdrop, the beat-reporting award given to the Times’ Gretchen Morgenson for her stock-market columns seems weirdly out of context.)

But the Pulitzer that carried the most symbolic value was the commentary award, given to op-ed columnist Tom Friedman. It was his third Pulitzer, preceded by international-reporting awards in 1983 and ’88, both for his coverage of the Middle East. The Times’ other Pulitzers document how a great newspaper went about reporting the most important story of our era. Friedman’s award says much about how we think of ourselves — and what we face in the war against terrorism in the months and years to come.

Almost from the moment of the terrorist attacks, Friedman has articulated a morally compelling brand of muscular liberalism, unafraid to project American power and speak up for American values throughout the world. His first post–September 11 column, on September 13, which he wrote while in Jerusalem, characterized the terrorist attacks as "the Pearl Harbor of World War III" and predicted "a long, long war ahead."

Friedman added presciently that "this Third World War does not pit us against another superpower. It pits us — the world’s only superpower and quintessential symbol of liberal, free-market, Western values — against all the super-empowered angry men and women out there. Many of these super-empowered angry people hail from failing states in the Muslim and third world. They do not share our values, they resent America’s influence over their lives, politics, and children, not to mention our support for Israel, and they often blame America for the failure of their societies to master modernity."

Friedman’s global liberalism — a throwback, really, to the Cold War liberalism of the 1940s and ’50s, which got sidetracked in the Vietnam War (see " ‘Liberal’: No Longer a Dirty Word," News and Features, October 19, 2001) — may be newly relevant, but it is hardly new to Friedman. His 1999 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which received mixed reviews, was a paean to global capitalism and its potential for liberalizing the rest of the world. When Noemie Emery, writing in the conservative Weekly Standard last October, opined that Friedman "is now a full-throated hawk and patriot," her use of the word "now" revealed that she hadn’t been paying attention.

During the Gulf War, Friedman questioned the wisdom of liberating Kuwait, saying it might have made more sense to wipe out Iraq’s offensive capabilities by "bombing the country into the Middle Ages" — an observation that led the radical journalist Alexander Cockburn to sneer in the Nation that "Christendom is back where it started in 1919, calculating the ‘moral effect’ of high explosives and gas shells on the wogs." (Friedman is Jewish, and he reportedly likes to show off a copy of one of his columns with the words jew bullshit written across it. So his induction into Christendom was strictly a figment of Cockburn’s imagination.)

Friedman also supported the US bombing campaign against Serbia during the Kosovo crisis on the grounds that Slobodan Milosevic’s subjects had "tacitly sanctioned" their leader’s genocidal policies. The leftist historian Howard Zinn responded in a piece for the Progressive in words that, post–September 11, seem especially chilling: "Can we now expect an Iraqi journalist to call for bombs placed in every American supermarket on the grounds that all of us have ‘tacitly sanctioned’ the hundreds of thousands of deaths in Iraq caused by our eight-year embargo?"

The difference between Friedman on the one hand and Cockburn and Zinn on the other is the difference between liberalism and leftist radicalism. The hard left sees the use of American military force as being — at best — morally indistinguishable from Osama bin Laden’s attacks on the US, Saddam Hussein’s aggression against Kuwait, and Milosevic’s evil policy of "ethnic cleansing." Liberals see a crucial difference between terrorist attacks aimed at civilians and military action aimed at rooting out terrorists, overthrowing dangerous governments, and halting genocide.