y some measures, Sept. 11 wasn't the worst of horrors. Although every death is an individual tragedy, and grief is never quantifiable, 3,000 killed was much the number who died on one bad night out of many in London during the Blitz. All the same, that morning in New York wrought an indelible change. Towers can be rebuilt, and even family lives, but we had all undergone a transformation in our consciousness. What had happened, and why?

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Those questions were discussed nowhere more urgently than in this newspaper. For some years, Thomas L. Friedman had enjoyed what he understandably calls ''the best job in the world'' as The Times's roaming foreign affairs columnist, traveling wherever he likes and writing whatever he likes with total freedom -- privileges that not many journalists enjoy, and that gave him a most unusual vantage point from which to come to terms with those shattering events.

''Longitudes and Attitudes'' is a collection of columns, from December 2000 to this past July, broken by September's great caesura, and including material from his diary, notes made but not used as he traveled to the Persian Gulf, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Indonesia, India, Saudi Arabia, London, Brussels. The book displays his salient strengths as a commentator, as well as some weaknesses. Friedman is fond of the ''good news/bad news'' routine, so let's reverse that order.

Always a writer with the ability to make you think, whether in agreement or otherwise, he is sometimes not just thought-provoking but plain provoking. Even when he has something important to say on weighty subjects, his breezily buttonholing turn of phrase can be a little grating: ''Fat chance . . . Dorothy, this ain't Kansas . . . Houston, we have a problem here . . . So, class, time for a news quiz . . . Ah, excuse me, but could we all just calm down here?'' Yo, dudes, calming down sounds like a real good idea, especially since we're talking about mass murder and potentially catastrophic wars.

For years, Friedman's big idea has been free enterprise in its new form of globalization: ''the inexorable integration of markets, transportation systems and communication systems to a degree never witnessed before,'' which he believed would solve most of the world's ills. Not that ''the maximum of intercourse between nations'' was a new notion, or a bad one. Long before we had heard of the Web, Richard Cobden put it splendidly in 1850 when he said that ''the progress of freedom depends more upon the maintenance of peace, the spread of commerce and the diffusion of education, than upon the labors of cabinets and foreign offices.''

Part of the trouble is that, like many well-meaning Americans, Friedman doesn't quite see that his country has a very distinctive take on ''the spread of commerce.'' The business of America is business, and what American business has always believed in isn't free trade but free investment, a very different thing. In any case, and quite apart from the fact that there seems some time to go before the whole House of Islam is converted to consumerism and the American way, it isn't necessarily true that the expansion of American markets must always bring sweetness and light.

In his last book, ''The Lexus and the Olive Tree,'' Friedman advanced what he called his Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention: no two countries would ever go to war with one another if they both had McDonald's restaurants on their soil. It was bad luck that the British edition of this book appeared just as United States Air Force missiles rained down on Belgrade, a city whose many misfortunes unquestionably included the presence of America's nastiest culinary export. Friedman honestly if ruefully admitted that Belgrade was the exception to his rule, but this was a warning against grandiose theories, golden or otherwise.

Now the good news. To begin with, Friedman is more often right than not. He was profoundly right in saying that Sept. 11 was an appalling crime that had no conceivable justification, or even any real origin in oppression and injustice. That might not sound like such an amazing insight, but it quite eluded the ''America had it coming'' left in Europe and on some campuses in the United States. As Friedman saw, Osama bin Laden was not the brave if misguided proponent of a worthy cause, and he didn't care twopence for the Palestinians. He was -- let's hope the past tense is correct -- a bloodthirsty religious maniac, and his followers were deluded fanatics for whom murder was some obscure compensation for failure.

When he turns to the conflict in the Holy Land, Friedman is partly right. As he sees, the Palestinians have learned some things from Zionism, but they have still to learn the lesson that the best is the enemy of the good, and that all wise negotiations mean settling for what you can get now rather than what you want one day. And yet he fails to see the full pathos of the situation of the Palestinians, a people forgotten by history who found themselves involuntarily caught up in another people's great drama.

Nor should he imply that the United States can be a even-handed broker in that conflict. A sharp-eyed Palestinian might spot a comical contrast here. While Friedman is dismayed when Arabs tell him ''that the Jews control the U.S. government,'' he also admits that although Israeli settlement policy is ''insane,'' President Bush can do nothing about it, because that ''would inevitably force a clash with U.S. Jews, whose votes and donations he needs to protect his G.O.P. majority in the House.''

With all those contradictions, few writers express better the sheer perplexity of America today: We are an open society and a beacon of freedom, so why do they hate us? Maybe an Englishman can help Friedman here. Like the Americans now, a hundred years ago the English combined political, cultural, economic and military hegemony with a very strong sense of their own virtue and high motives. And, just like the Americans now, they failed to see how insufferable others found this combination of might and righteousness.

For all Friedman's enthusiasm, this book inevitably has a bleak flavor. He may not be right -- I fervently hope he is wrong -- in saying that Sept. 11 was the beginning of World War III, but he is all too right in saying that the task of nation-building in Afghanistan is likely to defeat the Americans. Then, last February, he became one of the rare journalists to play a part in history themselves when he brought back the Saudi peace proposal: recognition of Israel in return for withdrawal to May 1967 borders. We may never know how far this was genuine, but within weeks, Friedman was writing that ''a terrible disaster is in the making in the Middle East.'' Nothing has happened since to make one think he was being unduly pessimistic.