Against his own instincts, against the wishes of his most fervent supporters, President George W. Bush took the case for a second anti-Iraq resolution to the United Nations Security Council yesterday.

Why? Because he had to.

America is the planet's lone superpower, but it still must exist within a web of political and economic relationships. In other words, for all its military might, the United States still can't afford to operate alone.

To be sure, Bush has long made his view clear. As he said last April 5, "I made up my mind that Hussein needs to go."

Yet even the Lone Star State president felt compelled to take the case to the United Nations last fall. That decision set off alarms among Bush's conservative base.

A new round of U.N. inspections was a "trap," warned William Kristol of The Weekly Standard. Even Bush's own vice president, Dick Cheney, had gone on record with skepticism toward Saddam Hussein's possible cooperation, declaring on Aug. 26: "A return of inspectors would provide no assurance whatsoever of his compliance with UN resolutions. On the contrary, there is a great danger that it would provide false comfort that Saddam was somehow 'back in his box.'"

Today, a majority of the Security Council seems to agree that Iraq is boxed in. And Turkey, Iraq's neighbor, which might be expected to be begging the United States to save it from Saddam Hussein's menace, instead seized the opportunity to extort billions from the United States.

Meanwhile, as the haggling stretched out, right- wing exasperation with the UN has deepened. Last month The Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer wrote a column titled, "UN R.I.P." And The Wall Street Journal editorialized, bluntly and somewhat anti- Bushly, "Dick Cheney was right."

And yet the U.S. joined with Great Britain and Spain in submitting a second resolution to the UN.

How come? Because the political "market" spoke, in the form of opinion polls around the world. Support in Britain for an invasion of Iraq, absent a second resolution, stands at 9 percent. In Spain, 85 percent of the population is opposed to war. The leaders of those two countries, Tony Blair and Jose Maria Aznar, might each be eligible for a "Profile in Courage" award, but they will be of little use to Bush if they are out of office.

The United States might feel immune from the pressures of the rest of the world, but other countries aren't so insulated. Yesterday, few Americans noticed when Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, chairman of the summit of "non-aligned" countries -- 116 nations representing more than half the world's population -- declared that the United States has launched "a war to dominate the world." But other nations have no choice but to pay heed to Third World rumblings. Spain, for example, is separated by the eight-mile-wide Strait of Gibraltar from Muslim Morocco and the rest of Islamic North Africa.

Hence Bush did Aznar and Blair the favor of seeking a second resolution. That is, even though his own course has been clear for a year, his allies needed political "cover," allowing them to argue that they did everything they could to make the UN process work. Indeed, it's possible that Bush & Co. will win a second resolution; as the Turkish experience proved, Uncle Sam will spend what it takes to get to war.

The subject of money, of course, leads to the second force bearing down directly on Bush: the economy, stupid. The president has barnstormed the country for months now, successfully whipping up martial support from voters. But investors see things differently. Every time the prospect of war goes up, the stock market goes down. Bush's proposed tax cuts may be good for the economy, but they could be outweighed by concerns about a protracted war, a messy occupation, or trouble elsewhere in the world.

As a survey released Sunday by Manpower, the Milwaukee-based employment company, noted, job hiring has declined for the first time in over a year: "Results are clearly showing a dominating sense of uncertainty."

So what's Bush to do? He needs swift victory abroad, and then a long calm at home. But the world is interactive, militarily and economically. Americans may find that a war, once started, doesn't end as quickly and cleanly as their commander-in-chief might like.