Among journalists (Who else would care, really?), an argument raged this week because "Time" magazine named New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani the Person of the Year for 2001. This title supposedly designates whoever had the most impact on the world that year, for good or ill. And many people say Osama bin Laden was the obvious choice – the proof being that Time's editors had to explain why he wasn't.

He is "too small a man to get the credit for all that has happened in America in the autumn of 2001," Time's Managing Editor Jim Kelly wrote. "It is what came after his men had finished their job that has come to define this year," as if there would have been any "what came after" without what came before. Truly, these are the historic words of an editor who doesn't want people throwing eggs at his car.

But the real problem is that no single person defined this year. Instead, two large, ongoing forces met head-on – people who resent America, versus America's determination to go about its damn business. Bin Laden is just one chapter in all this.

And his chapter – for that matter – is about done. Every other Person of the Year has ended his or her particular year successfully. "Time" magazine doesn't pick losers. When Hitler won the title in 1938, he had just taken Austria and Czechoslovakia. When Joseph Stalin won it in 1939, he had just netted Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and more than half of Poland.

But bin Laden is living on nothing but goat cheese and cotton swabs. Or maybe he's dead. Or maybe he's hiding out in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein will send him on a road show with a two-headed chicken and a guy who pounds nails up his nose. In any case, he himself no longer single-handedly drives our behavior.

So what about the next most logical choice for Person of the Year, George W. Bush? Why didn't he win? Probably because he won last year – and how many people want to re-read his biography already? Remember, Time's editors are trying to sell magazines.

Giuliani, on the other hand, makes for a great story. Here is a man with such a talent for managing a crisis that, sometimes over the last few years when no crises occurred naturally, he would create them on his own. He alienated half of New York City by attacking provocative art and playing hardball with the dead victims of police shootings.

But then, one bright morning in September, he became precisely, inarguably the right man for his job. He risked his life. He kept his cool. He was a man in full. People who had hated him for years loved him now. Loved him. L-O-V-E.

But did he actually make the most news in 2001? Of course not.

Let me suggest one more candidate for Person of the Year – Mohammed Mossadegh. Who? Why, only Time's Person of the Year in 1951, when he became Premier of Iran and nationalized Iran's oil, seizing assets from the British.

America wasn't unsympathetic, having already told Britain to pay the Iranians more than a pittance for labor and resources. Under Mossadegh, however, the oil operation shut down. The Iranians didn't know how to run it, and they didn't look like they were going to try.

America's attitude about Mossadegh would be the same one we'd form toward a lot of Middle Eastern leaders who followed him, up to and including Yasser Arafat. We don't fault people for driving a good bargain. But we couldn't figure out what the heck this guy even wanted – except, apparently, to hurt us. We also worried that a bankrupt Iran would fall to communism.

So in 1953, Britain and America helped drive Mossadegh from office, replacing him with the Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi. Pahlavi set up a security force that, according to Amnesty International in 1976, had the worst human rights record on the planet. This helped stoke anti-American feelings in the Middle East, which in Iran aided the rise of the Ayatullah Khomeini (Person of the Year, 1979), and elsewhere influenced some of the young men whose disaffection bin Laden would harness for suicide missions.

The late Mohammed Mossadegh – Person of the Year, 2001.