Why Won't You Listen When We Say What You Want To Hear?

Yesterday, at the Banqueting Hall -- the same building in which the Religious Right of the 17th century struck history's first blow against the divine right of kings by cutting off the head of Charles I - President George W Bush delivered a grim warning to the tyrants of the Middle East.

They might hope that continuing violence in Iraq might demoralise and defeat this president. Instead, in one of the most important addresses of his presidency, Mr Bush served notice that the war continues -- is expanding -- and will become yet more radical.

In a series of speeches dating all the way back to his great address to both houses of Congress on September 20, 2001, Mr Bush has drawn an ever closer linkage between terrorism and the political oppression of the Arab Middle East.

But never has he spoken more clearly, more forcefully -- and more self-critically -- than he did yesterday.

"We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East. Your nation and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. Long-standing ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold.

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"As recent history has shown, we cannot turn a blind eye to oppression just because the oppression is not in our own back yard. No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its victims."

With those words, President George W Bush - George Bush of Harken Energy, son of George HW Bush of Zapata Oil and the Carlyle Group, the George Bush who selected Richard Cheney of Halliburton as his running mate, that George Bush - announced the demise of the American alliance with the House of Saud.

A few hours after the speech, I was standing in Trafalgar Square. I looked at the great basin that somebody had tinted blood-red and watched a handful of protesters as they gathered their things and prepared to head home. One of them recognised me from a BBC interview the night before.

We began to chat, and soon more gathered, and I was talking to about a dozen people - all of them speaking with that quiet politeness and literacy that stabs even the most culturally secure North American with a twinge of admiration and envy for the deep civilisation of this ancient country.

At one point, one of them asked me to explain what I thought Mr Bush was trying to do in the Middle East. I told him that I thought the president was trying to deal with the evils that had grown up in the Islamic world while the United States had been preoccupied with the Soviet threat during the Cold War.

How he was discovering that 50 years of seeking the lesser evil had bred greater evils than any American had ever thought possible. How he was upending five decades of policy and trying to do in the Middle East what the United States and its friends had previously done in Western Europe, then Central Europe, then Central America and East Asia - champion democracy not out of benevolence, but out of hard-headed concern for our own safety and security.

I ran out of words after three or four minutes, and one of the protesters suspiciously asked: "Why doesn't President Bush ever say these things?"

I sighed, and started one more time. He has said them, again and again and again - and now he has flown to your city, and in front of your cameras and your reporters so all of you can see and hear, in plain words and in full public view, that he endorsed everything you say you believe. You say democracy is the answer? You say we must stop putting oil ahead of human rights? You say we should stop coddling wealthy and oppressive regimes and press them to change?

Everything you say, he has said. So the issue is not, why won't he speak? The issue is: why won't you hear him when he does speak?

An American writer who lived in London during the war has powerfully described the seemingly implacable dislike of the president felt by much of the British elite.

"London was altogether beside itself on one point, in especial: It created a nightmare of its own and gave it the name of [George Bush]. Behind this it placed another demon, if possible more devilish, and called it [Paul Wolfowitz]. In regard to these two men, English society seemed demented. Defence was useless; explanation was vain; one could only let the passion exhaust itself. One's best friends were as unreasonable as enemies, for the belief in poor [Mr. Bush's] brutality and [Wolfowitz's] ferocity became a dogma of popular faith."

OK, I'll confess - as the square brackets probably warned you, I've played a little trick. The American I'm quoting is Henry Adams. The war during which he lived in London was the US Civil War, and the names that originally appeared in the quoted paragraph were not "George Bush" and "Paul Wolfowitz," but "Abraham Lincoln" and "William Seward", Lincoln's Secretary of State.

I'm not equating Bush with Lincoln. But the 16th and 43rd presidents have more in common than just their unpopularity with London's top people. Both had scanty political experience before their election. Both arrived in office with weak political mandates - Lincoln took 39.8 per cent of the popular vote in 1860, the worst showing for any president.

Both were widely thought to be intellectually and culturally unfit for office, and were condemned by their opponents for trampling political liberties: Lincoln even suspended the writ of habeas corpus. Both were drawn into wars for which the United States was unready - and both, despite their innate caution and conservatism, were driven toward policies much more radical than anyone could have imagined at the beginnings of their administration.