Two years ago, George Bush stunned and outraged virtually the entire Arab world by warmly describing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a "man of peace" at the height of the brutal Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank. Last week, Bush did it again, endorsing Sharon's demands to end the right of Palestinian return and legitimizing decades' worth of illegal West Bank settlements. He did so even as Israeli assassinations of Hamas leaders and the bloody American campaign in Iraq had Arab anger at an almost unprecedented pitch. And he did so without any coordination with moderate Arab leaders or any attempt to explain himself to Arab audiences. When the final damage is calculated, the greatest victims of Bush's latest episode of public non-diplomacy may well be a group which Bush himself claims to most want by his side: Arab moderates.

The impact of the furious humiliation of Arab moderates has already begun to surface. King Abdullah II of Jordan--probably the most friendly of all Arab leaders--postponed a scheduled meeting at the White House. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak warned that Arab views of the United States had plummeted to unprecedented depths. Even more ominously, independent Arab moderates who had tentatively embraced Bush's calls for democratic reform--often at great personal and political risk--spoke with one voice about their humiliation and outrage. The Arab media now routinely equates the American occupation of Iraq with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and it has become a consensus view that America has lost all credibility in the region.

While Bush has waxed eloquent over the need for democracy in the Arab world, his policies can only be described as a systematic campaign of alienating and humiliating any Arabs who attempt to speak out on behalf of the United States. It has never been clear how the Bush administration has reconciled its rhetoric about empowering Arab publics with its policies which drive the hostility of those publics to ever greater heights.

While the furious response from Arab regimes might be dismissed as driven by their own feelings of insecurity, the lack of enthusiasm from Arab civil society reformers suggests the extent to which an association with America has become poisonous.

The problems with Bush's approach to democratic reform in the region run deeper than a lack of seriousness or poor execution. The core problem lies in the administration's clear contempt for Arab public opinion, a contempt which is keenly felt by those Arab moderates who actually share the goals of political, economic and cultural reform. The administration is divided between hawks, who believe that Arabs respect force and can be either browbeaten into submission or else easily repressed by friendly dictators; and neoconservatives, who believe that greater democracy will naturally produce pro-American attitudes.

A lot of folks in this administration clearly just don't really believe in a democratization agenda. To some extent, though, it's the result of conceptual confusion. A lot of the strongest supporters of the Arab reform project on the right are also the strongest supporters of Israel. On the plane of pure abstraction, there's a logic here: Israel is a democracy, the Palestinian authority is not, and Israel's most intransigent opponents -- Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Syria, Iran, etc. -- are nothing of the sort. So supporting Israel is pro-democracy. And supporting Arab reform efforts is also pro-democracy. Questionable, perhaps, but there's a real logic there.

The trouble is that when the theory hits the desert, it all breaks down. Those leading the charge against Israel may be anti-democratic, but you'd be very hard pressed to find an Arab anywhere -- democrat or otherwise -- filled with warm-and-fuzzy feelings toward the Jewish state in general and the Sharon government in particular. Strong support for Sharon, then, makes it essentially impossible for would-be reformers to embrace the United States, and without American support they have little chance of being able to successfully reform their own societies. So in the end, you have a very self-defeating set of policies.

The long-term strategy of this government is to spread freedom around the world. And I believe -- I told you, a free Iraq will be a major change agent for world peace. I also believe a free Palestinian state would be a major change agent for world peace. Ariel Sharon came to America and he stood up with me and he said, we are pulling out of Gaza and parts of the West Bank. In my judgment, the whole world should have said, thank you, Ariel. Now we have a chance to begin the construction of a peaceful Palestinian state.

Yes, [ here is where there was a pause for applause - but there wasn't any applause ] there was kind of silence, wasn't there? Because the responsibility is hard. It's hard to be responsible for promoting freedom and peace when you're used to something else. If you don't have the aspirations of the people firmly embedded in your soul, it's hard to take a gamble for peace by putting the institutions of a free society in place, institutions that are bigger than the people.

As Mr. Bush has grasped, every time we have humiliated our enemies we have gained respect and won security. By the same token, on each occasion we have shown deference to a Mr. Karzai, the Iraqi interim government, and our Eastern European friends, we have helped to create security and stability. Apart from the model of our forefathers who crushed and then lifted up the Germans and Japanese, we could find no better guide in this war than William Tecumseh Sherman and Abraham Lincoln - in that order. The former would remind us that our enemies traffic in pride and thus first must be disabused of it through defeat and humiliation. The latter (who turned Sherman and Grant lose) would maintain that we are a forgiving sort, who prefer restored rather than beaten people as our friends.