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n this famously optimistic nation, why would we expect anything less than an unstintingly positive president? Thus, in today's Washington Post it comes as no surprise that: 

...Bush does not come across like a man lamenting his plight. In public and in private, according to intimates, he exhibits an inexorable upbeat energy that defies the political storms. Even when he convenes philosophical discussions with scholars, he avoids second-guessing his actions. He still acts as if he were master of the universe, even if the rest of Washington no longer sees him that way.

You don't get any feeling of somebody crouching down in the bunker," said Irwin M. Stelzer, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who was part of one group of scholars who met with Bush. "This is either extraordinary self-confidence or out of touch with reality. I can't tell you which."

Until someone shows me evidence to the contrary, I have no problem making a judgment: Bush is out of touch with reality. This is what gives him extraordinary self-confidence.

How else can one explain the latest example of Bush's distorted vision - his definition of success in Iraq ?

According to Bush, if things turn out well, Iraq will end up as a pariah state, unable to forge diplomatic relations with most states in the region. It will remain on a perpetual war-footing, forever ready to attack its neighbors. For decades, it will be the largest recipient of foreign aid from the United States. It will engage in ethnic cleansing and discriminate against religious minorities while its highly paid lobbyists in Washington spare no effort in silencing its critics and promoting its image as a dislocated Western democracy. It will build a wall to protect itself and in the process expand its own borders. A successful Iraq will model itself on Israel.

Could Bush have come up with a more inappropriate comparison? I suppose he could have said that success in Iraq means that Iraq will become like America, but then even conservative observers like Irwin Stelzer would be left in no doubt that the president has become irretrievably out of touch with reality.

In the Hall of Fame for American blunders in Iraq, Bush's remark was as ill-conceived as was the act of draping a US flag over Saddam's statued head at the beginning of the war. He and those under his command betrayed their ignorance of the sensibilities of a whole region.

At the same time, Bush also unwittingly revealed his loss of faith in any so-called peace process. If Israel is in fact demonstrating its success as a democracy because terrorism has "not prevented [it] from carrying out its responsibilities," - which responsibilities Bush didn't specify - then apparently the status quo through which Israel maintains an occupation while denying the democratic and rights of a whole population, does not undermine Israel's claim of democratic success.

Nevertheless, what Bush displayed last week was not simply yet another symptom of his being a president who has lost touch with reality; it was the kind of cultural hubris that government officials frequently express in a multitude of ways as they strain to make themselves heard while ignoring whatever their target audience has to say.

The name for this process of one-way communication is "public diplomacy" and it is supposed to remedy the ways in which America is "misunderstood" by the world. Yet America suffers less from being misunderstood, than it suffers from cultural deafness.

In a recent post on Aaron Barnhardt's blog at Kansas City Star, he wrote:

After 9/11 - after the shock and the fear and the sadness and the anger - do you remember feeling just a pang of regret that you knew so little about what was going on in the rest of the world?

If so, you weren't alone. In the weeks and months after that terrible day, the American news media's gaze turned beyond our borders in a way it hadn't since World War II. The shift was especially noticeable on television. The summer of 2001 had been a low point for TV news, what with wall-to-wall coverage of a missing Washington, D.C., intern and shark attacks. And then, in an instant, what one critic called the "fake, breathless hysteria" of pre-9/11 news coverage vanished. Responsible journalism took its place. What's even more remarkable, ratings grew, at least for a time.

Since then, of course, American cable news - like Robert De Niro's character in "Awakenings" - has reverted to its pre-9/11 state. But the need for serious, globally-minded television news didn't go away. Around the world, in fact, a new wave of international news channels are dedicated to expanding their viewers' horizons.

Too bad we can't watch any of them here.

One of these upstarts has a familiar-sounding name: Al Jazeera English. Launched last fall by the same oil-rich emirate of Qatar that runs the Arabic al-Jazeera, it was offered for free to cable companies across America. Exactly one took up the offer - a tiny carrier in Vermont serving less than 2,000 households.

Even at no charge, it seemed, adding Al Jazeera English wasn't worth the potential backlash from customers who consider al-Jazeera to be the official network of Osama bin Laden and every nut job with a jihad to declare against the West.
Now if the administration understood how to engage in enlightened public diplomacy they would have recognized a golden opportunity. State Department and Pentagon officials who are in fact able to watch al-Jazeera, would have spoken out and encouraged the cable providers to adopt the new channel. It's availability across the United States would have been a potent demonstration that this is a genuinely open society.

Ironically, while many Americans still imagine that al-Jazeera is nothing more than an outlet for anti-American propaganda, the channel actually does a better job than any American cable news network in providing critical coverage on the very issues that Americans are told they should be concerned about.

For instance, while CNN and Fox News provided soundbite analysis of the Hamas takeover in Gaza, al-Jazeera ran reports such as this one from "Listening Post."

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How does a report like this present a threat to the average American viewer? It does no favors for Hamas. Indeed, it presents a more penetrating critique of the organization than any of the US coverage. Perhaps the greatest threat from al Jazeera however, is that it encourages the audience to think.

Is the American enterprise such a brittle thing that it might fall apart under the scrutiny of a more reflective population? Or will the intellectual torpor of this nation eventually be its undoing?

[Describing himself as "formerly a software knowledge architect, web editor, designer and Buddhist monk", Paul Woodward is also the man behind the blog "The War in Context".]