Asian hostility toward U.S. distresses Bush

Minutes after President Bush finished an hourlong meeting with moderate Islamic leaders on the island of Bali this week, he approached his staff with something of a puzzled look on his face.

"Do they really believe that we think all Muslims are terrorists?" he asked, shaking his head. He was equally distressed, he told them, to hear that the United States was so pro-Israel that it was uninterested in the creation of a Palestinian state, despite his frequent declarations calling for exactly that, living alongside Israel.

It was a revealing moment precisely because the president was so surprised.

In his six-day dash from Tokyo to the Philippines to Singapore, Indonesia and Australia, rarely did the searing suspicions of America's — and Bush's — intentions pierce the president's security bubble. But when they did, they revealed a huge gulf between how the president views himself and how Asians view George W. Bush's America.

The president returned to the United States on Thursday, visiting Hawaii, where he dropped flowers into the waters of Pearl Harbor at the USS Arizona Memorial.

White House officials drew parallels between Japan's sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 with al-Qaida's attack against the United States on Sept. 11, 2001. The campaign against terrorism was the main theme of Bush's trip to Asia and Australia to thank Iraq war allies and to attend a 21-nation summit.

By and large the encounters with other leaders and lawmakers were painfully polite, even when Bush decided to take on directly Malaysia's cantankerous prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, who declared that Jews run the world, and run it from the United States. More boisterous in their anti-Bush enthusiasm were the members of the Australian parliament who heckled him during a speech, shouting that the United States had no right to become the world's sheriff.

White House officials wrote off the first to the anti-Semitic mutterings of a soon-to-be-retired autocrat and the second to the local traditions of parliamentary decorum here, which bear a close resemblance to Australian rugby rules. But beneath both incidents lay uncomfortable realities for Bush: Mahathir's speech drew a standing ovation from world leaders at a major Islamic conference last week — including U.S. allies — and polls show that Bush's approach to the world is deeply unpopular among Australians.

Yet for his part, Bush seemed determined to leave the impression, at every stop, that Iraq was a special case and that he is more patient, less trigger-happy and far more interested in building alliances than the world acknowledges. He sounds like a man who believes himself genuinely misunderstood.