WHY DO the Arabs only like Americans when we're coming tub protect them?"
The voice was clear down the line to Beirut from the Delaware radio station, an ordinary American reporter stunned that the Arabs should be ungrateful for President Clinton's latest bombardment against one of the oldest of Arab lands.
Was it the lack of nuance that made the question so offensive? or the assumption that firing cruise missiles at President Saddam Hussein would somehow give locals the same feel good factor that Mr Clinton admitted to in the White House?
The Saudis and the Turks had sullenly refused permission for US bombers to take off from their airbases.
The Egyptians and Jordanians expressed "concern", leaving it to the secretary general of the Arab League to call the US attack "an aggression against the sovereignty of an Arab state".
Al Abram, the most prestigious Egyptian newspaper, asked why the US did not intervene when Turkey invaded the Kurdish safe haven in its hunt for communist guerrillas or when Iran sent its artillery into Iraqi Kurdistan.
In Qatar, another paper suggested that Washington "found in the Arabs an easy prey as it fires missiles against them, uses them as a field test for its ... modern weapons".
Even Syria, whose obsessive hatred of Mr Saddam almost matches Mr Clinton's, claimed the bombardment violated laws against "interference in the internal affairs of other countries".
The latest US adventure in Iraq and Washington's irritation at the Arab response - demonstrates yet again the gulf of incomprehension that lies between the Arabs of the Middle East and the world's only superpower.
True, Arabs do not like Mr Saddam. Most of them loath him for his arrogance and brutality.
But Iraq, the ancient land of the two great rivers of Tigris and Euphrates, home to the Sumerian and Assyrian peoples, the site of Babylon and Ur, traditional bulwark against Persia, is something else.
For Iraq is the only Arab country which contains both water and substantial quantities of oil. Syria and Lebanon and Egypt have water; the Arab Gulf states have oil. But only Iraq possesses both naptha and water, the source of both wealth and survival.
They thus make Iraq the most viable - potentially the strongest nation in the Arab world, a country which captures the imagination of Arabs, however much they fear and revile its current dictator.
It promises hope amid humiliation and political defeat. And the US has bombarded it again.
The West may blame Mr Saddam for this humiliation and ask why the West should not support the other local satraps and dictators in the region in the battle against the "Beast of Baghdad".
Did not Britain make an alliance with Stalinist Russia against Hitler in the Second World War, I was asked on a BBC discussion programme this week? "This is the question you are being asked to address," came the haughty voice down the line from London.
How often have I heard this tired argument?
Back in 1980, I recall a British Foreign Office factotum briefing journalists who asked - not unreasonably - whether it was such a good idea for Britain and the US to give tacit support to President Saddam after his invasion of Iran. At that time, of course, Iran was supposed to be playing the role of the Third Reich.
"Didn't Britain make an alliance with Stalin against Hitler in the Second World War?" the British diplomat asked indignantly.
Plus ca change.
A decade and a half ago, President Saddam was Stalin, Britain's ally in the battle against Hitlerian Iran. Now the other Arab leaders, along with their secret policemen, are all Stalins who should be helping in the fight against Hitlerian Iraq.
The trouble is that, five years ago, a man called George Bush asked us to believe in a New World Order, a set of principles which would supposedly put an end to all the institutionalised brutality of the Middle East and the self interest of nation states.
Oddly, many Arabs put their faith in this short lived if laudable concept. Yet there was President Clinton this week, talking of US "interests" in the region. Or was that what Mr Bush had in mind?