BRITAIN: Tony Blair can't understand how so many people can be so wrong about so much. Frank Millar looks back at the presidential visit to Britain
The emotional and political gulf between Tony Blair and Britain's anti-war party probably widened this week during President Bush's state visit to the United Kingdom. But the President flew back to Washington last night leaving his best buddy convinced more than ever that he is right - and that they are the right men to lead the transatlantic Alliance in facing what they both define as the new security threat of the early 21st century. There was palpable contempt in Downing Street on Thursday night as tens of thousands of Britons cheered the toppled effigy of the leader of the free world.
And elsewhere in Whitehall, irritation bordering on disbelief at what one official termed "the sheer bigotry" in attitudes he had encountered toward the queen's honoured guest.
Standing "shoulder to shoulder" with the President at their press conference in the Foreign Office earlier in the day Mr Blair imparted something of that same disbelief.
"There is something truly bizarre," he complained with feeling "about a situation where we have driven the Taliban out of government in Afghanistan, who used to stop people going about the street as they wished, who used to prevent girls going to school, who brutalised and terrorised their population . . . something truly bizarre about having got rid of Saddam, when we have already discovered the remains of 400,000 people in mass graves . . . something bizarre about these situations happening, and people saying they disagree when the effect of us not doing this would be that the Taliban was still in Afghanistan and Saddam was still in charge of Iraq."
That's it, simply put: the Prime Minister doesn't get how and why so many of his own people don't or won't get it.
"America did not attack al-Qaeda on September 11th, al-Qaeda attacked America, and in doing so attacked not just America but the way of life of all people who believe in tolerance and freedom, justice and peace," he told the Stop Bush protesters as they converged on Trafalgar Square.
No matter, as Foreign Secretary Jack Straw observed, that the attack on the twin towers - while executed during the Bush presidency - was almost certainly planned while President Clinton was still in power.
No matter either the President's assertion that allied forces had liberated 25 million people in Iraq, or his assurance there would be no retreat until the job was done and "a peaceful and democratic" country established in the heart of the Middle East.
Never mind the "coherent world view" Downing Street found in the President's keynote speech on Wednesday promising a "forward strategy of freedom" to be pursued in the greater Middle East, and to the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular.
Or his radical break with the past signalling, in the words of his former speech writer David Frum, "the demise of the American alliance with the House of Saud" and the long-standing policy of seeking lesser evils that "had bred greater evils than any American had ever thought possible".
To those on the march the "Toxic Texan" is, as London Mayor Ken Livingstone put it, "the most dangerous man on the planet" - a right-wing republican, in hock to the oil barons, public face of a neo-conservative conspiracy driven by fundamentalist Christians.
They believe he (like Mr Blair) has endangered the world by fighting a war launched on a false prospectus.
They are deaf to his warning of the linkage between political oppression in the Arab world and the terrorism which struck again in Turkey on Thursday.
And they simply do not believe that his harsh words to Israel will translate into a serious effort to establish a Palestinian state.
This does indeed strike Mr Blair as "bizarre".
Yet the gulf is real, and the disaffection of such large numbers of the British people - including so many members of the Labour Party - remains a danger.
True, Downing Street was boosted this week by an ICM poll for the Guardian showing that a bare majority of Labour members approved the President's visit, and that more voters welcomed it than did not.
With terrorism rising in Iraq and elsewhere, so, too, is support for the war - having previously reverted to something like pre-conflict levels.
The angry voice raised against the President was not that of the mainstream majority.
Yet that anger can also raise the anxiety of many who supported the war - that evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction be found, that there be no "cut and run" before the peace is secured, and that the allies show they have the means to will the extension of peace to the greater Middle East.
And above all, the anger and the anxiety remind us that it remains Iraq and its aftermath which will define Mr Blair's place in the history books.