President George W. Bush’s interview on Arab television yesterday is a clear recognition that America’s image in the Arab world has reached an all-time low. That Washington has understood that and sees the need to engage with Arab public opinion directly is at least something. But that is as far as it goes.

For all George Bush’s sincerity in his televised regrets for the treatment meted out by US troops to Iraqi prisoners, the interview will convince almost no one in the Arab world that Washington has changed its ways. Even had he got down on his knees and howled apologies for the now notorious photos of abuse, no one would have believed him — and no one here does believe him. It is not the photos that are the problem. It is four years of corrosive Bush Middle East policies, coming on top of decades of US incompetence and missed opportunities. The Americans have always underestimated the deep suspicion with which the Arab world has viewed their involvement in the Middle East. Even when the elder Bush led the coalition that liberated Kuwait, there was considerable doubt in the region about America’s real motives. That Washington then decided not to go on to Baghdad had much to do with the good advice of its Arab allies in the original Gulf War coalition. George Bush junior has not been as wise as his father.

Nothing that this US administration has done since it took office has given any support to moderate opinion in the Middle East. Bush was looking for an excuse to finish his father’s war from the minute he arrived in the Oval Office. Sept. 11 in all its horror, gave him the excuse. That Saddam had nothing at all to do with the attacks did not matter. Bush’s people manufactured new excuses as they became necessary. The final one was that Saddam was a monster from whom the Iraqi people had to be liberated.

Whatever America’s original good intentions, whatever the hopes that the ouster of Saddam may have raised, the awful reality is that Iraq is now in crisis. Most Iraqis today look at the inept and brutal behavior of the US-led coalition and want it out.

If the president imagined for one minute that his acknowledgement of the wrongs done to luckless detainees was going to help matters, he was mistaken. Once again his simplistic and elementary worldview has played him false. For him, the fact that the US government is taking stern measures against the soldiers who murdered, tortured and brutalized prisoners, in both Iraq and Afghanistan, is a virtue. For the rest of us, it is a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. The savagery of the US military is only a symptom of a wider abject policy failure for which the president ought actually to have been apologizing last night.

The whole exercise simply cut no ice.