It is amazing—yes, even after all these years—that the Bush administration is so utterly incapable of seeing the Middle East in terms the president might conceivably understand. Anybody who claims to be from Texas must have watched a few Westerns in his youth. From Tom Mix to Clint Eastwood, the recurrent theme was one of chivalry. The code of honor that Saddam exploited was much the same: even the bad guys look good if they die with their boots on. And that's what Saddam managed to do.

Why dwell on this bit of history now, almost a week after the event? Because the Iraqis will be thinking of it for several lifetimes. The illusion that mistakes can be corrected quickly—or if not corrected, then ignored and forgotten—is at the heart of the disaster our soldiers are living through, and dying for, every day in Iraq. But we Americans make a grievous error when we imagine that the rest of the world grows bored, changes the channel and moves on as quickly as the our compatriots do.

One classic example: the oft-repeated White House refrain that "we're fighting terrorists in Iraq so we don't have to fight them here in America." Put aside the fact that this argument, known in Washington as "the flypaper theory," is demonstrably specious. Ask yourself how the Iraqis feel about it? "They hate that line," says a senior U.S. official who has long experience in occupied Baghdad but is not allowed by the administration to speak frankly on the record. "They say, 'Why are we so lucky that we get to defend America to the last Iraqi?'"

At the moment, American policymakers are fascinated with the way Islamic radicals have mastered the technology of information. (Those darn videophones …) But Washington's problem is not its failure to control the world's multifarious media, it's the failure to develop a coherent message.

What do the jihadists have to offer? Almost nothing. They rap on about establishing a utopian cal—phate-which President Bush seems to take seriously, and talks about as if it were the name of a disease he'd just heard about from a golfing buddy. But few in the Arab or Muslim world pay much attention to that part of the radicals' boilerplate. What resonates widely is much simpler: hatred of the United States for the kinds of things the Bush administration says and does every day.

"The Al Qaeda message is a Manichean message of white versus black, good versus evil, a 'clash of civiliza—ions'-it's Samuel Huntington on steroids," says my friend the muzzled official. "And there are people in Washington who act like that's what they want, too. Sure, we can go and show that we have compassion for Muslims; that we believe in freedom. That can be one side of our 'public diplomacy.' But the other side is Abu Ghraib, Haditha, the use of phrases like Islamofascism. All that works very well for Al Qaeda's purposes." The way the Saddam hanging was carried out provided just another in a long list of self-inflicted disasters.