I was on BBC radio earlier tonight curtain-raising the SOTU. The interviewer was very keen to know if I though Bush would be “conciliatory” toward Europe.

I replied that if conciliatory means that Bush will say that he has been wrong to want to liberate Arabs and Muslims, wrong to believe that the Free World should expand its boundaries, wrong to believe that more people should choose their own leaders and live in societies that value freedom, human rights and democracy, wrong to believe that oppression breeds terrorism, well, no, he’s unlikely to be quite that conciliatory.