The ghastly bombings in Istanbul yesterday framed President Bush's state visit to Britain and gave tragic point to the principal theme of his press conference with Mr Tony Blair, that such terrorism is the major threat to international security in the 21st century.
Both men insisted this is a war in which the main battleground is in Iraq and which they are determined to win in the name of freedom and basic human values. As Mr Bush put it, the victims of yesterday's bombs were mainly Muslim Turks, even if the bombers' targets were British, on the day Mr Blair was hosting President Bush. Taken together with last week's suicide attacks on two Jewish synagogues, their objective appears to be to undermine Turkey's stability as a democratic state with a Muslim majority. This puts the threat they pose in a much wider and more dangerous setting, affecting Europe as well as the Middle East.
Mr Bush's visit to Britain has been framed in high security and deep controversy about the war in Iraq and his foreign policy objectives and methods, as witnessed by yesterday's large demonstration opposing him in London. His speech on Wednesday addressed a number of these criticisms fluently and directly.
The values he expressed in favour of multilateral institutions and democratic freedoms in the Middle East, as well as his stout defence of the war against Saddam Hussein, surprised some of his critics. So did his defence of their right to free speech - which he and Mr Blair insisted is guaranteed only by a willingness to defend it by military means if necessary. Others have welcomed these statements of principle but doubt whether Mr Bush has the political will or capacity to translate them into action in an election year. Theory and practice are in stark contradiction, they say.
The Istanbul bombings pose sharply the question of whether the war in Iraq was indeed, as claimed yesterday by Mr Bush and Mr Blair, necessary to defeat those responsible or whether the post-war chaos there has rather emboldened them. No credible connection has been established between the Saddam Hussein regime and organisations like al-Qaeda suspected of organising these attacks. What is certainly true is that they have been attracted to Iraq by the growing resistance to the Anglo-American occupation of that country.
The fact that Turkey is now being targeted by such movements is highly significant, given that its reformist Islamic government is seeking to join the European Union by adhering to more democratic norms. Mr Bush argues that a democratic Iraq would serve as a beacon for change in the Middle East as a whole. But democracy cannot be introduced by military occupation; it must be grown by returning sovereignty to the Iraqi people (including sovereignty over its vast economic resources) and seeking a renewed United Nations mandate to encourage greater international participation in its reconstruction and development.