Pictures of George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair strolling around together at Camp David, all smiles, must make the onlooker recoil. Why are they even talking? In British terms, George W. is so far right he is off the scale, and in the American Republican Party's terms, even "New Labour" is still little short of Communism. The answer is that they need each other for foreign policy reasons. This mutual reliance has just been illustrated by the Anglo-American air strikes against targets in Iraq.

These, however, were the result of such a glaring miscalculation in foreign policy terms that it seems almost superfluous to catalogue the reasons for saying so.

The timing of the raids could not have been worse: not only exacerbating the tensions in the Middle East generally, but also sabotaging the process of revising the Iraq sanctions policy by ensuring the hostility of the rest of the Arab world to any new proposals. We will never be told, but it looks suspiciously as if the left hand was not told what the right hand was doing. The fresh attacks a week later, seemingly designed to show that everything is under control, only redouble the political damage.

The claims by George W. and his team that it was all 'routine' must frighten anyone who believes them: is this really the kind of routine we should expect from now on? But it was not just an example of heavy-handed American incompetence: 8 of the 24 planes that took part in the now-admittedly ineffectual strikes near Baghdad were British, and it seems that the operation was largely British-planned. Once again, the British powers that be have decided to sacrifice any dignity they might have left in the world in order to preserve a 'special relationship' that increasingly exists only in their own minds.

George W. made a fool of himself in Mexico by making it clear to all observers that he didn't understand what the air strikes were about in the first place: this is not much of a surprise. Listen to Tony Blair, though, representing the wisdom of the British Empire:

"Operations such as the one last night would not be needed if Saddam stopped attacking us."

Since Saddam has not attacked anyone since the Gulf War, what this presumably means is that the USAF and RAF should be allowed to continue their high-tech target practice against Iraqi targets indefinitely without the Iraqis being so damned unsporting as to shoot back. What is there to choose between this and the Russian justification for flattening Grozny?

The situation in Iraq is bad, and it is clear that the Kurds need international protection. Looking at the whole picture, though, the air strikes plus sanctions formula has clearly failed. The rearmament of Iraq after the Gulf War has continued, and Saddam is a hero to his people. The international outcry over these latest raids is helping make him a hero to the Arab and Muslim world in general, which has been his main policy aim throughout his career. The Palestinian people have now taken him up as a symbol of their struggle, and Iran and Libya have joined the more moderate states of the Middle East in condemning the raids, thus creating the basis for an anti-Western solidarity that has so far eluded the Muslim world.

This reaction presumably came as a surprise in Washington. It is only a tactical error, though. The raids did not represent any new policy or strategy: rather, we should understand them as an illustration of the idiocy of the policy that exists, and a proof of the futility of the relatively stable strategy that underlies that policy.

Iraq evidently doesn't matter much to Bush, Powell, Rice, Cheney et al. The Middle East is not very important. What is important is America's place as top dog. That is how the air strikes will be understood by the American public: as another demonstration that the Pentagon can do just exactly what the hell it wants.

And amazing as it may seem to anyone outside the British Isles, the Brits are tagging along for fundamentally the same reasons. The British public still largely believes that Her Majesty's Government is running the world, and this co-operation with America is the only way to keep that sad illusion going.

There is an underlying political rationale -- a strategy, you could call it -- that is essentially simple. America, even in lone superpower mode, does not wish to be seen internationally as an independent force. Such an image would not be politically convenient. The idea that it is the leader of the international community is much better. The only major power that is consistently prepared to go along with this is the United Kingdom.

Through the Clinton years, however, the USA demonstrated again and again that it no longer feels any need to consult anyone else about its actions. The UN has been by-passed in Iraq, as it was in Kosovo, and again, there is no legal basis for the bombing. It is clear that Washington now holds international law in contempt. But in both of these cases, British support and participation has meant that the American actions can still -- just about -- be presented as representing an international consensus.

It seems entirely possible, by the way, that NATO will be the next casualty of this approach, whatever the two powers say. The British influence in NATO is important, but even so, the Americans and the Brits cannot simply assume that the Alliance will continue to tolerate this kind of attitude forever. France has taken a strong stand against the strikes in Iraq. For Washington, of course, France doesn't matter. NATO member Turkey also doesn't matter. The Europeans generally don't matter. By continuing to support the American methods of smart bomb diplomacy, the British are effectively committed to the same view.

The problem is that the support of the British is going to be much less important for a Republican security agenda focused not on NATO and Europe, but on National Missile Defense and anti-Islamic paranoia. NATO, for the same reasons, is beside the point now. The White House seems to have no problem with adopting a policy on missile defense that has already significantly raised the level of hostility from Russia and China. Since the most important aim is to increase domestic profits for the armaments sector, Russia and China don't matter.

But the British cannot go on forever supporting this approach. They won't see any of the profits, it is pushing them away from Europe, and despite the rhetoric, there is no American-led world for them to belong to. And yet, if they turn around one day and join everyone else in objecting to a similar lunatic military intervention, they will find that they, too, are simply ignored: that they, too, don't matter.

For the present, then, London is exhibiting a different kind of incompetence. It would certainly be difficult to find a realistic new foreign policy role without giving up on the idea of being a world player. But the decision to act as if nothing is wrong, in the hope that Washington will keep Britain on indefinitely for old times' sakes, like an old family butler who can't make it up the stairs any more, is a useless alternative. Worse, if the price of the current idiotic policy is a Middle Eastern war, Britain will be seen around the world as having helped provoke it.

With this intervention, we have practically reached the point where no one at all believes the Anglo-American claim to be acting in the interests of the international community. Even loyal American vassal states like those in Latin America or Central Europe who would never dare say so openly know it. The West Europeans know it too. In crisis after crisis, the wrong decisions are made, and the wrong actions are taken.

The results speak for themselves: the Balkans still not pacified, half of Eastern Europe still left to rot, Africa still melting down, the Middle East on the brink, Russia increasingly hostile¿ It isn't working. While the Pentagon's domineering view of the world was tempered by Bill Clinton's romantic liberal agenda, at least the policy basis was one that the rest of the world could feel some sympathy with. This sympathy will evaporate very fast once General Powell does some more stomping around the world and beating the drum of war.

We in the English-speaking world have succeeded in establishing English as the world language, and so our own opinions appear to us to be world opinions. According to those opinions, we are the champions of peace and democracy. If we took the trouble to listen to other tongues, we would all realize that for Russia, China, India, the entire Muslim world, most of the Third World, and much of Western Europe, the loose cannons, the irrational actors, the rogue states and the main threats to world peace today are not North Korea or Libya: they are Great Britain and the United States of America.

Christopher Lord is the editor in chief of Perspectives - The Central European Review of International Affairs, published by the Institute of International Relations in Prague. His recent books include "Politics" (1999) and "Family Values" (2000), a collection of fiction published in the United States.