When Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev famously banged his shoe on the desk at the United Nations almost 50 years ago, Harold Macmillan, the equally famously phlegmatic British prime minister, said: “I’d like that translated, if I may.”

George W. Bush, who ducked a volley of shoes from an enraged Iraqi journalist at a press conference in Baghdad on Sunday, professed to be perplexed. This was an epic insult intended for a serial bungler. But, like the shoes, it too went straight over his head. Mr Bush, who has buried America’s reputation throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds in the ruins of Iraq, did not, does not and will never get it.