Bush is an idealist and a revolutionary willing to fight for other countries' freedom, writes Peter Hartcher.

In the past 30 years the number of democracies in the world has almost trebled. Of the 192 nations on Earth, 119 of them, or 62 per cent, are now democratic, according to the annual Freedom House Survey. The democratic sphere has enlarged markedly on every continent and in every region of the world bar one - the Middle East.

Thirty years ago, among the 19 countries of the Middle East and North Africa there were three democracies - Israel, Turkey and Lebanon. Today only the first two survive. Of the 16 Arab states of the region, none is a democracy.

Is this stubbornness against the tide of history because of the dominance of Islam? No. There are democracies in Islamic countries elsewhere in the world. The most populous Islamic country on Earth, Indonesia, is now democratic. And outside the Arab world there are 27 countries that have a predominantly Muslim population. Among them, seven have a democratic set-up.

The renowned philosopher Mohamed Abed al-Jabri has said that, nowadays, democracy is the only principle of political legitimacy acceptable in Muslim societies - whatever their religious beliefs and attitudes. This is the same condition that applies in all other countries, too - there is no longer any other source of political legitimacy abroad in the world.

In practice, there are many variations, there are many delays and interruptions and declarations of states of emergency. But in principle, there is no other serious source of political legitimacy.

Most of the autocratic states of the Middle East have Muslim majorities, but they are not ruled by Islamic regimes. On the contrary, most are stridently secular dictatorships. It is not Islam that is somehow vetoing democracy. It is the self-interest of the secular regimes, the autocrats that defend their own power, or, in Churchill's words, are riding tigers they dare not dismount.

Until now, US presidents have been content to live with this stronghold of tyranny in the Middle East in the service of stability. This has been one of the manifestations of the school of realism in US foreign policy.

George Bush reminded us again yesterday in his State of the Union address that he is no realist. He is an idealist and that means he is a revolutionary.

Last month, in his inaugural address, Bush made a case against tyranny that was so powerful and seemed so brimful with purpose that dictators around the world grew concerned: "We will persistently clarify the choice before every ruler and every nation: the moral choice between oppression, which is always wrong, and freedom, which is eternally right.

"America will not pretend that jailed dissidents prefer their chains, or that women welcome humiliation and servitude, or that any human being aspires to live at the mercy of bullies."

And Bush concluded his inaugural address with words that seemed to burst with imminent action: "America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world, and to all the inhabitants thereof. Renewed in our strength - tested, but not weary - we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom."

The stridency and imminence implied in these words was so intense that the Bush Administration then had to set about reassuring some of its favourite autocrats that they were not under immediate risk of hostile US action. Vital US allies, including Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and the crucial great powers with which Bush has pursued closer relations, China and Russia, were relieved.

Now, in the State of the Union, Bush burned just as brightly with the fire of his democratic revolution, but he was more careful to specify how and where America wants it to catch alight.

Bush was not retreating in any way from his fervour of a few weeks earlier. Indeed, he explained that it was not only in the service of the high ideal of liberty that Bush framed his vision, but also in American national self-interest: "In the long term, the peace we seek will only be achieved by eliminating the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder," said Bush. "The only force powerful enough to stop the rise of tyranny and terror, and replace hatred with hope, is the force of human freedom."

But this time he differentiated. First, he limited his remarks to the Middle East. Second, he differentiated between friendly states and hostile states.

"To promote peace and stability in the broader Middle East, the United States will work with our friends in the region to fight the common threat of terror, while we encourage a higher standard of freedom."

He spoke of "hopeful reform" in "an arc from Morocco to Jordan to Bahrain". He specifically called on Saudi Arabia and Egypt to make democratic reform.

But Bush was careful to sound intimidating only to unfriendly states, specifically Syria and Iran. He cited these states for harbouring or sponsoring terrorists and promised to confront them.

And, as debate rages inside his Administration about how to deal with Iran's nuclear program, Bush addressed the people of Iran directly: "And to the Iranian people, I say tonight: as you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you."

Implicit in this is the fond hope that the Iranians will rise up in a democratic revolution. In the meantime there are powerful voices in his administration that advocate the urgent armed confrontation of Iran.

The key question, of course, is not the desirability of democracy in the Middle East but the practicalities of how to achieve it. The US has a low rate of success in installing durable democratic regimes - it has had four successes out of 16 attempts in the last century.

In Iraq, the Americans are at the point where the presence of its army serves not to advance democracy but only to discredit it. How? Because to continue as an occupier will only arm America's enemies who argue that the US is not serious about freedom, but only about using the cause of democracy as a Trojan horse for its imperial self-interest.

This argument will gain force if Bush continues to tolerate repression in states like Egypt, which has just arrested Ayman Nour, a key opposition leader and an activist in the cause of a moderate democratic alternative to Hosni Mubarak, the long-ruling autocrat and US ally.

Bush has set himself the great cause of unblocking the autocratic obstacles to the tide of history in the Middle East. He appears to be about to intensify the use of friendly pressure on friendly tyrants and gunpoint democracy on unfriendly ones.

It will be a dangerous and difficult test of American resolve and wisdom.

The US President, George Bush, has made it clear that Washington could not accept a nuclear-armed Iran, which, he said, would be "very destabilising" in the region and beyond.

The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, said in Brussels on Wednesday that Iran should understand that it faced referral to the UN Security Council, where it would face sanctions, unless it accepted proposals put to it by Britain, France and Germany to abandon permanently its uranium enrichment program.

Mr Bush said on Wednesday that Iran had to know that the "free world is working together to send a very clear message: don't develop a nuclear weapon".

"The reason we are sending that message is because Iran with a nuclear weapon would be a very destabilising force in the world," he said at the White House during a meeting with the visiting President of Poland, Aleksander Kwasniewski.

Iran's President, Mohammad Khatami, immediately rejected the suggestion that Tehran was intent on developing nuclear weapons and said it wanted to develop a nuclear program for peaceful purposes only.

"We will never abandon this program," he said. He warned that Iran would end talks with the European three, which resumed in Geneva on Tuesday, if America stayed on the sidelines of the negotiations and issued what he characterised as threats.

Dr Rice, after talks with NATO foreign ministers, urged European negotiators to take a tough line with Iran. Without spelling it out, she seemed to be suggesting the Europeans needed to make it clear to Tehran that unless it took the deal on offer - which would see increased economic aid to Iran together with trade opportunities - UN sanctions would be inevitable.

"I think a diplomatic solution is in our grasp if we have unity of message and unity of purpose," she said. At a news conference, she repeatedly refused to set a time limit on the negotiations and said there was no military option on the table "at this time". "The Iranians know what they need to do. The Iranians have to be held to their international obligations. We haven't set any timetables."

France and Germany have urged the US to join the negotiations with Iran, but Washington has refused, saying US sanctions against Iran have been in place for more than 20 years and it has "dealt itself out" of negotiations, as Mr Bush once put it. In France and Germany, the suspicion is widespread that the US wants more than a halt to Iran's nuclear program; it sees Iran as the main sponsor of terrorism in the world, and wants the regime overthrown.

Iran remains a potential flashpoint because the US is determined that Tehran cannot possess nuclear weapons, but it remains unclear what that determination means. What if these negotiations fail? And what if Russia or China exercises its veto at the Security Council - which seems more than possible - and the move to impose sanctions fails? No one knows.

It is a sign of the despair of the past four years of the intifida that both Israelis and Palestinians liked to tell the following joke. Yasser Arafat (or Ariel Sharon) asks God: "Lord, will there ever be peace in the Middle East?" God answers: "Yes, of course, but not in my lifetime."

Watching the white-haired Ariel Sharon and Mahmoud Abbas sitting at the table at Sharm el-Sheikh on Tuesday, pledging to stop killing each other and to seek peace based on the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, may appear to be something of a miracle - a parting of the ocean of blood between Arab and Jew on the shores of the Red Sea. Caution is in order, however.

There have been many false dawns in the Holy Land. I have watched several peace summits in Sharm el-Sheikh that have ended in failure. It was less than two years ago that Abbas and Sharon met at the other end of the Sinai, in Aqaba. Their speeches then were almost identical to their lofty words of peace this week.

Then, as now, Palestinian militants declared a truce. Then, as now, Abbas pledged to end violence and promised to build a democratic Palestinian Authority that would have a monopoly on weapons. But the truce collapsed, the suicide bombers started blowing themselves up once more, Israel halted the political process and Abbas resigned in frustration.

Why should it be any different now? The main reason for hope is that Arafat is history and Sharon wants to make history. Both sides are tired of a conflict that has killed more than 4000 people and set back the cause of peace by more than four years.

The flurry of recent moves towards peace - Israeli withdrawal from West Bank cities, the release of Palestinian prisoners, the imminent return of Egyptian and Jordanian ambassadors to Tel Aviv, and the return of the Bush Administration to active diplomacy in the Middle East - are all the product of Arafat's death.

The main reason for hope is that Arafat is history, and Sharon wants to make history."Abbas won a convincing election victory. He now has a popular mandate to end the Palestinian uprising and no longer has to look over his shoulder at Arafat who, as they say in the Middle East, "spoke out of both sides of his mouth" on the question of violence.

Sharon is also a changed man. Since the ill-fated Aqaba summit, he has caused an earthquake in Israeli politics by forcing through a "unilateral" withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, removing all soldiers and settlers from the territory by next northern summer.

He has brought Shimon Peres' Labour Party back into his coalition. Sharon, the political "father of the settlements", is now planning to use the army to evict thousands of settlers from Gaza, under fire if necessary. The man known by Arabs as the "Butcher of Sabra and Chatila" (because of the massacre of Palestinians during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that Sharon masterminded as defence minister in 1982) is now embraced by Egypt as the only Israeli statesman who can bring peace.

The death of Arafat and the death of Sharon's dream of "Greater Israel" have removed two large obstacles to peace-making in the Holy Land. But the way to peace could still be blocked by extremists, whether they be Islamic militants seeking a return to the glory of the caliphate or Jewish hardliners convinced that they are bringing about the coming of the Messiah.

Is the ceasefire agreed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad more than just another brief respite? Will settlers plan some new provocation to disrupt the negotiations, as they did with the 1974 disengagement accords, the 1979 Camp David accords and the 1993 Oslo accords?

Will Abbas have the guts to risk a Palestinian civil war to stop militants if they resume attacks? And if he does, will Sharon have the guts to hold back from retaliating? These are just a few of the questions that will be asked in the coming weeks.

There are even bigger uncertainties. Sharon and Abbas seem able to agree on the first steps: ceasefire, normalisation of Palestinian life, Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, creation of a Palestinian mini-state.

Then what? Sharon is giving up Gaza, the part of the occupied territory that Israel finds most difficult to hold on to; but he says nothing about the West Bank, the part that Israel finds hardest to give up. The most difficult issues - the borders of the Palestinian state, the fate of settlements, the status of Jerusalem and the return of Palestinian refugees - are being left to last, like so many ticking bombs.

The international "road map" for peace offers no precise destination. It sets out in great detail the first milestones, but says almost nothing about how it will "end the occupation that began in 1967". While the Palestinians are taking the first steps in the road map by promising to end violence, Israel insists that its own initial obligations - the dismantling of illegal settlement outposts and freezing all settlement building - will be postponed to an indefinite date after the Gaza withdrawal.

For Israelis and Palestinians, "peace" means very different things: Israelis want "security" and an end to conflict, while Palestinians want "justice" and independence. Unless Sharon and Abbas can agree, in secret if necessary, on the kind of final peace they seek to achieve, then any interim steps they take will prove short-lived.

The outside world can help. It can assuage Israel's security fears by providing military observers to ensure that Gaza does not become a terrorist outpost, and it can help Palestinians by offering money and expertise to rebuild their institutions.

George Bush can help both sides by spelling out more of the detail of a permanent peace agreement. He has already backed Sharon by declaring that Israel can retain blocks of settlements in the West Bank and that there will be no "right of return" for Palestinian refugees to Israel. He now needs to support Abbas. He should say that Palestinians have a right to the West Bank, territorial compensation for any land annexed by Israel and a share of Jerusalem, including the Old City.

This is all very similar to the "Clinton parameters" issued in December 2000. Call it the "Bush vision" if need be, but the US President needs to talk about freedom for Palestinians with the same strength as he talks about freedom for Iraqis.

Then maybe, just maybe, God might smile on the Holy Land and bring peace in our lifetime.

Anton La Guardia is diplomatic editor of The Daily Telegraph, London, and author of Holy Land, Unholy War: Israelis and Palestinians.