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President Bush thinks nothing of claiming a power ordinarily found in mystics. He flew to Baghdad this week, he claims, in order to look into Iraq's prime minister's eyes and divine the poor man's true self. Bush used his power of divination in 2001when for the first time he met Vladimir Putin. On that occasion, he said, "I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straight forward and trustworthy and we had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul."

In 2002, after Bush got a sense of Putin's soul, Putin, the former KGB head, without fanfare ordered postage stamps issued commemorating "The 80^th Anniversary of Soviet Counterintelligence".

The KGB, Russia's secret police, is a lineal descendent of the notorious Cheka, GPU, OGPU, NKVD, and NKGB. In one stamp, Putin happily commemorated the face of Vsevolod Balitsky, the GPU butcher who in the 1930s participated in the deaths of 10 million Ukrainians in Russia's creation of the greatest man-made famine in history, imposed to break the backs of the Ukrainian peasants many of whom were driven to the madness of cannibalism. A second stamp celebrates Vladimir Styrne, slaughterer in the 1920s of thousands of Uzbeks, a third salutes Artur Artuzov, the dreaded OGPU leader who oversaw the savage political slaughter of the early 1920s, and a fourth exults the murderer Sergei Puzitsky who killed a half million Cossacks in 1931.

There is something eerie in Mr Bush trudging through life speaking English as a second language, claiming that God has willed him to be our president, and stopping every now and then to perform his divination trick.