Behold Bush the diplomat and humanitarian, or are we just too stupid to see?

ON holiday we met some liberal Texans, a rare but spirited breed. The conversation turned to their former governor, George W Bush.

The Texans’ eyes narrowed. They detested the president’s politics but they took him seriously. There were none of the dismissive jokes or jeering references that greet his name on this side of the Atlantic.

Underestimating Bush is a European pastime, a misguided game which allows us to feel superior while dimming our view of what goes on in the White House. It is played with relish by otherwise sensible people. The scientist Richard Dawkins recently described the world’s most powerful leader as "a squawking chicken".

Nor is the coconut shy confined to Europe. A press aide to Canadian prime minister Jean Chrtien had to resign last week after calling the president "a moron". While she denied it, the axe fell all the quicker because the insult was so plausible.

"Moron" is the exactly sort of word that people use of Bush, including some Americans. The writer Jay McInerney describes him as "an under-educated buffoon". For Michael Moore, author of Stupid White Men, he is "idiot-in-chief". Whole websites are devoted to ‘Bushisms’ . (A taster: "The problem with the French is that they don't have a word for entrepreneur.")

Bush is a perplexing phenomenon but he is not an idiot. He has just led his party to a remarkable victory in the mid-term Congressional elections. He looks likely to take his country, and ours, into a war against Iraq. It is not necessary to agree with this president to take him seriously.

A new book, by Bob Woodward of Woodward and Bernstein fame, scrubs out Bush the cartoon character and substitutes a portrait of a politician who is neither stupid nor a squawking chicken.

Based on interviews and National Security Council minutes, Bush at War tracks the period after September 11, from the collapse of the Twin Towers to the fall of Kabul, with a coda on Iraq. What emerges is a picture of a president who is shrewder, more thoughtful and more compassionate than the hordes of his disparagers would credit.

In the run-up to the bombing of Afghanistan, it is Bush the supposed unilateralist who is keenest on coalition-building. Bush the aggressor frets about the suffering of the Afghan people. Bush the militarist keeps asking about food drops and humanitarian aid.

The ignorant president who reputedly cares nothing for the sensitivities of other cultures is shown to have diplomatic antennae. "We need to get some of our people on to Al-Jazeera," he urges, warning the military not to bomb any mosques.

Holding the ring for his warring advisers, the president is shown arbitrating coolly between Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld, the Pentagon and the CIA. His simplicity, which looks like stupidity from the outside, proves an asset on the inside, as Bush plays the Common Man. While Condoleezza Rice and Paul Wolfowitz are debating post-war reconstruction, he asks the obvious question: "Who’s going to run the country?"

Perhaps Woodward felt obliged, after the access he had been granted, to paint the president in a good light. His book suffers from that hazard of in-depth journalism, an over-identification with the dramatis personae. From the perspective of the West Wing, the war on terror assumes a heroic quality, and the president heroic status. Incidents such as the bombing of wedding parties and Red Cross depots, or the alleged massacres of Taliban prisoners, are barely mentioned.

Even allowing for insider empathy, however, there is a convincing story buried beneath the transcripts - of an underwhelming politician who learned to trust his instincts when a gigantic crisis came.

Far from fleeing Washington on September 11, Woodward’s Bush is desperate to return. Tony Blair, who arrives a week later to have dinner with the president and hear his speech to Congress, remarks on his sang-froid. "You don’t seem the least bit concerned or nervous," he says, as Bush leaves to deliver an address that will be watched on television by 80 million Americans.

None of this cancels out Bush the oilman or Bush the share-seller. It does not rehabilitate the tax-cutting privatiser who surrounds himself with ideologues from the Iran-Contra era. Only last week, the president appointed Henry Kissinger to investigate security flaws that could have contributed to September 11, an appointment greeted by The Nation, a left-wing weekly, as "akin to asking Milosevic to investigate war crimes".

Last week, too, environmentalists were incensed by go-aheads for logging in protected forests and oil-drilling on a beach with a colony of rare sea turtles.

Bush will never be anything other than a right-wing Republican with close corporate connections. But Woodward’s book suggests that he is not the crass aggressor of European nightmares. That may be scant consolation when it comes to Kyoto, but it provides a crumb of comfort in relation to Iraq.

Woodward’s account erodes the image of Bush as a unilateralist. He identifies Powell (not Blair) as the one who, at a private dinner in August, convinced the president that it was worth seeking United Nations support for action against Iraq. Yet the president was already keen to recruit other allies, telling his Secretary of State that "he preferred to have an international coalition and loved building one for the war in Afghanistan".

Equally, Bush’s stress on humanitarian aid ("We’ve got to deal with the suffering," he told officials before the Afghan bombing) will surprise critics who see his sole aim as "bombing the living daylights out of Iraq", as one Labour MP said last week. And his pointed inquiry about who will run the country is as relevant to Iraq as it was to Afghanistan.

At least someone is asking questions - someone who matters. The worry is whether those around him have the answers.

BUSH AT WAR, BY BOB WOODWARD, SIMON & SCHUSTER, 18.99