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There's something grotesque about the man who's in day-to-day charge of the most powerful military force the world has ever known having to lift the phone and plead with an eccentric pastor with a flock of around 50.

But Robert Gates did just that, telling Pastor Jones that his Koran burning stunt was putting US servicemen and women at grave risk. Earlier, the president had used an ABC interview to make a direct appeal to Terry Jones "if he was listening".

Perhaps the pressure from the top was too much. At any rate, Mr Jones announced that the Koran burning would be abandoned because the imam in charge had agreed to move the planned Islamic cultural centre near Ground Zero.

This is not true, it turns out. It appears a Florida Muslim leader had spoken to the wife of the New York imam, who said he wasn't available for a meeting before Saturday. On this premise was built the idea that he would give up his plans. But if Terry Jones was looking for a way out, then this flimsy pretext provided it.

But how come an extremist planning a book-burning that would disgrace any time after the Middle Ages has some of the top politicians in the West jerking around like puppets on a string ?

Is it the fault of the 24-hour media that has focused on this planned demonstration by a tiny number of people?

Is it the fault of those even more extreme who might react to an offensive display by murder and terrorism?

Is it the fault of General Petraeus for catapulting this into the headlines in the first place?

Not the last at any rate. The general, and Gates, and the president, realise that the pastor's stunt threatens the very basis of their whole strategy in Afghanistan, Pakistan and indeed the rest of the Muslim world.

They are stressing it is the bomber and killers who are the enemy, not Islam. They've been much more explicit, but it was at the heart of what Bush said as well.

It's not just how those willing to use violence might react, it is that the act would "prove" to many in the Islamic world that Americans were against their religion itself.

It would be better if the threat could have just been ignored and dismissed but everyone knows that if the bonfire was lit, it would be beamed around the world - if not by the main TV networks, by videophone and the internet. Fanatics on both sides of the divide would have used it to inflame the cultural war they so desperately want.

However distasteful it might be, whatever terrible precedents it might set, America's politicians could hardly have remained silent. At least the Muslim world should now have heard, loud and clear, that this is not the will of America, but something that disgusts its leaders.

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