As Israeli warplanes were preparing an attack on Lebanon Thursday afternoon, and a Lebanese militia was aiming a rocket at the ancient Israeli city of Safed, President George W. Bush was bantering with reporters in Germany about a pig.

Bush kept bringing up the roast wild boar he was about to dine on at a banquet that night, even when asked about the swelling crisis in the Middle East, where pig meat is forbidden to religious Jews and Muslims.

"Does it concern you that the Beirut airport has been bombed?" a reporter asked. "And do you see a risk of triggering a wider war?"

"I thought you were going to ask me about the pig," Bush replied blithely. Then he brought the pig up again -- for the fifth time -- before giving a long answer that ended with his saying Israel needed to protect itself.

"He was asked a serious question," said Ian Lustick, a Middle East expert now at the University of Pennsylvania, and his answer "epitomized his disengagement in the Middle East."

In the past, Arab-Israeli hostilities usually came to an end only when the United States signaled the Israelis in private to stop. But Bush, more than most if not all of his predecessors, has kept a largely hands-off approach -- in part, his aides have said, because he saw former President Bill Clinton's embarrassing failures to bring about peace in the region.