Eccentric Star: A Public Diplomacy Weblog

Sizing Up Where the US Stands, 5 Years After 9/11

"Losing the Battle for Hearts and Minds," by Ahmed Rashid - the Telegraph (UK), 11 September 2006. Rashid is a Pakistani journalist who has covered Central Asia for over 20 years, for publications including the Far East Economic Review and the Wall Street Journal. His books include Taliban and Jihad.

Five years after the September 11 attacks, unprecedented global co-operation in the police and intelligence fields has thwarted dozens of potential terrorist atrocities on the soil of Western nations.

Yet the traditional heartlands for sustaining Islamic extremists and their armies — Pakistan-Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and the Middle East — are still being bitterly contested and even expanding as a result of the West's policy failures and refusal to allocate sufficient troops and resources to these regions....

[A]fter the war in Iraq and the US-British supported war in Lebanon, there is far greater anti-Americanism in the Muslim world than ever before and that could limit future intelligence co-operation.

Also, the West's capacity to negotiate regional disputes is being undermined. Senior US diplomats admit it will take one or two generations to turn around America's image and potential in the Muslim world....

Five years after liberating Afghanistan the West's failure to provide sufficient troops, money and resources to secure the country and carry out reconstruction is now forcing Nato troops to fight a resurgent Taliban in hand-to- hand combat.

President Hamid Karzai's political support is dwindling because Western largesse has not been forthcoming and he now has little to show his people....

In Somalia an extremist Islamic movement conquered the country while the Americans were busy backing discredited and now defeated warlords.

Al-Qa'eda is now free to build a major base in Somalia from where it can undermine other parts of Muslim Africa. In the Middle East there has emerged a new phenomenon of Islamic movements rather than secular resistance groups or states, winning support.

Despite Israel's insistence, Hamas and Hizbollah are not terrorist groups, but social and political movements with a strong Islamic agenda. Yet elements from these parties could become the cutting edge for a revamped al-Qa'eda in the Middle East. The growth of extremist Islam is directly related to the refusal by the West aggressively to address the Israel-Palestine issue.

Unless the West backs democratically-elected governments and then provides the resources to secure them, the battle for hearts and minds will never be won.

"Evaluating Our Partners and Allies Five Years Later," by Julianne Smith and Thomas Sanderson - special to the WashingtonPost.com's 'Think Tank Town' column, 11 September 2006. Both authors are with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. Smith is a Senior Fellow and Deputy Director of the International Security Program. Sanderson is a Fellow and Director of the Transnational Threats Program.

Over the past week Americans have been inundated with special reports evaluating the United States' performance in the "Global War on Terrorism" since 9/11. But any examination of how far we have come and what remains to be done must also include a look at our partners and allies. That story -- how the world has contributed to America's fight against terror -- is an intricate mosaic of missteps, obstacles, accomplishments, heated debates and unpredictable results. While international counter-terrorism cooperation has soared over the last five years, today the global coalition is battered and bruised and in need of repair.

When the United States put out a call for partners following the September 11 attacks, virtually every country responded positively. Nations from every corner of the world offered an array of military, intelligence, economic and political support. Even traditional adversaries such as Libya and Syria contributed. And many of them delivered in the face of significant bureaucratic and cultural barriers at home.

The most remarkable barrier overcome by our allies has been public opinion. Once the Bush administration decided to take the fight to Iraq, public attitudes turned dramatically against the United States, making it difficult for foreign leaders to openly support the American-led war on terror. But despite deep divisions over Iraq, a number of countries -- including France and Germany, two of the most outspoken opponents of the Iraq war -- maintained strong counter-terrorism cooperation with the United States, albeit often discretely....

[N]ot all difficulties in counter-terrorism cooperation can be traced to our partners. In many cases, it has been the United States that has failed to foster long-term and cooperative partnerships. Most damaging has been the decline of U.S. moral authority, stemming first and foremost from the invasion and botched occupation of Iraq, but also from Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and the renditions of terror suspects. The war in Iraq has also eclipsed other aspects of the fight against terror, frustrating partners intent on turning U.S. attention to preventing the proliferation of WMD, halting the spread of radicalization and strengthening intelligence sharing.

U.S. partnerships with countries with poor human rights records has left the impression that America will partner with anyone in the name of short-term tactical gains. Its decision, for example, to negotiate the use of Uzbekistan's Karshi-Khanabad airbase to assist with the mission in Afghanistan was sharply criticized given that country's dismal human rights record. Furthermore, some allies have started to question the overarching value of standing arm and arm with the United States when its global image is so tattered. As a result, international cooperation is becoming more difficult, not less....

"Bush's Approval Ratings Slumping Even Further in Europe," by Chris Cillizza and Zachary A. Goldfarb - the Washington Post, 10 September 2006.

President Bush's approval ratings in the United States are nothing to cheer about, but he can count himself lucky that the midterm elections will not be held in Europe. A comprehensive survey of public opinion in a dozen European nations and the United States found that things have gone from bad to worse when it comes to disdain for the administration and its national security policies.

The annual survey, taken by the highly regarded German Marshall Fund of the United States, shows that 77 percent of Europeans disapprove of the way Bush has handled international affairs, as compared with 56 percent who felt that way in GMF's "Transatlantic Trends" survey in 2002.

Asked how desirable it was for the United States to exert strong leadership on the world stage, 37 percent of Europeans said that should be a goal -- down from 64 percent five years ago. In this country, 82 percent of Americans think it is very desirable or somewhat desirable for the United States to exert leadership....

[But] even though Europeans' views of Bush have collapsed over the past five years, their fears about the threat posed by international terrorism have grown closer to Bush's view. Sixty-six percent of Europeans called terrorism an "extremely important" threat, up eight percentage points since last year. In Britain, which has been the target of several terrorist operations in the past year, the number of those viewing terrorism as a main priority rose by 22 percentage points. But Europeans remained wary of military action as the answer to security threats, and they put greater emphasis on diplomacy.

GMF President Craig Kennedy said the survey revealed "broad agreement on threats across the Atlantic and a profound division on how to deal with them."...

A detailed summary of the German Marshall Fund report is available online, as a .pdf file:

"Transatlantic Trends - Key Findings, 2006" - the German Marshal Fund (Washington, DC), September 2006. The excerpts below are from Section One, "Trends in Transatlantic Relations," pp. 5-6.

Although U.S. and European policymakers report that official relations have improved in the past year, most observers argue that the image of the United States and President Bush among the European publics has not improved since their strong opposition to the war in Iraq in 2006....

The proportions of Europeans who view U.S. leadership in world affairs as desirable has reversed since 2002, from 64% positive to 37% this year, and from 31% negative to 57%....Similarly, when asked to evaluate their feelings of warmth toward the United States on a 100-point thermometer scale, Europeans ratings declined from 64 degrees in 2002 to 51 in 2006....

Europeans continue to distinguish between their views of President Bush and their views of the United States more generally. While European attitudes toward President Bush’s handling of international affairs have fallen from 38% positive in 2002 to 18% in 2006, there is a 9-point gap between this figure and their evaluation of U.S. leadership in world affairs. This gap has generally persisted over five years....

Added 16 September:

"Winners and Losers Five Years After 9/11," by Jurek Martin (opinion) - the Financial Times (UK), 15 September 2006

....Mendacity and exaggeration have profited enormously from 9/11. Just this week the ABC “docu-drama” The Path to 9/11, seemed to imply that if Bill Clinton had not been dallying with an intern Osama Bin Laden would be six feet under. It was unadulterated CSI vs al-Qaeda rubbish, much more fiction than fact.

But we keep reading that more and more Americans believe, courtesy of internet babble, that the US government somehow took down the twin towers on 9/11 and that the plane hijacks never happened. Surely not even Michael Moore would concede the Bushies are good enough to pull that one off.

It is almost as if FDR’s great dictum “we have nothing to fear but fear itself” has been taken to exactly the opposite extremes he intended. Fear has unleashed the xenophobia that powers anti-immigrant sentiments in America; fatuously, it gave us “freedom fries” in the US Congress.

It also made beneficiaries of non-American universities, only too happy to accommodate the foreign students who used to come here in droves but found short-sighted national security considerations putting obstacles in their way. This will hurt America over the longer term.

Others have come out ahead of the game, too. As John Tierney wound up his New York Times column a week ago, “the terrorist threat is still small; it’s the terrorism industry that got big.” It is one of those comments, saying it all, which I would give my eye teeth to have written.

It is an industry that is all around us, when we board planes or watch “experts” pontificating on TV when they are not writing books without number that raise the fear factor further. Government deficits soar as the industry grabs even more of the federal and state dollar....

Foreign Policy has posted selections from 9/11 editorials from newspapers around the world to its website:

"9/11 Editorials from Around the World" - Foreign Policy, 12 September 2006

The editorial pages of global news outfits weighed in yesterday on the anniversary of 9/11, and they didn't have very positive things to say about U.S. foreign policy.

China's English People's Daily Online says U.S. foreign policy, "highjacked" by neo-conservatives, has increased the threat of terrorism worldwide by transforming Iraq into a "hotbed of training ground of terrorist activities." (sic)....

In The Moscow Times, Alexei Bayer also criticizes the global war on terror (GWOT), writing: "George W. Bush's administration swallowed al-Qaida's bait hook, line and sinker."  Instead, he argues, the United States would have been better off ignoring terrorist "provocation" and not treating the conflict as a war, considering the age of terrorism - in the vein of the British in Northern Ireland - a time of "troubles."

Hassan Nafaa in Egypt's Al-Ahram Weekly discusses how GWOT "became a war on Arabs and Muslims," saying that the United States conflated a war that should have been focused solely on al Qaeda....

EU: No Proof Secret Prisons Exist - Or That They Don't Exist

"No Proof of Secret US Prisons, European Antiterror Chief Says," by Dan Bilefsky (in Brussels) - the New York Times, 21 April 2006

BRUSSELS, April 20 — The European Union's antiterrorism chief told a hearing on Thursday that he had not been able to prove that secret C.I.A. prisons existed in Europe.

"We've heard all kinds of allegations," the official, Gijs de Vries, said before a committee of the European Parliament. "It does not appear to be proven beyond reasonable doubt."

But Mr. de Vries came under criticism from some legislators who called the hearing a whitewash. Kathalijne Buitenweg, a Dutch member of Parliament from the Green Party, said that even without definitive proof, "the circumstantial evidence is stunning."

"I'm appalled that we keep calling to uphold human rights while pretending that these rendition centers don't exist and doing nothing about it," she said.

Many European nations were outraged after an article in The Washington Post in November cited unidentified intelligence officials as saying that the C.I.A. had maintained detention centers for terrorism suspects in eight countries, including some in Eastern Europe. A later report by the advocacy group Human Rights Watch cited Poland and Romania as two of the countries.

Both countries, as well as others in Europe, have denied the allegations. But the issue has inflamed trans-Atlantic tensions.

Mr. de Vries said the European Parliament investigation had not uncovered rights abuses despite more than 50 hours of testimony by rights advocates and people who say they were abducted by C.I.A. agents. A similar investigation by the Council of Europe, the European human rights agency, came to the same conclusion in January — though the leader of that inquiry, Dick Marty, a Swiss senator, said then that there were enough "indications" to justify continuing the investigation.

A number of legislators on Thursday challenged Mr. de Vries for not taking seriously earlier testimony before the committee of a German and a Canadian who gave accounts of being kidnapped and kept imprisoned by foreign agents.

The committee also heard Thursday from a former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, who said: "I can attest to the willingness of the U.S. and the U.K. to obtain intelligence that was got under torture in Uzbekistan. If they were not willing, then rendition prisons could not have existed." But Mr. Murray, who was recalled from his job in 2004 after condemning the Uzbek authorities and criticizing the British and American governments, told the committee that he had no proof that detention centers existed within Europe.

He said he had witnessed such rendition programs in Uzbekistan, but he seemed to back up Mr. de Vries's assertion when he said he was not aware of anyone being taken to Uzbekistan from Europe. "As far as I know, that never happened," he said....

The diplomatic problem the US faces is not whether anyone can or cannot prove the existence of secret prisons in Europe. It's whether people believe that the US still pays more than token respect to human rights and international law.

Also see:

"UN Torture Panel Presses US on Detainees," by Stephanie Nehehay - Reuters (Geneva), 18 April 2006

GENEVA (Reuters) - The United Nations committee against torture has demanded that the United States provide more information about its treatment of prisoners at home and foreign terrorism suspects held in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.

In questions submitted to Washington, the panel also sought information about secret detention facilities and specifically whether the United States assumed responsibility for alleged acts of torture in them, U.N. officials said on Tuesday.

"It is the longest list of issues I have ever seen," Mercedes Morales, a U.N. human rights officer who serves as secretary to the U.N. Committee against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, told reporters.

Washington is expected to send a delegation of 30 officials to defend its record at a meeting next month in Geneva of the committee, composed of 10 independent human rights experts.

The debate, set for May 5 and May 8, will focus on a report filed a year ago by the United States on its compliance with the Convention against Torture, which bans all forms of torture.

Washington said at the time it was abiding by the treaty and that any abuses of detainees in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were not systemic. Critics called the report a whitewash.

The U.N. committee has responded, asking firstly how memoranda from the U.S. Justice Department declaring that torture covers only extreme acts is compatible with the treaty.

It asked whether there had been any independent investigation into "the possible responsibility of high-ranking officials" for authorizing or consenting to acts of torture committed during interrogation of detainees.

It seeks details on how many people are detained in Iraq, Afghanistan and the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as well as their exact legal status.

On the Abu Ghraib facility in Iraq -- where photographs of torture and sexual abuse of detainees by U.S. soldiers provoked outrage in 2004 -- the U.N. committee asked what measures had been taken to "identify and remedy problems" there.

The U.N. panel cited reports of secret detention facilities, including on ships, and demanded a list of all detention facilities where inmates are held under de facto U.S. control.

"Why have such secret detention facilities been established? Does the (United States) assume responsibility for alleged acts of torture perpetrated by its own public agents outside its territory but in territories under its jurisdiction or de facto control...?" the U.N. committee asked.

It also challenged some practices in U.S. domestic jails, such as imprisoning juveniles with adults, banned under U.S. law. It cited a report that "detained women are kept shackled during childbirth," while other detainees are chained in gangs.

"There is serious concern on the part of the committee at the situation of (U.S.) prisons, the system and the conditions of detention which can be tremendously severe," Morales said.

The U.N. panel, which meets twice a year, will also examine the records of Georgia, Guatemala, Peru, Qatar, South Korea and Togo at its May 1-19 session.

For earlier developments, see US Chooses to Sit Out UN Human Rights Council Election and 'Secret Prisons' on Agenda for Rice's Upcoming European Trip. Type 'secret prison' into the Google search box at the top right corner of this Web page to get a more complete list of posts on this topic.

US Muslims Worried by American Perceptions of Islam

Although this article is specifically about American Muslims' concerns of how their faith is being perceived, it highlights several issues that are relevant to public diplomacy as well:

• The tendency of negative images and messages to overwhelm positive ones (it's a rule of thumb in public communications that you need to present at least two 'goods' for every 'bad' you mention, because otherwise people remember only the bad stuff -- that's one reason for some of the vapid, marginal material that you'll see in public information campaigns);
• People's (Americans', anyway) tendency to attribute actions to people's essential character rather than their circumstances; and
• The fact that messages alone may not be enough to change perceptions. Karen Hughes has said more than once that she doesn't understand why Palestinians and Arabs don't give the US more credit for supporting Palestinian statehood. A big part of the problem is that while President Bush has publicly stated US support for Palestinian independence, his administration has said and done a number of other things that implicitly undercut that goal. Similarly (and I'm not terribly comfortable with either this analogy or the course of action it suggests), it's not enough, in public communication terms, for moderate Muslim leaders to assert that Islam is a religion of peace. They also need to demonstrate how Muslims build and sustain peaceful communities.

"TV Images Skewing Americans' View of Peaceful Islam, Muslim Leaders Say," by Tamara Audi - USA Today, 17 April 2006

American Muslim leaders say they are facing an increasingly tough public relations battle as they fight to portray their faith as non-violent.

Some Muslims say conveying a peaceful image of Islam is tougher now than it was after the Sept. 11 attacks, and they blame a daily barrage of negative media images.

They are referring to stories such as a Christian convert being threatened with execution in     Afghanistan, coverage of thousands of Muslims expressing outrage at Danish cartoons and shouting anti-Western threats, and daily bloody images from     Iraq.

"We say we're peaceful people, but it doesn't matter what we say," said Irfan Rydhan, 31, a spokesperson and organizer for the South Bay Islamic Association in San Jose, Calif. "They see these violent images on TV, and those people look like us."

American views of their Muslim neighbors had been improving. A Pew Research Center poll released in July 2005, after the London terrorist bombings, showed that 55% of Americans had a favorable opinion of Muslim Americans. But a Washington Post/ABC News poll released in March showed that a majority of Americans have a negative view of Islam.

It seems as if extremist voices "have taken over," said Rana Abbas, a 26-year-old Muslim American who is deputy director of Michigan's American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a nationwide civil rights group based in Washington, D.C. "It makes your struggle so much harder. It makes it seem as if all your efforts are in vain. It's really hard right now for moderate Muslims to get their message out."

A large part of the public relations problem is that most Americans do not have a basic understanding of the turmoil that exists in parts of the Muslim world, said James Zogby, the president of the Arab American Institute, a political advocacy group based in Washington, D.C.

Zogby said that many heavily Islamic regions have been destabilized by war.

"The problem is not the nature of the religion; it is the dislocation and disruption of normal society brought on by the trauma of war," he said. "It's similar to what happened in our own country during the post-Civil War period where you had lynchings and the emergence of extremist currents that lasted for decades."

Imam Hassan Qazwini heads the largest mosque in the USA, the Islamic Center of America, based in Dearborn, Mich. Qazwini said he and other imams have grown weary of being made to answer for every violent act committed in the name of Mohammed.

"This has become a daily nightmare for Muslims," Qazwini said. "We're upset. We're frustrated. We cannot control every Muslim. We cannot be held responsible for everything."

Imam Hassan Qazwini heads the largest mosque in the USA, the Islamic Center of America, based in Dearborn, Mich. Qazwini said he and other imams have grown weary of being made to answer for every violent act committed in the name of Mohammed.

"This has become a daily nightmare for Muslims," Qazwini said. "We're upset. We're frustrated. We cannot control every Muslim. We cannot be held responsible for everything."

Qazwini said he is confounded when Islam as a whole is blamed for the actions of individuals, while other religions are not.

"How is it that when Pat Robertson calls for the murder of the president of a sovereign country that nobody said Christianity is promoting violence and murder?" Qazwini said, referring to Robertson's call last August for the assassination Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Robertson later apologized....

OpEd: Are We Winning Battles but Losing the War on Terrorism? (Added 3/1: Palestinian Poll)

Are things really this bad?:

"We've Lost Sight of His Vision," by John Brennan (opinion) - the Washington Post, 26 Feb 2006. Brennan is a former CIA counterterrorism official who now heads a consulting firm.

Osama bin Laden's plan to use terrorism to trigger an Islamic reawakening that will challenge Western dominance of world events and assure the ascendancy of Sunni extremists is moving forward -- at an alarming rate.

Hibernating securely somewhere along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, bin Laden and his Egyptian sidekick, Ayman al-Zawahiri, must be deriving warmth from the fact that the Iraqi insurgency has taken on a decidedly Sunni extremist coloration; that Hamas has successfully exploited political opportunities in Palestine; that radicals within Europe's Muslim communities are gaining strength and destructive force; and that caricatures of the prophet Muhammad have led to violence even among Muslims not inclined toward terrorism.

Terrorism, in bin Laden's strategy, is only a tactic, a means to achieve what he believes is a providentially ordained objective -- global domination by an Islamic caliphate. Yet dangerously, the United States is focusing on countering that tactic, missing the growth of the extremist Islamic forest as we flounder among the terrorist trees. Maybe it's because we have led ourselves to believe that the term "al Qaeda" means "Kill Americans." It doesn't. It means "foundation" or "base" in Arabic. Bin Laden chose the word intentionally and cleverly. He knew that his battle-hardened core of veterans from the Soviet-Afghan war of the 1980s would serve only as the foundational wellspring to irrigate fields of political, social and economic discontent among the Muslim masses.

He also recognized that the global explosion of mass media outlets over the last decade gave al Qaeda a ready recruitment vehicle. Headline-grabbing violent attacks against the West, especially the United States, broadcast by al-Jazeera, CNN or the BBC -- and abetted by instantaneous Internet communication -- were certain to impress and win adherents.

Bin Laden has also insidiously convinced us to use terminology that lends legitimacy to his activities. He has hijacked the term "jihad" to such an extent that U.S. and other Western officials regularly use the terms "jihadist" and "terrorist" interchangeably. In doing so, they unwittingly transfer the religious legitimacy inherent in the concept of jihad to murderous acts that are anything but holy.

While al Qaeda has been rocked by a well-financed and increasingly successful international counterterrorism effort, there is no equivalent successful campaign to counter bin Laden's strategic plan and vision. Sunni extremist activists roam virtually unchallenged in the Islamic world, spreading political and ideological seeds among a younger generation thirsting for attention, power and celestial reward....

I think Brennan is going way over the top in his assessment of where things stand. In fact, I think things look much better than they did a year and a half ago.

There's been a string of really good news over the past year in terms of Muslim and Arab public opinion turning against extremism, for its own reasons -- see Ramadan TV Serials Criticize Terrorism, Extremism and Amman Bombings Alienate Al Qaeda Supporters. I heard something the other day (I think on NPR) about public opinion in Saudi Arabia having changed so much that families now call the police if they think a son is headed off to Iraq to fight in the insurgency. That's an astounding shift not just in attitudes but in behavior.

I can't agree that Hamas' recent victory in Palestinian signals that the sky is falling, or even that it has any connection to public attitudes toward Al Qaeda. Many observers have argued that Palestinians were voting on a domestic agenda, against Fatah corruption, rather than for Hamas extremism (see, for example, "Hamas: The Perils of Power," by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, the New York Review of Books 8 Feb 2006.) (Added 1 March: Also see "Most Palestinians Believe Hamas Should Change Its Position on Eliminating Israel," by Angela Stephens - WorldPublicOpinion.org, 27 Feb 2006)

Al Qaeda certainly is making use of media channels and the Internet -- but so what? It doesn't mean they're having the impact they want. I don't like the idea of unhappy teenagers downloading instructions for body bombs from Web sites, but that's not the same thing as mass mobilization. It's a nasty but limited threat. What's more significant is that militants have to make their pitch in an increasingly wide and competitive media environment, and one in which there is increasingly vocal condemnation of political terrorism.

What did give me the willies, in reading Brennan's argument, was his evident belief in strong media effects theory. Strong media effects theories hold that audiences receive media messages passively. In reality, of course, that's not what happens. People get conflicting information and views from all kinds of different sources. They compare what they hear from one source with what they hear from another. They compare what they see on television with their own experience of the world. They judge information and opinion in a context. And the context that American decision makers create in their pursuit of an image of US might and success -- by putting civilians at risk in attempts to kill Al Qaeda leaders, or paying publishers money to get 'good news' stories into print in Iraq -- does cost the US public sympathy and support, not only in the Middle East but throughout the world.

Amman Bombings Turned Arab Publics Against Zarqawi

"Buried in Amman's Rubble: Zarqawi's Support," by Fawaz Gerges (op ed) - the Washington Post, 4 Dec 2005 (registration required)

Amid the continuing bloodshed in Iraq, there is evidence of fresh thinking. The change is, ironically, brought about by Abu Musab Zarqawi himself, whose indiscriminate terrorism appears to have succeeded in uniting people there against his global jihad ideology. Since the hotel bombings in Zarqawi's native Jordan, more and more Sunni Iraqis and Arabs have condemned the terrorist leader's nightmarish vision for their societies -- one that promises further "catastrophic" suicide attacks. Their reaction represents an important turning point, both for the militants for whom this change of outlook represents a new predicament and for the U.S. government, which must recognize that securing Iraq's future stability is not up to foreign military forces but depends on local public opinion.

Now that the holy warriors are waging their struggle in the heart of the Muslim community, or ummah -- in shopping centers, residential compounds, hotels and restaurants -- Muslims are getting a closer look at the terrorists' lack of respect for life, and most don't like what they see. Some of the protesters in Amman carried placards asking simply "Why?" Why would Zarqawi target their country, where so many people had supported his jihad in Iraq? In a survey of more than 1,000 Jordanians conducted for the newspaper al-Ghad, more than 87 percent of the respondents said they now considered al Qaeda a terrorist organization. (In previous surveys in Jordan, al Qaeda had enjoyed approval ratings of upwards of 60 percent.) Other polls in Arab countries confirm this change of opinion....

Zarqawi is in real trouble because his reckless killing has alienated the very constituency that he claims to be defending against foreign occupiers and local collaborators. Sheik Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, the grand imam of al-Azhar mosque in Cairo, widely regarded as the most hallowed religious institution in the Islamic world, has called on the international community to put an end to terrorism in Iraq and to punish Zarqawi and his men for killing civilians. In two separate statements, the imprisoned leaders of the Egyptian Islamic Group and Islamic al-Jihad, the two largest jihadist organizations, have also denounced Zarqawi and accused his organization of trying to "annihilate" Iraq's majority Shiites rather than "liberate" Iraq.

Even the senior leadership of the jihadist movement has publicly voiced its anger. Abu Mohammed Maqdisi, Zarqawi's spiritual and ideological mentor who spent three years in prison with him from 1995 to 1999, has said on al-Jazeera TV, "The kidnapping and murder of relief workers and neutral journalists has distorted the image of jihad."

But the most telling rebuke lies in a communication intercepted by U.S. authorities. In July, al Qaeda's ideologue and second-in-command to Osama bin Laden himself, Ayman Zawahiri, dispatched a 6,000-word letter to Zarqawi, chiding him that he risked alienating Arabs. "In the absence of this popular support," Zawahiri wrote, "the jihadist movement would be crushed in the shadows." Anyone who doubts the authenticity of Zawahiri's letter must read his memoir, "Knights Under the Prophet's Banner," smuggled out of Afghanistan and published after Sept. 11, 2001, in which he calls on militants to fully integrate into society and lead the ummah....

In Arab and Muslim eyes, the Amman bombings shattered the myth of the holy warriors battling on behalf of the ummah. Contributors to al Qaeda Web forums -- who have been lionizing Zarqawi for months -- expressed the militants' new predicament. One contributor who goes by the title Prime Negotiator lamented the public opinion fallout. "Go to Amman and hear, unfortunately, a lot of people cursing Zarqawi everywhere," wrote Prime Negotiator. "The confidence of the Jordanian people in al Qaeda is zero." In a commentary for al-Jazeera, a leading Islamic activist, Yasir al-Za'atira, said that the very existence of al Qaeda is at stake; the organization's survival depends on whether bin Laden and Zarqawi are prepared to reassess their deeds to be in line with the consensus of the ummah, he added.

This inability to live outside his own bubble may well prove to be Zarqawi's undoing. The killing of civilians in Jordan, on top of those in Saudi Arabia, Britain, Indonesia and Egypt has triggered an unprecedented torrent of angry and emotional responses in the Arab world. In a moving article titled "I Am Also Zarqawi" [i.e., a native of the town of Zarqa] published in the pan-Arab nationalist newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi, Amjad Nasser, an artist who was born and raised in Zarqa, paints a nostalgic portrait of the town. "I am also Zarqawi like many other ordinary people in Jordan, but we are made of a different fiber than the one which hijacked the name of the city and turned it into a banner of blood and death," he wrote.

The dramatic shift in public opinion does not bode well for Zarqawi's al Qaeda branch in Iraq or bin Laden's parent organization. The social environment that supplied them with recruits and refuge is becoming inhospitable.

The implications for Iraq are clear: Integrating the Sunni Arab community into the political process will quicken Zarqawi's end. That requires a critical reassessment of U.S. strategy in Iraq. Social harmony, not the American military presence, is the most effective weapon against the Zarqawi network. As a radical Islamist told me, the longer the war continues, the longer Zarqawi will be around: "But when the conflict is over, Zarqawi cannot survive. He serves no other value to the movement," said this former jihadist leader.

The Bush administration must convince Iraqis and Muslims that U.S. troops will come home sooner, not later, and set a realistic timetable for military withdrawal. Zarqawi's declining popularity does not mean that Muslims are more accepting of the U.S. military presence. Iraq continues to be a recruiting ground for militant jihadist causes. But once Sunni Iraqis are fully brought into the new political order in Baghdad, they will find it in their own interests, as they have already promised, to defeat the terrorists in their midst. It remains up to President Bush to recognize the significance of Islamic and Arabic shifting hearts and extract his forces from Iraq's shifting sands.

Zarqawi Defends Jordan Bombings (Added 11/20: Family Severs Ties)

"Al-Zarqawi Tape Threatens Jordan's King," by Jamal Halaby - AP (Amman), 18 Nov 2005

The Mideast's most feared terrorist sought Friday to justify a triple suicide bombing on Amman hotels that killed 59 civilians, insisting he did not deliberately target a wedding party and appealing to Muslims to believe that he was not attacking them.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq, took an unusually defensive tone in an audiotape posted on the Internet, seeking to shore up support after widespread anger over the civilian deaths, even among sympathizers.

Still, the Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi made clear he was not about to stop the bloodshed, warning he will attack more tourist sites in Jordan and threatening to behead King Abdullah II. He said he was targeting Jordan because it is serving as a "protector" for Israel, helps the U.S. military in Iraq and has become a "swamp of obscenity," with alcohol and prostitution in its tourist sites.

"Your star is fading. You will not escape your fate, you descendant of traitors. We will be able to reach your head and chop it off," al-Zarqawi said, referring to the king.

Al-Zarqawi, who has a $25 million bounty on his head from the U.S., told Jordanians to stay away from bases used by U.S. forces, hotels and tourist sites in Amman, the Dead Sea and the southern resort of Aqaba and embassies of governments participating in the war in Iraq, saying they would be targeted.

"People of Islam in Jordan, we want to assure you that we are extremely careful over your lives ... you are more beloved to us than ourselves," he said.

The authenticity of the audiotape, posted on an Islamic militant Web forum, could not be confirmed independently, but the voice resembled that of al-Zarqawi on previous tapes....

In the past, al-Zarqawi has defended Muslim civilian casualties in attacks by his suicide bombers in Iraq, saying they were justified because the attacks are part of a "jihad" against U.S. occupiers and their Iraqi allies. "God ordered us to attack the infidels by all means ... even if armed infidels and unintended victims — women and children — are killed together," he said in an audiotape released in May.

But he sounded more penitent in Friday's audio.

"People of Jordan, we did not undertake to blow up any wedding parties," he said. "For those Muslims who were killed, we ask God to show them mercy, for they were not targets. We did not and will not think for one moment to target them even if they were people of immorality and debauchery."

In the deadliest of the triple attacks, a bomber set off his explosives belt in the Radisson hotel, killing 30 people at a Jordanian-Palestinian wedding party in a ballroom. Both the bride's parents were among the dead, as was the father of the groom.

But al-Zarqawi insisted that Jordanian officials' accounts that the bomber specifically targeted the wedding were a "lie."

Al-Zarqawi claimed the bomber struck a hall where Israeli and American intelligence officials were meeting at the time. Part of the roof fell in on the wedding hall, either from the blast or even — he said — from a separate bomb placed in the roof, though not by al-Qaida.

"Our brothers knew their targets with great precision," he said. "God knows we chose these hotels only after more than two months of close observation (that proved) that these hotels had become headquarters for the Israeli and American intelligence," he said....

Al-Zarqawi accused the Jordanian government of hiding casualties among Israeli and American agents.

The Radisson attack involved two bombers — an Iraqi husband and wife. Witnesses told Jordanian security officials that the couple talked their way into the wedding, telling hotel employees they wanted to watch, then went to different sides of the hall. When the woman's explosives belt failed to go off, her husband told her to leave, then he jumped on a table in the ballroom and set off his blast, Jordanian officials have said....

This is great fodder for a rhetorical analysis based on William Benoit's typology of image repair strategies.

In a nutshell, Benoit has identified five general strategies that public figures use to repair their images in the wake of crisis or scandal:

• Denial - "I didn't do it," "it wasn't wrong/harmful," "someone else did it"
• Evade Responsibility - "I was provoked," "I couldn't have done otherwise given the information/resources available to me," "it wasn't deliberate," "I meant well"
• Reduce Offensiveness - "but look at all the things I did well here," "there wasn't that much damage done," "it's not as bad as what I might have done if I really were a bad person," "the ends justify the means," "my accuser does the same or worse," "we'll compensate people for their inconvenience/suffering"
• Corrective Action - taking steps to minimize the chances of the offensive act taking place again
• Mortification - accepting responsibility for the offense and apologizing

People often use more than one strategy at the same time. (Heck, sometimes they use more than one strategy in the same breath.) The first three strategies listed -- denial, evasion, and reduction of offensiveness -- are more common than the last two (taking corrective action or expressing mortification) are. Except in cases where there's strong evidence to back up a denial, the last two strategies are the more effective ones.

Zarqawi can be seen using:

• Denial - "we did not undertake to blow up any wedding parties"; someone else - we don't know who - must have put a bomb on the hotel roof;
• Evasion of responsibility - we were provoked by the [alleged] presence of Israeli intelligence agents; we took care to observe the hotel for two months; don't forget our real target is King Abdullah II and the Americans and the Israelis; "God ordered us to attack the infidels by all means"; and
• Reduction of Offensiveness - it's acceptable to kill "unintended victims" in the course of fighting "armed infidels"; the bombing was bad but look at these lies the Jordanian authorities are telling about it.

In the US, at least, it's a combination of strategies that probably would not fly with anyone who wasn't already a staunch supporter. (The combination of denial and evasion is inherently contradictory -- if you really didn't do X, why do you have to bring up this other stuff?)

In any event, the fact that Zarqawi is resorting to any of these strategies suggests that he knows he's in trouble.

Added 20 Nov 2005:

"Al-Zarqawi's Jordan Family Renounces Him," by Jamal Halaby - AP (Amman), 20 Nov 2005

Family members of Jordanian-born Abu Musab al-Zarqawi renounced the terrorist leader Sunday after his al-Qaida in Iraq group claimed responsibility for the Nov. 9 suicide attacks on three Amman hotels that killed 59 people.

The family of al-Zarqawi, whose real name is Ahmed Fadheel Nazzal al-Khalayleh, reiterated their strong allegiance to Jordan's King Abdullah II in half-page advertisements in the kingdom's three main newspapers. Al-Zarqawi threatened to kill the king in an audiotape released Friday.

"A Jordanian doesn't stab himself with his own spear," said the statement by 57 members of the al-Khalayleh family, including al-Zarqawi's brother and cousin. "We sever links with him until doomsday."

The statement is a serious blow to al-Zarqawi, who no longer will enjoy the protection of his tribe and whose family members may seek to kill him....

The al-Khalayleh tribe is a branch of the Bani Hassan, one of the area's largest and most prominent Bedouin tribes, which help form the bedrock of support for the royal family's Hashemite dynasty.

Relatives hold senior posts in the army and other government departments.

Al-Zarqawi often boasted of his family's influence when he was jailed in his native Jordan, said Yousef al-Rababaah, an ex-convict who shared al-Zarqawi's cellblock for four years until both were freed under a royal amnesty in 1999.

"Prison wardens and other prisoners feared him because of his family connections and influence," he told The Associated Press recently.

The family statement follows a rally Friday by dozens of angry al-Khalayleh tribe members, who also denounced al-Zarqawi.

The terrorist leader took his name from the city of Zarqa, 17 miles northeast of Amman.

"If my son was a terrorist, I wouldn't hesitate to kill him," family member Mousa al-Khalayleh said during Friday's rally, claiming he spoke on behalf of the tribe. "This is the slogan raised by the tribe as of this moment."

Sunday's message was similar to one sent last year by some members of al-Zarqawi's clan to Abdullah. That message, which contained fewer signatories, severed links with the terrorist for claiming a failed plot in April 2004 that targeted the Amman headquarters of Jordan's intelligence agency, the prime minister's office and the U.S. Embassy....

Amman Bombings Alienate Al Qaeda Supporters

"Islamic Web Sites Criticize Jordan Bombing," by Maamoun Youssef - AP (Cairo), 15 Nov 2005

Contributors to Islamic Web sites known for enthusiastically supporting al-Qaida have reacted angrily and with unprecedented criticism to last week's hotel bombings in Jordan.

The sites say that the targeting of Muslims and the public outrage that followed have damaged the reputation of the insurgent group.

One regular contributor suggested Monday that al-Qaida in Iraq, which claimed responsibility for the suicide bombings that killed 60 people, reconsider its mistakes. Another writer, in an article published on several sites, directly criticized group leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and offered him advice for the next attack.

The postings were a startling turn for the Web sites, where anonymous or pseudonymed writers regularly glorify al-Qaida's terrorist operations in discussion forums and where religious propaganda — including recruitment attempts — and militant statements are posted.

"We are shedding tears of blood because of the many negative aspects attached to the operation," wrote Sami, who frequently contributes to Islamic forums. "I swear to God it was a big mistake in which al-Qaida will pay a heavy price."

An article by a writer calling himself Al-Murshid, or "The Guide," appeared on several sites, urging al-Zarqawi to avoid any "military operation" that might harm innocent Muslims.

"This is both a (religious) task and a pragmatic tactic. ... Acts where many innocent Muslims lose their lives make us lose a lot of popular support," he wrote. "The death of the innocent Muslims in this attack ... was a fact that lived with each Jordanian. Now people say al-Qaida kills innocent Muslims."

In the days after the triple hotel bombings residents of Amman and other cities in Jordan held angry protests condemning al-Qaida in Iraq and demanding al-Zarqawi's death. Arabs account for more than half the 60 people killed, who included three Iraqi suicide bombers.

The vehement protests — in which thousands shouted "Burn in hell, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi!" and "Death to al-Zarqawi, the villain and the traitor!" — led the group to issue a second statement to justify the killing of Muslims, alleging that the hotels were dens for Western and Israeli intelligence agents.

Contributor Fawz Al Islam said the attack made the media "portray the mujahedeen as cannibals. I have noticed a split (in opinion) in many jihad Web sites."

Other writers accused al-Qaida of being too hasty in issuing the claim of responsibility, particularly because the mention of a female bomber led Jordanian intelligence to search for the woman after finding the bodies of three male bombers only. The female suspect was arrested on Sunday and gave a televised statement about her role in the attacks.

"The thing that most saddened me was the organization's insistence on issuing three statements about the operation, which only benefited the enemies of the nation on military, information and field aspects," al-Murshid wrote in his article, which was highlighted on one site with four stars to draw attention to it....

Also see:

"Protests Continue as Kingdom Returns to Work" - Petra (Jordan's official press agency), as carried in The Jordan Times (Amman), 15 Nov 2005. It's probably prudent to take the figures cited in this report with a grain of salt -- Petra is government-run -- but other news reports also give the impression that Jordanians are unified in their outrage over the bombings.

AMMAN (Petra) — Thousands of university students, lawyers and citizens took to the Kingdom's streets yesterday to protest against Wednesday's terrorist attacks and express their opposition to extremism.

The Jordan Bar Association (JBA) organised a march from the Palace of Justice towards the Parliament building in Abdali, chanting slogans against terrorism.

JBA President Saleh Armouti, association council members, and lawyers performed a special prayer for the victims' souls.

Meanwhile, the Greater Amman Municipality (GAM) has distributed over the past few days more than 52,000 photos of His Majesty King Abdullah, 42,000 Jordanian flags and 42,000 posters to protesting citizens.

Yesterday marked the first working day since the attacks took place with some 10,000 students and faculty members of the Jordan University of Science and Technology holding a rally inside the campus to voice their anger. The march was joined by the university's Arab students.

Students and faculty members at Al al Bayt University in Mafraq, Yarmouk University in Irbid, Tafileh University, and Shobak College also demonstrated against the attacks, renewing their allegiance to the Kingdom and its leadership.

In Lebanon, Jordanian students along with their colleagues at the American University of Beirut staged a protest attended by the Kingdom's ambassador in Beirut, Hosni Abu Gheida.

The Yemeni Media Centre in Amman, in cooperation with the Yemen Youth Federation, organised a march in solidarity with the Jordanian people, as Yemeni students in the Kingdom issued a statement condemning the attacks.

Meanwhile, an international youth organisation joined the world in condemning the attacks and sympathising with the families of the victims and the Jordanian people.

In a letter published by the Junior Chamber International (JCI), President Kevin Cullinane expressed “profound dismay and grief at the hideous acts of terrorism perpetrated against innocent civilians.”

“We are taking this opportunity to applaud the statements by His Majesty King Abdullah II, indicating that Jordan will not bow to coercion,” the letter said.

Cullinane affirmed that the “JCI's determination to defend freedom and peace is greater than the terrorists' determination to cause death and destruction to innocent people in a desire to impose extremism on the world.”

He encouraged all JCI members to “express their solidarity with those affected by these abhorrent acts of violence and to lead efforts to create public opinion against terrorism.”

JCI was officially founded as an international organisation in 1944, bringing together young people from around the world to work towards mutual understanding.

Amman Bombings Suggest Militants Not Heeding Advice on Public Opinion (Updated 11/14)

Yesterday's bombings of three hotels in Amman were horrible -- and a horrible reminder of the logic that appears to go into such attacks.

It would seem from the choice of targets (the Hyatt and Radisson hotels and the Days Inn) that the attacks were aimed at American and other foreigners, and undoubtedly foreigners were among the victims. But many if not most of the victims are certainly Jordanians, especially since the deadliest of the bombings took place at a wedding reception. The decision to target the reception might say something about class resentment as much as ideology being a motivation for at least one bomber's participation in the attacks.

The Amman attacks also suggest that key people in the militant movement are either not listening to warnings that indiscriminate attacks are alienating Arab public opinion -- or that they don't care whether they alientate public opinion or not.

"Jordanians Rally to Denounce Al-Zarqawi," by Jamal Halaby - AP (Amman), 10 Nov 2005

Hundreds of angry Jordanians rallied Thursday outside one of three U.S.-based hotels attacked by suicide bombers, shouting, "Burn in hell, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi!" after the terrorist's group claimed responsibility for the blasts that killed at least 56 people....

The Amman protest was organized by Jordan's 14 professional and trade unions — made up of both hard-line Islamic groups and leftist political organizations — traditionally a vocal critic of King Abdullah II's moderate and pro-Western policies.

Protesters — including women and children — gathered outside a bombed hotels, shouting, "Death to al-Zarqawi, the villain and the traitor!" Drivers honked the horns of vehicles decorated with Jordanian flags and posters of the king. A helicopter hovered overhead.

"We sacrifice our lives for you, Amman!" the protesters chanted.

State television said a second rally was planned in the Red Sea port of Aqaba, where attackers using Katyusha rockets narrowly missed a U.S. ship and killed a Jordanian soldier in August.

The streets of the capital appeared deserted early Thursday, which was declared a day of mourning. Public and private offices were closed under government instructions, apparently to allow tightened security measures to take hold....

"Al-Qaida Links Jordan Bombings to Iraq War," by Jamal Halaby - AP (Amman), 10 Nov 2005

Al-Qaida claimed responsibility Thursday for three suicide bomb attacks on Western hotels that killed at least 56 people, linking the deadly blasts to the war in     Iraq and calling Amman the "backyard garden" for U.S. operations. Police continued a broad security lockdown and authorities sent DNA samples for testing to identify the attackers. Land borders were reopened after being closed for nearly 12 hours.

Government spokesman Bassel Tarawneh lowered the death toll by one, citing confusion in the early hours after the blasts. He said the number was likely to rise slightly.

He said the victims included 15 Jordanians, five Iraqis, one Saudi, one Palestinian, three Chinese, one Indonesian; 30 others hadn't been identified.

The nearly simultaneous attacks late Wednesday also wounded more than 115 people, police said. They detained several people overnight, although it was unclear if those being held were of suspects or witnesses.

The al-Qaida claim, posted on a militant Internet site, said Jordan became a target because it was "a backyard garden for the enemies of the religion, Jews and crusaders ... a filthy place for the traitors ... and a center for prostitution." The authenticity of the posting could not be independently verified, but it appeared on an Islamic Web site that acts as a clearing house for statements by militant groups.

The claim of responsibility, signed in the name of the spokesman for Al-Qaida in Iraq, said the attacks put the United States on notice that the "backyard camp for the crusader army is now in the range of fire of the holy warriors."

Iraqi government spokesman Laith Kubba said the attack should alert Jordan that it needed to stop playing host to former members of     Saddam Hussein's regime.

"I hope that these attacks will wake up the `Jordanian street' to end their sympathy with Saddam's remnants ... who exploit the freedom in this country to have a safe shelter to plot their criminal acts against Iraqis ."

He also said Iraqis may have had a hand in the attacks.

"The al-Qaida organization has become as a plague that affected Iraq and is now transmitted by the same rats to other countries. A lot of Iraqis, especially former intelligence and army officers, joined this criminal cell," Kubba said.

Jordan's Deputy Prime Minister Marwan Muasher said shortly after the blasts that al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was a "prime suspect." The Jordanian-born al-Zarqawi is known for his animosity to the country's Hashemite monarchy. The claim of responsibility did not name King Abdullah II but twice referred to the "tyrant of Jordan."

In the attacks, the suicide bombers detonated explosives at the Grand Hyatt, Radisson SAS and Days Inn hotels just before 9 p.m. One of the explosions took place inside a hall where 300 guests were celebrating a wedding....

"People Were Killed - It Was Ugly" - BBC News, 10 Nov 2005

Eyewitnesses have described the bloody scenes after bombs ripped through three major hotels in Amman, Jordan.
At the Radisson, the blast occurred in the middle of a wedding party where there were more than 250 guests.

Witnesses said the room was torn apart by the blast, which appeared to have gone off near a wall that separated it from the bar area.

"We thought it was fireworks for the wedding but I saw people falling to the ground," Ahmed, a guest at the reception, told the Associated Press news agency.

"I saw blood. There were people killed. It was ugly."

The fathers of both the bride and groom died in the attack and the couple themselves were injured.

"I lost my father and my father-in-law and I saw many others dead. This is a horrible crime," Ashraf al-Khaled told state TV from his hospital bed.

"My mother-in-law is in an intensive care unit in this hospital just behind me and probably she will make it - we pray that she will make it."

He and the other wedding guests had done what they could to help the injured, he said.

"The world has to know this has nothing to do with Islam," he added. "We should show people all over the world that this is not Islam because this cannot help us as Arabs or as Muslims.

"This is damaging our rule, it is harming us, it's not getting anybody other than ourselves."

The central Amman luxury hotels are popular with US and European businessmen and diplomats.

The Radisson, in particular, is popular with Israeli tourists, and reports say it has been a target of several foiled attacks by extremists in the past.

But the hotels have also become a gathering spot for affluent Jordanians and many of the victims of the attacks are believed to be locals....

Also see this item, about another attack on Iraqi police and army recruits, for another example of militants ignoring public opinion The one item in opinion surveys that all Iraqis, regardless of regional or communal identity, seemed to agree on was that attacks on Iraqi police and soldiers were unjustified (see the surveys linked to in this post).

"Iraq Bombers Target Police, Army Recruits," by Omar Sinan - AP (Baghdad), 10 Nov 2005 - as carried on ABCNews.go.com.

Two suicide bombers blew themselves up near a restaurant frequented by Baghdad police, killing at least 33 people and seriously injuring 19, while a car bomb killed seven army recruits in Saddam Hussein's hometown, police said.

The bombers struck at about 9:45 a.m., when officers usually stop by the restaurant for breakfast. Police Maj. Abdel-Hussein Minsef said seven police officers and 26 civilians were killed in the blast and 24 others injured, among them 20 civilians.

The blasts came just before British Foreign Secretary Straw was expected in the country for a meeting with Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

Samiya Mohammed, a housewife who lives nearby, said she rushed outside when she heard the explosion.

"I went out to see the restaurant heavily damaged. There was bodies, mostly civilians, and blood everywhere inside the place. This is a criminal act that only targeted and hurt innocent people having their breakfast," she said.

There were no Americans in the area, she said.

"I do not understand why most of the time it is the Iraqis who are killed," she said....

Added 11 Nov 2005:

"Q&A: Al-Qaeda's New Direction" - BBC News, 11 Nov 2005

A series of bombings targeting hotels in the Jordanian capital, Amman, have been blamed on the fugitive leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. BBC Security Correspondent Frank Gardner explains what the attacks tell us about the evolution of al-Qaeda....

Q: Zawahri is alleged to have issued a letter recently urging a scaling down of attacks. Is the attack in Amman proof that Zarqawi is going his own way?

Zarqawi has pretty much gone his own way for a long time. He has taken the al-Qaeda name and has allegedly pledged allegiance to Osama Bin Laden but, in practice, he is now the main man of the al-Qaeda movement internationally. He is the person who is rolling up his sleeves and, in the eyes of the jihadis, he is the hero who is confronting the invaders in Iraq.

His followers tend to overlook the fact that most of the bombings attributed to his group mostly kill Iraqis and Muslims. They kill far more Muslims than Westerners and that may be something that is worrying Zawahri and the remnants of the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The strategists like Zawahri realise they will not be able to carry with them the bulk of Arab opinion if so many Muslims are dying at the hands of Zarqawi's movement.

Q: How much influence do al-Qaeda's old guard still exert on the world stage?

it is premature to write off the core of al-Qaeda hiding in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Their ideas are still very much alive and there are indications - such as the release of the tape claiming the London bombings - that they are still active in operations around the world.

But in a way, their work is already done. What they wanted to do was to wake up people to the need to confront what they see as Western aggression. And they have been generally very successful in recruiting people to their cause.

But I think the latest bombing is going to do them a lot of damage. Just as in the bombing of the al-Muhayya compound in Riyadh in November 2003, most of the casualties are Arabs and Muslims and that is not good for public opinion.

Q: What signs are there of a backlash against Zarqawi's network and will such a backlash affect its ability to operate?

You will never be able to completely eradicate the hardcore militants who hold that anybody who does not adhere to their very narrow vision of Islam is not a good Muslim, or worse, an unbeliever. But actions such as the Amman bombing of the wedding tend to undermine mainstream support that al-Qaeda might have had.

A measure of this can be seen, visually, in the hundreds of people who protested against Zarqawi outside one of the hotels in Jordan. But the way to measure this in practice is much harder - for instance, in an increase in members of the public reporting on the militants to the police. That has happened a lot in Saudi Arabia - the tide of public opinion there has turned largely against al-Qaeda because so many Saudis have been killed by their actions....

Added 13 Nov 2005 -- It seems especially odd to me that, according to news coming out of Jordan this morning, the wedding reception at the Radisson Hotel was targeted by a husband-and-wife team of bombers. It makes the motivation of the bombers seem more like resentment of wealthy, privileged, protected Arabs and less a desire to kill Westerners.

"Iraqi Woman Confesses on Jordanian TV," by Shafika Mattar - AP (Amman), 13 Nov 2005

Strapped with a disabled explosives belt, an Iraqi woman arrested Sunday confessed on television to trying to blow herself up with her husband in one of three suicide attacks earlier this week that killed 57 people.

The 35-year-old woman — the sister of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's right-hand man who was killed by U.S. forces in     Iraq — appeared on Jordanian state TV hours after she was captured by security forces who were tipped off by an al-Qaida claim that a husband-and-wife team participated in Wednesday's bombings.

Looking nervous and wringing her hands, Sajida Mubarak Atrous al-Rishawi, 35, described how she failed to blow herself up during a wedding reception at the Radisson SAS hotel on Wednesday night after struggling with the cord on her explosives belt.

"My husband wore an (explosives-packed) belt and put one on me. He taught me how to use it," al-Rishawi said, wearing a white head scarf, a black gown and a disabled bomb belt tied around her waist.

"My husband detonated (his bomb) and I tried to explode my belt but it wouldn't," she said. "People fled running and I left running with them...."

Also see:

"Jordan's King: Attacks Targeted Jordanians" - AP (Washington), 13 Nov 2005

Jordan's King Abdullah II said Sunday that he suicide attacks by a group of Iraqis last week that killed more than 50 people were aimed at Jordanians — not foreigners.

Abdullah said the three hotels chosen by the al-Qaida cell members were frequented by Jordanians and Iraqis.

"This was nothing to do with the West. This targeted Jordanian citizens — innocent men, women and children," the king said on NBC's "Meet the Press...."

"Al-Zaqarwi's Hometown Torn over Bombings," by Zeina Karam - AP (Zarqa, Jordan), 13 Nov 2005

In this rundown industrial town where the al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was born, residents expressed anger, skepticism and dismay Saturday that one of their own could be behind Amman's triple bombings that killed 57 people, mostly Arabs and Muslims.

"If there were still any people with any sympathy left for al-Zarqawi, it's gone now. It has backfired on him," said Zuheir Najjar, 45. "What does an attack on a wedding with women and children have to do with fighting the Americans?"

Al-Zarqawi's group, al-Qaida in Iraq, sought in a Web statement to justify the attacks, accusing Jordan's government of launching a war on Islam and supporting the U.S. presence in Iraq.

But in the desert town of Zarqa, 15 miles northeast of the capital Amman, many regarded Wednesday's bloody attacks as a barbaric act that had nothing to do with Islam....

Ayman Tawalby, sitting cross legged on the ground and stroking his Osama bin Laden-style beard, said he opposed any terrorist attacks inside Jordan.

"I support the resistance against the Americans in Iraq and against the Israelis everywhere," said the unemployed 47-year-old. "Those are our enemies. But I don't support bombing innocent civilians."

In the town's center, Nabil Daoud said he supported bin Laden when he fought the Soviets and, later, the Americans in Afghanistan, just like he backed al-Zarqawi's insurgency against the U.S.-led occupation in Iraq.

"But when they started targeting Muslims, I stopped sympathizing with them," said Daoud, who is in his early 20s. "I don't understand it anymore."

For excerpts from other news reports on Zarqa residents' reaction to the bombings, see Some Place Amman Bombings in a Familiar Frame: Israel Did It.

Added 14 Nov 2005:

"Jordanians Turning Against Terrorism," by Dale Gavlak - AP (Amman), 14 Nov 2005

Less than a week ago — before suicide bombers killed 57 people at Amman hotels — Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was seen by many Jordanians as a homegrown holy warrior battling U.S. troops in occupied Iraq.

After the bombings, claimed by al-Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq, thousands of Jordanians took to the streets throughout the kingdom, shouting: "Burn in hell, al-Zarqawi."

"All Jordanians — even fanatic Muslims — are changing their minds (toward Islamic extremist attacks) because of what they saw happen to innocent people" in Amman, said Ibrahim Hreish, a jeweler in the Jordanian capital....

[A]mid a spiraling of violence in neighboring Iraq and numerous foiled terror plots here in Jordan before Wednesday's strikes, views toward terrorism have started to change.

Most of those killed in the triple hotel bombings were Arabs and Muslims — and the targets included a Jordanian-Palestinian wedding reception.

TV talk shows and newspaper columnists have been focussing on the suicide attacks and whether Muslims should condone them in part or total.

"There has (long) been empathy among Jordanians for insurgent strikes against military targets in Iraq, particularly against U.S. forces," said Mustafa Hamarneh, a researcher who has conducted surveys on domestic attitudes toward suicide bombings.

"I believe we will now begin to see a change in how the country's press reports events in Iraq, such as suicide bombings and in public attitudes," he said.Jordan's King Abdullah II, a critic of Islamic militancy, said the battle against terrorists like al-Zarqawi was an "ideological struggle between extremist Muslims that have this perverse view of Islam against the rest of us moderate Muslims."

A July survey from the Washington-based Pew Research Center even found support in Jordan for suicide bombings against Americans and their allies in Iraq dropped from 70 percent to 49 percent since March 2004. Last week's bombings are likely to erode al-Zarqawi's support even more, some analysts say.

"It's a public relations disaster for al-Zarqawi and his militants," said M.J. Gohel, the director of the London-based Asia Pacific Foundation, a think tank that tracks militant groups. "They murdered Muslims in cold blood."

Still, there are many Jordanians who believe that targeting U.S.-led forces in Iraq and or Israeli troops in the Palestinian territories remains legitimate.

"We have to differentiate between terrorism and resistance," said Abdul-Latif Arabiyat, a leading member of the hardline Islamic Action Front, Jordan's largest Muslim opposition group. Arabiyat said fighting occupation of Muslim land is sanctioned....

Bin Laden's Writings Being Published in English

"In Bin Laden's Words," by Bruce B. Lawrence - the Chronicle of Higher Education, 4 Nov 2005 (posted to chronicle.com as of 1 Nov; as of that date, was accessible to non-subscribers). Lawrence, a professor of Islamic Studies at Duke University, edited and wrote the introduction to an English-language translation of Osama bin Laden's writings that Verso is publishing this month.

It began with an e-mail message from an editor last spring: "Would you please write an essay for a new collection of writings we're putting out?" Instead of the reflexive, "No, I'm too busy," I found myself agreeing to write an introduction for the first-ever English translation of the major declarations of Osama bin Laden.

Although bin Laden has become a legendary figure in the West, the body of his statements has until now never been available to the public. Occasional fragments are cited, and a few speeches have been reproduced in the press or made available on the Internet. Yet official pressures have ensured that for the most part, his voice has been tacitly censored for English speakers, at the same time that it has entered an alternative sphere largely confined to Arabic speakers.

Bin Laden's rise to prominence mirrors the latest phase in the Information Age, the techniques of which he has adroitly mastered. In a 10-year period from 1994 to 2004 that coincides with the emergence of a virtual universe — moving from print to the Internet, from wired to wireless communication around the globe — bin Laden has crafted a series of carefully staged statements designed for new media. They include interviews with Western and Arab journalists, handwritten letters scanned onto discs, faxes, and audiotapes, and above all video recordings distributed via the first independent Arabic-language news outlet, the Qatari satellite television station Al-Jazeera. Those are the texts that were sent to me and proposed as the core of a volume dedicated to making informed critical discussion of Osama's outlook possible for a broader public, one not limited to secretive government agencies and counterterrorism experts....

We learn three things by reading bin Laden in his own words.

First, bin Laden shifts his style after September 11. He retains the same, anti-imperialist agenda but tries to benefit from the forces that 9/11 unleashed. Responding to the U.S.-led war, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, bin Laden becomes more alert to his own role on the world stage. He crafts letters to Muslim audiences with the confidence of a man already writing his own history. The letters reveal him to be a calculating, highly literate polemicist. Stateless, he creates his own image of an Islamic supernation that replaces all current Muslim nation-states. He projects himself as the counterweight to both American hegemony and Arab perfidy. He is the Nasser of the new century, trying to rouse Muslim audiences as much through his rhetoric as his action. He even turns the tables on the Western media. In his view, it is they, not he, who perpetuate terror. "Terror is the most dreaded weapon in the modern age and the Western media are mercilessly using it against their own people," he declares in an October 2001 interview with Al-Ja-zeera. Why is the Western media establishment so anti-humane? Because, in bin Laden's view, "it implants fear and helplessness in the psyche of the people of Europe and the United States. It means that what the enemies of the United States cannot do, its media are doing!"

Second, bin Laden not only assails the Western media, but he also talks over the heads of Arab and Muslim governments. He appeals directly to the youth, those with education and skills who still find themselves on the margins of wealthy societies and under the thumb of corrupt autocrats. He invites the overeducated and undervalued to become the vanguard of a war against religious enemies, Jews and Christians. Through selective citations from the Koran as well as the moral example of the Prophet, he claims that Muslims have always fought against their Abrahamic cousins, and the stakes have never been higher than now. "Resist the current Zionist-Crusader campaign against the umma, or Islamic supernation," he urges young Muslim men, "since it threatens the entire umma, its religion, and its very existence."

Third, to underscore the extremity of the current crisis, bin Laden invokes a new, Islamic form of just-war theory. For both classical Christian and Islamic theorists, as well as for their contemporary successors, just war has revolved around causes for going to war and methods of waging war. Collapsing both into one comprehensive argument, bin Laden defines the current war as a war "against religious enemies" that is nothing less than a war for survival on the part of the Islamic supernation. "We should see events not as isolated incidents," he warns, "but as part of a long chain of conspiracies, a war of annihilation in all senses of the word." Because "the Zionist-Crusaders" have launched World War III, he argues, random, unannounced violence against enemy civilians, including women and children, is now justified in the name of Islam....

If I have learned one enduring lesson from months of reflection on the words of Osama bin Laden, it is that the best defense against World War III is neither censoring nor silencing him but reading what he has actually written and countering his arguments with better ones. He has left a sufficient record that can, and should, be attacked for its deficiencies, its lapses, its contradictions, and, above all, its hopelessness.

Most striking is the absence of any social dimension. Bin Laden never examines the different structural features of the various Muslim societies in which jihad is to be waged: Afghanistan is not Iraq is not Israel/Palestine. Morally, he denounces a host of evils. Some of them — unemployment, inflation, and corruption — are social. But no alternative conception of the ideal society is ever offered. The absence of any social program separates Al Qaeda not just from the Red Army Faction or the Red Brigades, with which it has sometimes mistakenly been compared, but — more significantly — from the earlier wave of radical Islamism in the mid-20th century. Both Sayyid Qutb in Egypt and Abu'l Ala Mawdudi in Pakistan tried to transform their societies into a just Islamic order (nizam-i mustafa, the model order of the Prophet, in Mawdudi's elegant phrase). In place of social objectives, bin Laden accentuates the need for personal sacrifice. He is far more concerned with the glories of martyrdom than with the spoils of victory. Rewards belong essentially to the hereafter.

Bin Laden's is a creed of great purity and intensity, capable of inspiring its followers with a degree of passion and principled conviction that no secular movement in the Arab world has yet matched. At the same time, it is obviously also a narrow and self-limiting one: It can have little appeal for the great mass of Muslims. Like their Jewish and Christian counterparts, contemporary Muslims need more than scriptural dictates, poetic transports, or apodictic slogans to chart their everyday life, whether as individuals or as collective members of a community, local or national....

[N]either ignoring bin Laden nor trying to address his concerns will tackle the root causes of the antipathies that pit the United States and its allies against a resilient, localized network of anti-imperialist Muslim warriors. In what might have been his own epitaph, bin Laden wrote the following poem in February 2003:

Let me be a martyr,
dwelling in a high mountain pass
among a band of knights who,
united in devotion to God,
descend to face armies.

The attraction of knights will continue until such time as more-humane heroes can attract the idealism of Muslim youth. Unlike bin Laden and his Al Qaeda cohorts, future Muslim leaders, if they are to succeed, must work within the state system; their task, unlike his, must be to find a better way not only to liberate Muslim homelands but also to forge a brighter future for those liberated. In the meantime, reading the words of Osama bin Laden is a sober reminder of how hard, yet necessary, it is to wage war against Al Qaeda with the pen — through the press, the Internet, and television — and not just with the sword, whether on the plains of Iraq or in the mountains of Afghanistan.

Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden, edited by Lawrence and published by Verso, should be in bookstores in a few weeks.

Congress Negotiating Defense Bill Torture Ban

For background, see Senate Passes Rider Banning Torture of Detainees. One of Sen. McCain's chief arguments in favor of the ban is that mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo and other US facilities undercuts US standing in the world and makes it harder to gain international support against terrorism.

"Negotiators on Torture Bill Feeling Heat," by Liz Sidoti - AP (Washington), 25 Oct 2005

Congressional negotiators are feeling heat from the White House and constituents as they consider whether to back a Senate-approved ban on torturing detainees in U.S. custody or weaken the prohibition, as the White House prefers.

Led by Vice President     Dick Cheney, the Bush administration is floating a proposal that would allow the president to exempt covert agents outside the Defense Department from the ban.

Meanwhile, some newspapers are calling for lawmakers to support Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record)'s provision that would bar the use of "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" against anyone in U.S. government custody, regardless of where they are held.

In a meeting last week with McCain, R-Ariz., Cheney and     CIA Director Porter Goss suggested language that would exclude clandestine counterterrorism operations overseas by agencies other than the     Pentagon "if the president determines that such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack."

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said Tuesday that the president has "made our position very clear: We do not condone torture, nor would he ever authorize the use of torture."

McCain, a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, said he rejected the administration's proposal because "that would basically allow the CIA to engage in torture."

It is unclear how much influence McCain has in the negotiations to resolve differences between House and Senate versions of the $445 billion defense bill. McCain will not be involved directly in those talks.

Among those leading the negotiations will be Sen. Ted Stevens (news, bio, voting record), R-Alaska, and Rep. Bill Young, R-Fla., who head the defense spending subcommittees....

Top Democratic negotiators — Sen. Daniel Inouye (news, bio, voting record) of Hawaii and Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record) of Pennsylvania — support McCain's language, but their clout is limited because they are in the minority party. Nevertheless, Murtha said he planned to press negotiators not to change the Senate-passed provision.

Lawmakers say Cheney's latest alternative was just one of several that the White House has offered.

This month, the Senate added the ban and the interrogation standards to its defense bill by a 90-9 vote. The administration threatened a veto if the president's ability to conduct the war was restricted....