Following a truck bombing in June 1996 near the Dhahran air base in Saudi Arabia, which killed nineteen US servicemen, the Saudi authorities grudgingly acknowledged the presence of 5,000 American troops on their soil. This figure is widely believed to be only a quarter to a third of the actual total.

That is when bin Laden, then based in Afghanistan, issued his call for a jihad against the Americans in Saudi Arabia. "The presence of the American Crusader forces in Muslim Gulf states...is the greatest danger and [poses] the most serious harm, threatening the world's largest oil reserves," he said.

"The ordinary Saudi knows that his country is the largest oil producer in the world, yet at the same time he is suffering from taxes and bad services," he added. "Our country has become a colony of America. The Saudis now know their real enemy is America." Then, taking advantage of the series of crises between Baghdad and Washington on the question of UN weapons inspectors in Iraq, bin Laden widened his political canvas.

"Despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the Crusader-Zionist alliance...the Americans are once again trying to repeat the horrific massacres," he said as the leader of the International Islamic Front, consisting of militant organizations from Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh, in February 1998. "The Americans' objectives behind these wars are religious and economic; their aim is also to serve the Jews' state, and divert attention away from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there." The eruption of the Palestinian intifada in September 2000 gave further fillip to bin Laden's rhetoric.

In July an Al Qaeda recruiting videotape, released in the Middle East, intercut gory images of Israeli soldiers shooting unarmed Palestinian protesters with Al Qaeda volunteers undergoing military training in Afghanistan.

To counter such propaganda effectively, the United States would need to address certain specific issues urgently. One is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Interestingly, the Bush Administration dropped its insistence on "total quiet" for one week by the Palestinians as a precondition for the peace talks to resume. But Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon rebuffed a personal appeal by President Bush and vetoed Shimon Peres's scheduled meeting with Yasir Arafat on September 16. In response, the least Bush can do is to publicly ban the use of US-made and -supplied F-16s and Apache attack helicopters against the Palestinians. This would make Sharon sit up and take notice. And it would go some way toward pacifying popular opinion in the Muslim world.

Second, there is the question of the presence of American troops on the Arabian Peninsula. Is it absolutely essential to station 170 US fighters, bombers and tank-killers on the soils of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait? Those who say yes, and argue that they are needed to enforce the no-fly zone in southern Iraq, must remember that these planes complement the ones parked on US aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf. There is no military reason why the Pentagon cannot shift the responsibility for monitoring the no-fly zone exclusively to these carriers, and thus deprive bin Laden and company of an effective propaganda tool.

Most fundamentally, the United States must sensitize itself to the feelings and perceptions of Muslims everywhere. President Bush's use of the word "crusade"--a highly loaded and negative term from the Muslim viewpoint, referring to the Christian crusades intoMuslim lands, and mirroring bin Laden's labeling of Americansas crusaders--illustrates the enormous gap that exists between the White House and the Islamic world. One way for Bush to counter the rising popular animosity toward the United States in the Islamic world would be to appoint a Muslim American to a high-profile Administration post.

Those who argue that now is not the time for Washington to review its Middle Eastern policies for fear of appearing to appease the terrorists miss the fundamental point: Cause precedes effect. To remove the symptom you must tackle the root cause--and the sooner the better.

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