CAIRO, Sept. 13--President Bush won quick public support from key Arab governments today for his declaration of an international campaign against terrorism. But moving beyond support to participation in any military response may prove difficult in a region where organizations classified as terrorist in Washington are viewed by many people as armies fighting for a just cause.
Officials in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan pledged that their intelligence and police services will help U.S. investigators seeking to determine who was behind Tuesday's synchronized attacks in New York and Washington. U.S. officials have said their suspicions are focused on the Afghanistan-based network of the accused Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden and, according to U.S. reports, investigators are interviewing men who are apparently of Saudi Arabian and Egyptian origin and may be bin Laden followers.
Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as well as Jordan, have extensive experience monitoring and fighting extremist groups and will likely be asked to participate in helping unravel who was involved.
"We agree that this is an attack against us all," said Jordanian Foreign Minister Abdulillah Khatib, whose country in late 1999 foiled a plot by bin Laden associates to attack hotels and tourist sites on the eve of millennium celebrations. But he added: "We will need to exert effort to draw lines between the issues – terrorism and the struggle for independence on the part of different people. It is not an easy thing."
Having spent much of the 1990s battling a violent Islamic uprising, Egypt maintains sometimes oppressive oversight of organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic Group. President Hosni Mubarak's government has frequently complained that western nations, Britain in particular, offer easy asylum to individuals convicted by its military courts of terrorist crimes.
An Egyptian government spokesman, Nabil Osman, said that if the United States, NATO and the west in general are serious about crushing such movements, his country is ready to help.
"Terrorism is becoming more sophisticated and much more ferocious. Individually, no one will be able to combat it, and what happened in America proves that," Osman said. "We have been victims ourselves."
Throughout the Arab world, denunciations of the attacks have mounted in the last two days, with secular leaders, Muslim clerics and even fundamentalist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood denouncing what happened as an offense to Islam.
"If such attacks were carried out by a Muslim...then we, in the name of our religion, deny the act and incriminate the perpetrator," said Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi, a Qatari-based conservative cleric who has been among the most outspoken critics of U.S. support for Israel.
But regional analysts and government officials agreed there may be limits to what Arab states can or are willing to do on America's behalf at a time when shock over the attacks is offset by anger over American support for Israel and what is seen as unjust punishment against Iraq.
Even as they pledged help in figuring out what happened in New York and Washington this week, regional allies stopped short of commitments for future military action. This is, they noted, different than the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, which threatened the sovereignty of an Arab nation and prompted Egypt, Saudi Arabia and even antagonists like Syria to join a coalition to repel President Saddam Hussein's army.
While Afghanistan's Taliban government is not popular among most Arab states, it could be difficult for Arab forces to join in any U.S.-led military action against another Muslim state. This is particularly true at a time when Arabs feel the United States has ignored their pleas for help in stopping what is seen as an unjust use of U.S.-supplied military power by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank.
"The dilemma of the Arab leaders is on one hand to be able to prove to the U.S. that they are sincere friends, without creating too much resentment among their own public," said Walid Kazziha, a political scientist at the American University of Cairo. "To put it as good versus evil empties the whole thing from its political context...What will be required is intelligence, and that will be provided...but it will be support short of active military involvement."
Despite the massive scenes of destruction in New York, therefore, fighting what Bush has termed the "first war of the 21st century" may require some difficult choices in places like Riyadh, the Saudi capital. For one thing, Saudi Arabia is one of only three countries – Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates are the others – to have diplomatic relations with the Taliban government, which professes a strain of Islam similar to the dominant Wahhabi Islam in Saudi Arabia.
Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador in Washington, said the kingdom stands ready to help the United States in any way it can. But he declined to be specific, particularly on the use of military facilities on Saudi soil.
The Saudi royal family's generosity toward ultraconservative religious institutes may come under scrutiny as a possible source of funding for Islamic militants. Similarly, Saudi Arabia and Yemen have in the past set limits on how deeply they will let the west probe into their societies: both have frustrated attempts by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to fully understand the networks behind terrorist incidents like the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Aden harbor last October and the 1996 explosion at the Khobar Towers apartment building that killed 19 U.S. servicemen.
When U.S. courts issued their own indictments in the Khobar bombing earlier this year, Saudi officials denounced what they viewed as interference in an internal matter. Likewise, U.S. officials have been frustrated at Yemen's inability – some regard it as a refusal – to investigate possible connections between high-level Yemeni officials and bin Laden.
Dismantling bin Laden's organization or even toppling the Taliban would leave untouched groups like Hezbollah, the Shiite Muslim movement in Lebanon; the Palestinians' Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, in Gaza and the West Bank; orDamascus-based organizations such as the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine that have contributed to Palestinian attacks on Israel.
Pushing into that frontier would put America directly in conflict with Syria, Iran and others who support armed struggle against Israel. It would also clash straight-on with mainstream Arab sentiment that backs Palestinian efforts to end Israeli occupation in the West Bank and Gaza.
