Mideast Media Gripped by Another Horrible Image

The Saudi Gazette, the English-language version of the country's most popular Arabic newspaper, said "The danger now is that the spiral of violence will increase as each side attempts to revenge itself on the other for the latest outrage."

The results, they predict, will be a further breakdown of security in Iraq.

The United States is in Iraq "for the foreseeable future." Yet U.S. forces appear "unable to provide the internal security the overwhelming majority of Iraqi people so evidently crave and foreign contractors so evidently need. … This places American combat troops in the front line for internal policing something for which they are not trained."

The Gulf News in the United Arab Emirates called Berg's decapitation "a truly barbaric act that served no cause except the brutish bloodlust of his executioners."

They lamented the effect on Iraqi detainees.

"Just when the world's attention was focusing on Washington and the plight of the Iraqi prisoners, this atrocity took the spotlight away from those who are suffering in detention. . . . One brutality does not forgive another.

"There is justifiable anger at the behavior of American forces in Iraq but atrocious acts will never give comfort to those who have suffered in detention, nor do anything but add to the despair of the Iraqi people."

Islam Online, based in Doha, Qatar, reported that the Islamic militant group Hezbollah had condemned the beheading as "an ugly crime that flouted the tenets of Islam". But al-Manar, the Web site of the Lebanese television station run by Hezbollah, did not run a story on Berg on Thursday. The station did report that "Israel" (and al-Manar always puts the name of the Jewish state in quotes) was negotiating with Palestinian authorities for the return of remains of the soldiers killed in the roadside bombing.

"Not only did an innocent civilian lose his life in appalling circumstances," they said. "But the Arab and Muslim worlds have been dealt a severe body blow by the same blade that ended Berg's life."