Those are some of the revelations in a series of letters the 33-year-old Kasi has written from his jail cell in Fairfax County, Va., where a judge Friday sentenced him to death by lethal injection.

Five years ago this Sunday, Kasi sprayed a line of cars outside CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., with AK-47 rifle fire, killing two agency employees and wounding three other people. He pleaded not guilty but was convicted last November, with a jury recommendation that he be put to death.

Kasi did not testify in his trial and has never spoken to the media. But in a series of 10 letters Kasi began writing to this reporter in December, he described his bitterness at the United States government for bombing Iraq and his life on the lam after the Jan. 25, 1993, shootings and said his only regret today is that he didn’t kill some CIA higher-ups instead.

“I am not proud of what happened. I feel sad (that) the people who came under attack were not powerful people … I wish powerful people would have come under the attack, then it would have been better,” he wrote.

“I wanted to shoot [then-CIA Director) James Woolsey but was not able to find him, or his timing of coming or going to CIA. If I had found (former CIA Director Robert) Gates I would have attacked him, as these are people who make up policies for CIA or U.S. government."

The Washington Post reported last year that CIA security agents had detected someone stalking Gates' suburban Virginia house a few weeks before the 1993 killings, with some speculating that it might have been Kasi. But the defendant said it wasn't him. "I never went to his house," he wrote.

Kasi also rejected the allegation by Gen. Hamid Gul, the retired head of Pakistani intelligence, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), that he had once worked for the CIA and had perhaps turned on the agency in an act of fury. Gul, who worked closely with the CIA during the Afghan War, insisted to this reporter in an interview in Rawalpindi last August that "Aimal Kasi was an agent of the CIA ... He was working inside of Pakistan and outside of Pakistan."

Kasi, however, declared, "I did not work for CIA." During the war in Afghanistan, he wrote, "I had mujahedeen (Afghan guerrilla) friends who worked with the ISI people in bringing (CIA-supplied) arms from military bases in Pakistan to the mujahedeen arms depot (in Afghanistan). I sometimes used to go with them. That was all."

Kasi got into the United States after buying false papers in Karachi and altering his name to "Kansi," he said. He later bought a fake green card in Miami.

Kasi denied he had any contacts with Iraqi, Iranian, Syrian or any other foreign terrorists, as has been alleged. He wrote that he was surprised that he hadn't been killed during his assault, which started when he stepped out of his car in morning rush-hour traffic and started firing at cars waiting to turn into the CIA's main gate in Langley, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

"I used to pass this area almost every day and knew these two left-turning lanes (were) mostly people who work for CIA," he wrote me.

"The attack on CIA was my idea alone ... Nobody in Pakistan knew about it. I alone planned everything and did it."

Kasi says the idea for the attack "started coming into my mind" after he purchased an AK-47 from a local Virginia gun dealer. After that, the planned attack was "more important than any other thing to me."

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In his letters, Kasi says the seeds of the idea were planted while he watched U.S. warplanes bomb Iraqi troops as they withdrew from Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. "Once the Iraqis withdrew from Kuwait then the continued bombings of Iraq were not justified," he wrote. "I did not want to become famous. I wanted to punish those who do wrong things against Muslim countries like Iraq."

While Kasi admits to the shootings, he disputes a key part of the prosecution's case: that he shot one of his victims, CIA employee Frank Darling, in the back, and then shot him again in the head.

"I started shooting at cars in front of me. When the shooting finished I was returning back to my Isuzu pickup ... I shot at him from front. I did not [go] back and to the back of his car. I shot him several times from the front. I sat in my pickup and drove away,” he wrote in one letter.

In another, he explained: “[Darling's] car was the last one on the left [of the] left turning lanes and he was looking at me … I looked at him before shooting … There was a child also in the car, in the front seat standing [and] looking at me. He was I think maybe five or six years old. I didn’t see the wife of Darling in the car.”

Actually there was no child in the car. FBI spokeswoman Susan Lloyd speculated that Kasi mistook the head of Darling’s wife, Judy, who was trying to get under the dashboard of their Volkswagen Golf, for a child.

Kasi did not think he would get away after the shootings. “I thought I will be arrested, or maybe killed in a shootout with CIA guards or police,” Kasi said. Instead, he just hopped back into his Isuzu pickup truck and drove off, leaving the bloody carnage in his rear-view mirror.

Kasi painted a rosy picture of his four-and-a-half-year sojourn in Afghanistan after the killings, saying he was welcomed as a “hero” by fundamentalist Muslims who took power in May 1992, including then-Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

“Would you believe I rode with the prime minister in his black Mercedes to a place of worship — I did!” Kasi wrote. “I was respected by the people there as a hero, and in the four years there not a single person told me you did a wrong thing by attacking the CIA. They all said you did a great job.”

Kasi spent most of his time in the border regions near Pakistan, traveling with and protected by his fellow Pushtun tribesman. One day he was sitting under a tree listening to his radio when he heard a report that the man wanted in the CIA killings had been captured.

“First, I got surprised. Who have they arrested? And then I started laughing with myself and saying to myself, I am sitting under this tree and they are saying the man has been arrested. It was real funny — and I enjoyed hearing such news.” On another occasion he heard that two men had been arrested in Quetta by the FBI and taken to Islamabad. “They had arrested the wrong Aimal. After a week or 10 days they came back home to Quetta.”

An FBI agent who worked on the case disputed this element of Kasi’s account. “There were reports like that all the time over there. I stopped reading them.”

As the years passed, Kasi drifted from place to place in Afghanistan, usually not staying more than two weeks in any one spot, dreaming of a permanent safe haven somewhere — perhaps in Iran, perhaps in the Muslim republics of the former Soviet Union. He’d been to Iran in 1984, he told me, but didn’t find much to admire in the Iranian revolution.

He also fantasized about going to Greece, getting a job on a ship and slipping back into the U.S. to hit the CIA again.

“I’d take a taxi to CIA headquarters, and when the taxi reached the same lights and the left-turning lanes outside CIA headquarters, I will jump out of taxi and shoot some more CIA officials,” he told me, then “escape in one of the dead official’s car.”

“These were the thoughts that used to come into my mind.”

Kasi began to believe that the U.S. and Pakistani security services had given up on trying to find him. He often crossed into Pakistan to buy newspapers or see friends and “nobody ever interrogated me,” he says. “All they ask[ed] was who are you, and I will say I am an Afghan … and if they want to see my I.D. I will show them a false I.D.,” which he said were easy to get. If a guard balked, he’d give him “100 rupees” — less than three cents — and waltz through.

His life on the lam began to unravel in June 1997, however, when some fellow Pushtun tribesmen — reportedly persuaded by millions of dollars in American reward money — inveigled him into an alleged scheme to smuggle Russian electronic goods into Pakistan.

“The promises were doing a business deal, buying a large amount of Russian goods in Afghanistan, selling them in (Pakistan),” he wrote, adding that he was also promised an “I.D. and legal documents (from) this area.”

Last June 15, Kasi was lured
to Dera Ghazi Khan, a dusty bazaar town in central Pakistan, and booked a room in a hotel. At 4 a.m., a team of FBI agents busted into his room, nabbed him and flew him back to the United States without an extradition hearing. The move caused howls of outrage in Pakistan, and the U.S. government has never admitted it caught Kasi there.

Speculation was rife in Pakistan that relatives of Farook Leghari, then Pakistan’s president, had helped set up Kasi. But Kasi refused to identify anyone, saying, “People will get killed.”

“I want to make it clear (that) the people who tricked me … were Pushtuns, they were owners of land in the Leghari and Khosa clan areas in Dera Ghazi Khan,” but “I will never name them,” he wrote.

Kasi’s likely death sentence has hardly dampened his fury. But he insisted that “I am not against the USA or the American people. I am against the policies of the U.S. government toward Islamic countries or toward Muslims.”

“A lot of young people in Pakistan,” he said, “think mostly the same.”

A major symbolic clue for Iranians had to do with the interviewer herself. Amanpour is a source of pride for Iranians. As an award-winning journalist of Iranian extraction, her mere presence in the presidential palace constituted an important statement about the Iranian government’s liberalizing attitudes toward women in positions of importance.

More important, she wore a head covering for the interview — but significantly did not cover her hair entirely, as would be required of a woman in Iran (where women’s hair is considered erotically provocative according to conservative Islamic views).

Islamic officials might have been able to insist that she conform fully to the most conservative dress standards as a condition of the interview, but they clearly did not. Iranian citizens will read the fact that she only partially observes the letter of the female dress code as a sign of liberalization on the part of their own government. It will be interesting to see if Iranian women attempt to follow Amanpour’s example in head-covering — such small changes in behavior often presage much larger shifts in social attitudes and policy in Iran.

As for President Khatami, although he was in full clerical garb, his language was remarkable. He was relaxed and spoke in nearly colloquial Persian, in contrast to the highly Arabicized, convoluted Persian, intoned in sermonlike pronouncements, that has long been a principal characteristic of Iran’s religious leadership.

In Iran, rhetorical styles are keys to political attitudes. A politician talking like a cleric advertises his conservative leanings. By eschewing such language, Khatami identified himself as something new — a cleric who doesn’t sound like one. Overall, Khatami handled Amanpour’s questions like a seasoned diplomat. He was frank, forthcoming and not condescending. One hopes that U.S. foreign policy analysts noticed that this leader is qualitatively different from those who have preceded him.

Washington also needs to pay attention to Khatami’s subtle message about how a potential U.S.-Iran rapprochement could proceed. U.S. officials reacted strongly against Khatami’s call for “people to people” rather than government-to-government diplomacy at this stage. But what Khatami is really saying is that Iran will not enter into communication with the U.S. government as a lower-status partner. Iran sees the
relationship between the two nations before the revolution of 1978-79 as
one of patron (U.S.) to client (Iran), all engineered by the Shah without
any Iranian public input. The current regime vehemently rejects this
relationship and Khatami must defend this position in order to
retain his own power.

This means that Iran will respond to U.S. accusations of wrongdoing and support of terrorism only with denial and counter-accusations, because to accept the American
accusations, even as a topic for discussion, places the U.S. in the
higher-status position.

On the other hand, Khatami provided a way to talk about
matters of mutual concern without pressing the hot button of status
difference. In the interview, he brought out analogies in U.S.
history for all of the bad behavior of which the Iranians have been
accused. In effect he was saying: “We can discuss our mutual pasts in a
common framework without needing to determine who was the wrongdoer.”

In the same way, Khatami’s call for people-to-people contacts was a way
of opening discussion between Americans and Iranians without confronting
the status-guilt problems that loom in government-to-government contacts
favored by Washington officials.

In short, Khatami wants to eschew the need to admit guilt and
place Iran in a lower status position as conditions for renewed dialogue with
the U.S. There is precedent for this in the business world, where
companies sued for liability quietly fix the problems they have with
consumers “out of court,” without admitting guilt.

This could be a model for making progress with Iran. A mediated
dialogue (Saudi Arabia has wisely volunteered to serve as mediator), no
requirements for admission of guilt and a commitment to fix global
problems of mutual interest could put the two nations on the road to
healthy communication. As a start, the U.S. would be wise to graciously
endorse the Iranian leader’s suggestion to wide “people-to-people” contacts.

Critics have pointed out that Amanpour didn’t ask the really tough questions, for example concerning the fatwa against writer Salman Rushdie.
But her interview with Khatami made a
significant step toward establishing just such non-governmental dialogue.
And for Iranians, the message is quite clear: Iranian officials no longer take
a negative view of talking to Americans. If nothing else results from
this event, conveying this message will have been a significant
achievement.

Most writers rallied to the side of Rushdie and his publishers. But a number of them decided that it would be boring to say all the obvious things. Instead, they criticized Rushdie for offending against the tenets and emotions of a great religion. They implied that criticism of Islam was a Western, elitist, colonialist practice. They accused him of caring more for royalties than for human life and of insisting on a paperback edition rather than acting to calm the passions aroused by the hardback. And they said, darkly, that “he must have known what he was doing.”

These were the positions of British writers Roald Dahl, John Berger, Paul Johnson, Hugh Trevor-Roper and John le Carri, among others. At the time, Rushdie was rather busy finding a place to stay, and didn’t get around to replying to each in turn. But nor did he forget, as a recent rancorous correspondence in the Guardian of London has demonstrated.

Le Carri, angered by the suggestion in the New York Times Book Review that the central character in his latest thriller, “The Tailor of Panama,” was an anti-Semitic “Judas” caricature, had made a speech to a Jewish organization in his own defense and given it to the Guardian to reprint. In it, he bemoaned the tendency of some Jews to equate all criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, and denounced said tendency as a form of “correctspeak.” A day or so later came a letter from Salman Rushdie saying, in effect, that now that le Carri knew what it was like to face a mild form of religious correctness, would he care to change his mind about the real thing?

Le Carri, it turned out, did not care. He repeated all the charges listed above, including the one about the pro-Rushdie forces evincing “colonial” attitudes. He added that he had been motivated in his call for a moratorium on the paperback of “The Satanic Verses” by concern for the “mailroom girls” who might get their hands blown off. This solicitude, he loftily implied, was more elevated than any concern for Rushdie’s earnings. (Contempt for mere royalties is new for le Carri but then, so is the idea that the author of “Midnight’s Children” and “The Jaguar’s Smile” is an apologist for Western-style colonialism.)

At this point, I should declare, I myself wrote a letter to the Guardian inquiring whether le Carri would have been satisfied by a free edition of the book, given out from trestles in the street. As for the “girls” in the mailroom, none had been harmed in eight years’ worth of defiance of the fatwa. Instead, rather inspiringly, the staffs of Crown Books and B. Dalton had rebelled against their respective managements’ proposal to drop the book as a security risk. This rather dented le Carri’s suggestion that Rushdie’s defenders were all members of the elite. To compare their brave conduct to blasphemy was, I suggested, like relieving yourself in your hat and then stuffing the hat on your head. (I now slightly regret the last bit, because it gave later correspondents the opportunity to change the subject.)

Le Carré returned to the fray, repeating his point about there being no “God-given” right to criticize monotheism free of charge. (Take away the unintentionally funny phrase “God-given” and Le Carré seems to be saying that there is no right to offend the religious at all.) And his old friend, journalist and author William Shawcross, contributed a whole column in which he said that if any book of his had led to such an explosion of violence, he would have asked for the paperback “to be put on hold, in the hope that passions would die before people.”

I wonder about that last bit. Shawcross wrote a fairly critical book about Henry Kissinger, “Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia,” published in 1979. Had Kissinger threatened to have Shawcross killed, would he have felt that the proper response would be to limit the circulation of the offending book? And how would he react if people went around saying that, given Kissinger’s murderous record, Shawcross had no right to be surprised at the treatment he was receiving? Shawcross is the chairman of Article 19, a British organization that combats censorship. The officers of its international board wrote a letter effectively disowning him and making the rather obvious point that:

“It is not acceptable that Ayatollah Khomeini or his successors in the Iranian government should determine what works of fiction may be written or published internationally, in particular under the threat of extreme violence. To have delayed publication of the paperback would have meant acquiescing in terrorism.”

Of course, there have been victims. Several people were killed in riots led by supporters of the Ayatollah’s line. Hitoshi Igarashi, Japanese translator of “The Satanic Verses,” was murdered. Ettore Capriolo, the Italian translator, was severely wounded in another attack, as was William Nygaard, the Norwegian publisher. They all did what they did as volunteers, despite the fatwa. At least they have been spared the sneer that they, too, “knew what they were doing.” The idea that these crimes are the responsibility of Salman Rushdie, on the face of it a thought too absurd and disgraceful to merit debate, is the logical inference to be drawn from the view of many supposed “intellectuals.”

On one level, Rushdie certainly knew what he was doing. There has been, for some time, an argument within Islam about the literal truth of the Koran and the fundamentalist application of its teachings. Men and women in the Islamic world risk their lives every day in the course of this debate. Many of them, including Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz — himself the victim of a murderous assault by clerical fanatics — have issued a volume titled “For Rushdie,” in which they state that the affair of “The Satanic Verses” is the defining issue separating them from the dogmatists. Signatories include most of the writers worth reading in Iran, Palestine, Lebanon and Algeria. (And le Carré wrote that the friends of Rushdie operated from “armchair” positions of “colonial” safety …)

But, in deciding consciously to employ supposed holy writ for literary purposes, Rushdie could not possibly have predicted the fatwa. Nobody could have. The published view of the mullahs is that his novel is a co-production of international Zionism and various intelligence circles. How can you anticipate the thinking of minds like that? And why should anyone be asked to try to appease the self-evidently unappeasable?

Even had he known, I would argue that Rushdie would have had every right to produce a blasphemous provocation if he so chose. I would also note that no other Islamic authority, political or religious, has endorsed the fatwa. To describe the death-threat ravings of a senile cleric as the view of the whole Islamic world is a none-too-subtle denigration of a great religion, offered by those who hypocritically claim to be extra “sensitive” to such insults.

Most bizarre of all is the idea, put up by the supposed defenders of those “mailroom girls,” that the safest course is to refuse to publish a paperback that mailroom girls could afford to buy. There was a time when the Bible was not supposed to be translated into the vernacular lest the profane rabble get hold of it and review it for themselves. William Tyndale was strangled and burned for his English edition of the holy scripture. Indeed, most landmark struggles for free speech have been against those foes who claim a divine warrant. In our time, “The Satanic Verses” happens to be the test case. It might not be the test case everyone would have picked, but it is the test case nonetheless.

I am grateful to le Carré and to others who refuse to see this, for keeping the argument alive and for preventing it from becoming another pious mantra.

Last August I walked through the political environment out of which Kansi sprang when I went to Pakistan to investigate his life and eventual capture by a team of FBI, CIA and Pakistani commandos. Bumping along a stretch of broken concrete in the broiling heat of central Pakistan, my driver, Ahmad, told me a story.

“You know how Pakistan was listed No. 2 in world corruption last year?” he asked. On the horizon, like a runaway prop from “A Passage to India,” the half-century-old Lahore-Karachi Express chugged by, its passengers hanging from the windows and riding on the roofs.

Yes, I said to Ahmad, I’d heard something about that. Nigeria was the worst, right?

“Actually,” Ahmad said, his eyes dancing and black mustache twitching, “Pakistan was No. 1, but we bribed the Nigerians to go first.”

When they’re not joking, Pakistanis blame the U.S. for this rather dubious achievement. Corruption, along with a flood of heroin and AK-47s, they say, are Pakistan’s principal rewards for collaborating with Washington during the Afghanistan war of 1980-89, when the CIA equipped and quarterbacked a coalition of Islamic fundamentalist rebel groups against the Soviet Red Army. With the Red Army long gone, radical Islam of the most extreme kind has triumphed in Afghanistan. And it is becoming an increasing factor in Pakistani cities, where rival Sunni and Shia extremists battle it out with leftover AK-47s.

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At the same time-anti-government, and anti-American, mullahs are raising the decibel level in the mosques, much like the movement that toppled the Shah of Iran almost 20 years ago. It was out of this maelstrom, rather than an organized terrorist cell, that last week’s deadly attack on four American oil company workers in Karachi most likely came. The murders were claimed by something calling itself the Aimal Secret Committee, in honor of the defendant in Virginia. But intelligence sources know of no such organized group and believe it was almost certainly the work of an ad-hoc gang of Muslim hotheads cashing in on Kansi’s conviction.

As a result of the murders, the Virginia jury was sequestered under armed guard, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright pointedly pressed the Pakistani government to capture the killers — without any evident success so far — and the State Department has issued a traveler’s advisory warning American tourists, business people and soldiers to beware of
“random acts of anti-American violence, such as drive-by shootings, kidnappings or bombings.”

The phrase “random acts” is accurate. Organized international terrorism has been in steep decline over the past decade. Last year there were 296 terrorist attacks, down from 665 in 1987, according to Larry Johnson, a former State Department terrorism specialist. The number of terrorist groups operating now is about half of that in the mid-1980s, down to 40 or so. Four groups are responsible for 90 percent of the casualties — Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, Hamas, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah and Egyptian fundamentalists, who murdered more than 60 foreign tourists and Egyptians last Monday.

“The threat of terrorism is so amorphous and so difficult to pin down that it’s easy to exaggerate it,” says Johnson. There is a terrorist threat to America, Johnson says. It’s just not coming from terrorist groups so much as freelance gunmen like Kansi, or ad hoc groups like the one Ramzi Yousef patched together to bomb the World Trade Center in Manhattan.

Kansi grew up in Quetta, the southern base for the CIA’s war in Afghanistan, and may even have been recruited by the CIA at some point, according to retired Gen. Hamid Gul, Pakistan’s former spy chief, whom I interviewed in Rawalpindi last summer. Kansi has said he was motivated by America’s enmity toward Islam, but
Gul suggested Kansi might have had a personal motive in attacking CIA employees. The CIA flatly denied any association with Kansi.

While the CIA, FBI and Pentagon have recently turned their attention — and millions of dollars — to the threat of state-sponsored nuclear, chemical and biological terrorism, Johnson considers lone actors like Kansi a more lethal threat to American security.

“To an extent that it’s an act of personal vengeance,” Johnson said of Kansi’s assault, “it’s even more dangerous. It de-links politics and violence, and there’s no telling what they’ll do, and no limits on what they’ll do.”

Johnson compares Kansi to American anarchists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — little men who made big statements with guns and bombs. “Politics imposes restraints, because the ultimate goal is to be in control,” Johnson said. “Kansi didn’t care about that … It’s sort of an old form of anarchism.”

And nearly impossible to deter or prevent. Current thinking in counter-terrorism circles is that rewards are the most effective tools to catch fugitives — after the fact. More than $3 million was paid out to snitches and Pakistani officials to get Kansi, according to reports.

Saddam Hussein or Iran’s theocrats, on the other hand, are loathe to sponsor terrorist attacks on U.S. soil that can be traced to them, according to most terrorism specialists. As one former CIA man put it to me, “They’ve got addresses in Baghdad and Tehran where we can hit back.” Not so the wandering man with a grudge.

The teeming slums of Pakistan, like the refugee camps of Gaza or the tenements of Cairo, are breeding grounds for future Aimal Kansis. Just after dawn last August I was driving out of Lahore, capital of the old Punjab. Outside my window scores of families in rags were awakening in the dust and dirt of the city’s parks to another bleak day of hustling for food and water. I turned to Ahmad and asked whether militant Islam held much of an attraction for these homeless, hungry people.

“When the mullahs give their speeches,” Ahmad said, “they show up and listen. They nod their heads and sometimes yell, ‘Death to America!’ with everybody else. But most of them just go home afterward.”

Then his brown eyes fixed on me, seriously. “But Aimal Kansi, you know, he didn’t just go home. And there are many more like him these days. Many more.”

And from here, the Clinton administration is being seen — even by its closest friends — as a muscle-bound naif, lacking the courage of its own often-stated political convictions to secure a true and lasting peace.

Arabs have not forgotten America’s pledge in 1991, after being helped by Arab allies to subdue a belligerent Iraq, to make an evenhanded effort toward an Arab-Israeli settlement. Here in Morocco, one of America’s oldest and closest allies in the region, that promise was symbolized by the 1994 Middle East Economic Summit in Casablanca, a gathering of Israeli and Arab leaders and business people that translated the hopeful rhetoric of regional peace and economic cooperation into something tangible.

Three years after the Casablanca summit, Arab expectations lie dashed. The only tangible result of the Gulf War victory seems to be the unrelieved suffering of the Iraqi people. No Arab leader trusts or supports Saddam Hussein, but a strong sense of Arab and Muslim solidarity compels them to side with their powerless Iraqi brethren. As a result, President Clinton’s bid for support for the use of military force to punish Saddam for his noncompliance with United Nations weapons inspectors is getting a very cool reception here. Even Kuwait, the victim of Saddam’s 1990 aggression, will not support the use of more U.S. force against Iraq.

Instead, Arabs are asking, where is the American president’s outrage over Israel’s dismal record of noncompliance in the Middle East peace accords? Ever since Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu assumed power in 1996, the U.S.-sponsored process has faltered and stalled, largely as a result of Israel’s continued construction of Jewish settlements, the wholesale demolition of Arab houses and other provocative acts. Netanyahu’s botched attempt to assassinate a Hamas political leader in Amman last month outraged Jordan’s moderate King Hussein, once Israel’s staunchest defender in the Arab world.

What has the Clinton administration done to protect its investment in Middle East peace, Arabs ask, other than to slap Israel with the mildest of rebukes? It should have come as no surprise to the White House that despite its best efforts only a smattering of low-level Arab officials attended this month’s Middle East Economic Summit in Qatar. Such regional gatherings, with all their attendant political symbolism, cannot be divorced from the glaring absence of any meaningful peace process, Arab officials say. To attend, they add, would have just given Netanyahu another concession he could pocket without offering anything in return.

Here in Morocco, the prevalence of such anger and frustration toward the United States is noteworthy. In 1777, before the outcome of the American Revolution was clear, Morocco became the first country in the world to recognize American independence, the foundation for the longest alliance with the United States in the entire Arab world. Before Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made his historic journey to Jerusalem in 1977, it was Morocco’s King Hassan who hosted the secret Israeli-Egyptian talks that made the visit possible. In addition to hosting the first Middle East economic summit, Hassan established low-level diplomatic relations with Israel and welcomed a permanent Israeli representative in Rabat. Other than the U.S. ambassador, no other foreign envoy enjoys such access to the Moroccan monarch.

The man who put together the Casablanca summit is Andre Azulay, Hassan’s top economic counselor, an elegantly tailored, French-speaking Morrocan Jew with close friends and family in Israel. “Today, I feel like all my work has been in vain,” he told Salon. “You can see the distance from where we were before, how everything has been broken and hurt. Today, because of Israel’s policies, there is no more momentum.” Azulay pauses, then adds: “We have special credentials in this matter. When we say that the peace process is in trouble, people have to listen to us.”

King Hassan places the blame for that lack of momentum squarely at Clinton’s feet. During a meeting last month in which U.S. Middle East envoy Dennis Ross urged the king to send a delegation to the Qatar economic summit, Hassan angrily accused the Clinton administration of blithely standing by while Netanyahu was allowed to backslide on one commitment after another, and of violating Washington’s solemn promise to remain evenhanded.

“This is a guy who went out on a limb for peace long before any other Arab leader,” departing U.S. Ambassador Marc Ginsberg told Salon. “He can’t understand why the United States won’t protect its own investment in the region, why it’s letting Netanyahu change the rules of the game. This is a guy who doesn’t like the look of the limb anymore. It’s a limb where he can get shot.”

The same goes for other moderate Arab leaders who realize that the future depends on their ability to lift their people out of the crushing poverty that fuels Islamic extremism. How do they explain the lack of dividends from what is being seen in the coffeehouses and bazaars as a blatantly unfair peace process — a point the extremists are quick to exploit?

They are also looking with increasing scorn at Clinton’s apparent reluctance to get tougher with Netanyahu. According to a recent poll, more than 80 percent of American Jews support further Israeli withdrawals from the occupied West Bank land to further the peace process. Moreover, American Jews, 90 percent of whom belong to the Reform or Conservative denominations, are outraged over Netanyahu’s plans to support a proposed religious law that will effectively disenfranchise them in Israel. And when the chairman of the congressional appropriations committee warned Netanyahu’s government that the $3 billion of U.S. aid would be cut unless it handed over an American Jew suspected of a murder outside Washington, D.C., there was barely a peep of protest either in Congress or among American Jewish groups. So, goes the thinking here, isn’t it time for Clinton to take on an Israeli government that not only inspires contempt almost everywhere, but even speaks for less and less Jews?

A tougher U.S. posture toward Netanyahu would be greatly welcomed in the dispirited Arab world. There are risks: American Jews and Congress could circle the wagons (and hurt Al Gore’s chances in 2000). But after President Clinton’s constant reminders about the need for the Arabs to take risks for peace, he would be well-advised to take a few of his own. Lest the kind of sideshow seen this week in Luxor become the main event.