Arab commentators marked the anniversary of September 11th by emphasising that an already wide gulf in perceptions between the Arab world and the US was wider since the atrocities in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
An editorial in the Jordan Times said that opportunities to mend Arab-US relations had been "squandered". Washington had not addressed Arab alienation caused by the crisis in Palestine and the lack of political and economic progress which prompted 19 young Arabs to mount the September 11th operation against the US.
Instead, the "jingoistic Bush administration" bombed Afghanistan and lectured the Palestinians on democracy while they were trying to "cope with [an Israeli] barrage of bullets, bombs and bulldozers". The imminent adoption by Congress of the Syria Accountability Act imposing sanctions on Damascus for backing the Lebanese Hizbullah movement and Palestinian resistance groupings and an attack on Iraq can only increase Arab rage, encouraging extremists, the paper said.
While Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, the effective ruler of the kingdom, publicly acknowledged that young Saudis were responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, many Saudis are still in denial.
The editor of Arab News, Khaled al-Maena, reflected this popular rejection of culpability in a front-page article: "The fact that those responsible ... were allegedly our fellow Muslims and perhaps even our fellow Saudis should make us stop and ponder." Such doubts were widely expressed, even though the lead story in the country's press was a statement from the Defence Minister, Prince Sultan, clearing the kingdom of blame. "Individuals, not the country, were responsible," he asserted.
Saudi political analyst Jamal Khashoggi, writing in Beirut's Daily Star, rejected this approach. He said his countrymen had to face the fact that Saudis "whose names and addresses we know" took part in the attacks. "The most pressing issue now is to ensure that our children can never be influenced by extremist ideas like those 15 Saudis who were misled into hijacking four planes that fine September day, piloting them, and us, straight into the jaws of hell."
While the Saudi press was wary of mentioning Osama bin Laden, the former Saudi blamed by the US for the attacks, Kuwait's al-Rai al-'Am published a survey revealing that 74 per cent of more than 15,000 respondents residing in the emirate consider bin Laden a "hero" rather than a "criminal".
Syria's official daily, Tishreen, looked at developments over the past year from a regional perspective. "It is no exaggeration to say that the Arabs ... have paid the highest price for the September 11th terrorist attacks ... [Israeli Prime Minister] Ariel Sharon has managed to convince the United States that the struggle of the Palestinian people [for their homeland] is terrorism and that his fight is the same as that of [US President] George Bush against terrorism."
The paper said that the combination of this analogy with "unconditional US support for Israel" had "provoked feelings of hostility" towards the US in the Arab world.
Looking to the future rather than the past, many papers focused on today's address by Mr Bush to the UN General Assembly.
Jordanian columnist Tareq Mussarwa, writing in al-Rai, said Mr Bush could be expected to tell the world "whether you agree or not, we've decided to invade Iraq", while Sarkis Naoum, commenting in Beirut's al-Nahar, warned that Mr Bush was "setting a trap" for Iraq.
