I believe Bou Aardvark is quite right, first of all, in taking a very cautious stance on the implications of al Qaeda apparently doing more public communicating and apparently less bombs. His comment following I think is largely spot on:

I've always argued that Arab and Muslim opinion is diverse and contested, and that it's a major strategic mistake to accept the bin Laden framing of an essential conflict between Islam and the West. But I'm just as uneasy with the growing tendency to minimize the potential power of the al-Qaeda discourse, which strikes me as too easily susceptible to wishful thinking or blowback (believing our own spin). The Danish cartoons episode showed quite powerfully how potent these 'clash of civilizations' issues can be under the right conditions.

Indeed, I was thinking the same thing re believing one's own spin in taking in the pitifully bad Fox news (although I would note in general the great revelation for me in this, my first sustained return to the US of A in years is the decline in American broadcast news quality as a general matter. Barely even meeting the lowest standards of say UK gutter tabloids in my opinion) a few days ago when one pseudo-journo (name escapes me) whanking on about the Zarqaouie video and how it didn't "play well with Arabs" - rather went on about it although for all I could tell his grandoise statements were derived from his reading of a few (interpreted) comments.

At the same time, I am not entirely comfortable with Bou Aardvark's train of thought here:

I keep coming back to the cartoons crisis, for all its essential stupidity, for three reasons: for the intensity of passions it unleashed on both sides; for how much this outbreak took both sides by surprise (it came at a time when arguments about the declining support for al-Qaeda were all over the place, shortly after Zarqawi's terror attack in Amman); and for the central place it occupied in bin Laden's recent speech.

While Bou Aardvark's general thinking here is well taken, that is that the reserve of tensions between 'East and West' are great, his quasi linking of al-Qaeda sypathy and Cartoon outrage discomfort me a bit. To be sure, there is some linkage (that is outrage at perceived Western disrespect of the religion feeding into sympathy for an org claiming to be fighting the same), it's also not a necessary linkage. I know well Bou Aardvark knows that, but the phrasing here lacks (although it's only a blog post, can't beat the man up for it).

Ah, and I might have thrown in the entire Dubai Port fiasco as well.

My concluding comment, then, is it's very useful to keep in mind how little one really knows about the dynamics of the organisation, al Qaeda (even if one knows Arabic), and secondly that the communications game is two sided, and in many ways more important than the bombs. Well, as important.