Arab frustration at US spills into violence Roula Khalaf in London and Charles Clover in Kuwait
Khalid al-Shimmari, a Kuwaiti policeman who wounded two US soldiers on a highway last Thursday, was originally described by police as mentally disturbed - the favoured explanation in the Middle East for any act of violence.
On Sunday, however, several Kuwaiti newspapers leaked his testimony to police, revealing that his motive was that he hated Americans and Jews.
While Kuwait is the US's best friend in the region, having been liberated by US forces in the 1991 Gulf war, two attacks on American soldiers in the last two months have killed one marine and injured three other soldiers, and left Kuwaitis wondering whether their country is a haven for extremists.
The attacks appear to have been perpetrated by militants trained in Afghanistan and with possible ties to al-Qaeda. But they come amid a wave of violence against US nationals and soft American targets across the region.
In Jordan on Sunday, a Pizza Hut outlet was set alight in Aqaba. The incident followed the killing of Laurence Foley, a US aid official in late October.
Last Friday, in the United Arab Emirates, police shot and wounded a customs worker after he tried to drive his car into a prohibited area of the Fujairah airport, used by the US navy. Earlier last week, an armed Saudi man burnt down a McDonald's restaurant near a US air base in Kharj, 70km south of Riyadh.
In Lebanon this month, blasts rocked three US fast food outlets; last week an American nurse was murdered in Sidon.
Until recently, the resentment of the US, blamed for supporting Israel in the two-year-old Palestinian intifada, expressed itself mostly through boycotts of US brands and fast food chains.
But in the run-up to a possible US military action against Baghdad, the anger is turning into violence and sparking fears of a more concerted campaign - against the US and domestic governments seen to be assisting it - if a war is launched.
Senior diplomats in the region caution against generalisation, pointing out that each case should be examined on its own.
"The acts of violence show how much the public is resistant to war. But one has to be careful if you only have one incident in a country. It becomes problematic if it recurs," says a diplomat. "We've always said we cannot control things. If there is a war the longer it lasts the more problematic it will be internally."
Saad al-Faguih, a London-based Saudi dissident who monitors al-Qaeda, says the attacks are unlikely to be the work of the organisation's hardcore terrorists.
"In some cases, such as Kuwait, you have to look at the second level of Qaeda supporters, people who went to Afghanistan and trained with al-Qaeda but are not directly part of it," he says. "In most of the other cases it's the third level - people who are simply inspired by al-Qaeda."
Western diplomats serving in the Middle East have been warning that anti-Americanism has reached unprecedented levels.
From the Palestinian refugee camps in Amman to the wealthy neighbourhoods of Riyadh, the US is accused of double standards - allowing Israel to ignore UN resolutions and grab more Palestinian land while insisting that Iraq should face military action if it fails to comply with UN demands. Regimes that lack domestic legitimacy are often suspected of secretly assisting the US while publicly opposing war.
"You will find anti-American anger everywhere, low level government officials and Islamists now talk the same language," says Hani Hourani, director of the New Jordan think-tank.
However much the Bush administration tries to explain that Iraq's threat comes from its possession of weapons of mass destruction, the Arab public remains unconvinced. The most widespread conspiracy theory is that the US objective is to control Iraq's oil and redraw the map of the region to Israel's benefit.
"The campaign against Iraq has to have other motives - exactly like the war going on in Palestine. These conflicts are nothing less than a continuation of the crusades the west launched against the Arab world centuries ago," Yusif Makki, a Saudi academic, recently wrote in the Saudi daily al-Watan.
In Kuwait, the authorities have sealed off the northern part of the country, where US troops are training, thus keeping them out of sight. The US State Department has offered to pay for the repatriation of non-essential staff at the embassy in Jordan.
"The US realises the problem but how that will translate into action we don't know," says a senior Arab official. "But this is what we've been telling them for a long time. We cannot ignore the level of frustration." Additional reporting by Nicolas Pelham in Amman, James Drummond in Cairo and Caroline Daniel in Washington