Latest horror could destroy President of divided nation

[kskiska]

By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles

Is this the horror that will finally undo George Bush's presidency? First Nicholas Berg, now Paul Johnson: in two months and in two different countries, two US civilians have been kidnapped and beheaded by their al-Qa'ida-affiliated captors, becoming not only pawns in a deadly geopolitical game but also symbols of the complicated feelings of revulsion unleashed by the Bush administration's "war on terror".

It is hard not to think back to earlier acts of defiance against the might of the United States and wonder if we are not seeing a parallel erosion of presidential authority: the steady drip-drip of casualty figures from Vietnam that proved the undoing of Lyndon Johnson's presidency in 1968, or the corrosive effect of the Iran hostage crisis on Jimmy Carter 12 years later.

We have now witnessed four similar killings of Western civilians in the conflicts unleashed by the attacks of 11 September 2001, starting with Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in January 2002 and including the Italian Fabrizio Quattrocchi in Iraq in April. Even in our jaded, news-saturated age there is something about these cases that bespeaks almost bottomless horror, in a way that the deaths of more than 800 US servicemen in Iraq or the violence and death visited upon thousands of Iraqi civilians have not.

The fact that the images of ritual slaughter have been posted on the internet has only made the brutality more vivid, more palpable - even to those who have not had the stomach or the inclination to watch. This is a propaganda war, fought with images as much as with guns and knives.

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http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=533087