AFTER AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI released a new videotape on August 4, the media focused on how he placed the blame for the last month's terrorist attacks in London on Tony Blair's shoulders and threatened even greater carnage in the future. Less noticed but no less important is al Qaeda's changed tactical approach to the West: They are now attempting to convince Westerners that they are worth negotiating with and can be appeased.

Zawahiri put forth this idea in a section of the tape where he speaks directly to Americans. In it, he mentions the hudna, or truce, that Osama bin Laden offered last year in exchange for the withdrawal of foreign troops from the Muslim world. Zawahiri asks, "Didn't Osama bin Laden tell you that you would never dream of peace until we actually live it in Palestine and before all foreign forces withdraw from the Land of Muhammad?"

In arguing that Westerners can buy peace through accession to al Qaeda's demands, the group's leaders emphasize three issues that they believe will have traction in the West: withdrawal from Iraq, ending support for Israel, and military disengagement from the Middle East.

The notion that al Qaeda can be appeased is, of course, false. By emphasizing its political grievances, the group attempts to obscure its long-term goal: reestablishment of the caliphate, which in al Qaeda's mind is an Islamic super-state primed for perpetual war with the West. The 9/11 Commission Report discusses al Qaeda's desire to reestablish the caliphate and both bin Laden and

But a marked shift in al Qaeda's rhetoric came in April 2004 following the Madrid train bombings, after which the group seemed to decide that its divide-and-conquer strategy could succeed. After all, those attacks apparently swung the Spanish election to the Socialist Party, which subsequently withdrew the country's troops from Iraq.

Bin Laden's previous communications to the West had been characterized by long strings of unrealistic demands. For example, in his November 2002 "Letter to America," bin Laden demanded that the United States disallow interest-bearing loans, ban the production and consumption of alcohol, punish sex out of wedlock, ban gambling, and sign the anti-global warming Kyoto Accords.

But after Spain announced its troop withdrawal, bin Laden offered a truce to countries that similarly withdrew their forces from Iraq. This was his first peace offer designed to appeal to an appeasement-minded Westerner.

The tactic continued with bin Laden's "October surprise," the video released just before the 2004 election. In it, bin Laden painted al Qaeda as "free men who don't sleep under oppression," and suggested that America could find peace by addressing the alleged root causes of the conflict--which by then had morphed into U.S. support for Israel and America's military presence in the Middle East.

Bin Laden's October tape was also slicker in its appeal to Westerners. It was, in fact, such a blatant endorsement of the arguments in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 that the filmmaker gloated shortly thereafter, "Did you get the feeling that he had a bootleg of my movie?"