President Clinton has given the wealthy Saudi Islamist rebel Osama bin Laden exactly what he wanted: a holy war.
By attacking targets in Sudan and Afghanistan on Thursday night, Mr Clinton not only distracted attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but he poured paraffin on the slow-burning rage of millions of Muslims.
Already the effects of that rage are being felt and the western world - Christian and "crusader" in the eyes of many Muslims - could suffer for it.
In the hours following the simultaneous attacks an Italian and two French men were shot and wounded on a UN bus in Kabul. Just as an Irishman and French, British and German citizens were taken hostage in Lebanon in the late 1980s as the result of US policy towards Iran and support for the Israeli invasion, Europeans may again pay for US actions.
Ordinary Afghans will also suffer, because the US attacks have forced the UN to cease operations in Kabul, where it provided the only sustenance for thousands of women and children.
Non-governmental agencies are pulling out of Peshawar and other Pakistani border areas. Europeans said they could feel the hostility on the streets of Pakistani and Arab capitals yesterday, and large anti-American demonstrations took place in five Pakistani and Afghan cities as well as in the Gaza Strip.
Mr Clinton said there could be "no sanctuary for terrorists." But in the aftermath of the cruise missile attacks it looked as if the US presence, not Mr bin Laden, was retreating.
For years the US has had no diplomatic relations with Libya, Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan. The US embassy in Sudan, which was sacked by an angry mob on Thursday, was shut months ago.
Mr Clinton said "there are no expendable American targets", but US embassies are apparently "expendable" when threatened. This week Washington closed its chanceries in Pakistan and Albania, and US citizens all over the world were warned to be cautious.
When Mr bin Laden announced his "jihad" against the US in 1993, the former construction magnate was a little-known figure, living in isolation in Sudan, then in caves and tents in Afghanistan.
A few hundred followers - mostly Arabs whom he had recruited to fight the Soviet Union in the previous decade - called him "Sheikh Osama" and showed him great reverence. Now Mr Clinton has elevated him to the rank of "public enemy number one", a title in which he must revel.
The Pentagon knew Mr bin Laden's camps well because the CIA built them when it backed the mujaheddin against the Soviet Union.
Those men have since founded the most extreme Islamist groups fighting to overthrow the governments of Egypt and Algeria.
Just as the CIA created its future woes in Iran when it overthrew a democratically-elected prime minister in 1953, its 1980s sponsorship of "holy warriors" established what Washington now regards as "an international terrorist network".
The transition usually goes in the other direction: men such as Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat went from being "terrorists" to statesmen. Now that they are trying to drive the US out of Saudi Arabia rather than the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, the former "freedom fighters" have become "terrorists".
Suddenly, US officials say the ascetic Mr bin Laden was responsible for assassination attempts against the Pope and the Egyptian President, Hosni Mubarak, attacks on US forces in Somalia and the World Trade Centre bombing. French officials yesterday privately cast doubt on the veracity of US intelligence claims.
Our demonology needed updating. Mr bin Laden has filled the void left by Carlos the Jackal, Abu Nidal, Ayatollah Khomeini, Col Gadafy and Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman. In the west, we forget that thousands of Muslims named sons Carlos, Ruhollah and Moammar.
Thanks to Mr Clinton, Mr bin Laden's street credibility has rocketed, and Osama is now sure to be a popular name.
As the "martyred" people of the Middle East, the Palestinians command a certain moral authority among Muslims. It was significant that Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, the blind Palestinian spiritual leader of Hamas, reiterated Mr bin Laden's call for jihad after the US attacks. If the US wanted to, it could not do more to forge "an international terrorist network."
Mr Clinton spoke of the Islamists' alleged love of violence and hatred for democracy. But he has never recognised the fury that bubbles across the Muslim world, for to do so would be to acknowledge the disaster of US Middle East policy.
Mr bin Laden repeats constantly that he wants US troops to leave his native Saudi Arabia, site of Islam's two holiest shrines, as Washington promised in 1990. That demand receives at most a sentence or two in US press reports.
The Saudi dissident has also said he is haunted by the massacre on April 18th, 1996, of 106 Lebanese civilians at a UN base by Israeli artillery.
When a UN report judged the Qana massacre to have been deliberate, Washington tried to suppress the document, then punished the UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, for releasing it by depriving him of a second term in office.
The word "terrorist" is the Leitmotiv of every US pronouncement, as if its hypnotic repetition erased all need for explanation and excused all means of revenge.
The atrocities in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam might not have come as such a shock to Americans if they, like hundreds of millions of Arabs and Muslims, were acutely aware of the homicidal effect of UN sanctions against Iraq, of the humiliation and sense of betrayal felt by Arabs who trusted President George Bush when they signed up for the Madrid peace conference after the Gulf War.
Seven years later, Mr Benjamin Netanyahu has virtually torn up the Oslo agreement. He has refused to relinquish even the 13 per cent of the Israeli-occupied West Bank that Washington gently requested, and Mr Clinton says nothing.
"Moderate", i.e. pro-American, Arab leaders such as Mr Mubarak and King Hussein see the ground crumbling beneath them. When they joined in the war against Iraq, they told their people Washington would provide justice for the Palestinians when the war was over.
That broken promise has ensured a multitude of new recruits for the likes of Mr bin Laden.
Every time the US kills Muslims - in Libya in 1986, in Iraq since 1991, this week in Sudan and Afghanistan - US presidents stress they had nothing against the people killed, only their leaders. But the leaders are never harmed by cruise missiles.
First used in the 1991 Gulf War, the Tomahawk has since been fired repeatedly at Iraq, each time killing civilians as well as striking alleged military or intelligence targets.
For many Muslims, cruise missiles have a lot in common with car bombs; both are cowardly weapons. Those who use them do not see their enemy, or risk their life in combat.
The battle lines between American technological power and Mr bin Laden's fervour have been drawn. What poisonous fruit will spring from them?