I agree that the attacks **are** for headlines (they have little direct military value and would have been scoffed at during WW2 aerial blitzes)...but I have one or two doubts that the **Western** news media is their prime target (secondary, no doubt).
They need recruits. Al Qaeda in Iraq and Hamas in Israel have both been busted lying to their suicide bomber recruits, resorting to dire subterfuge to obtain even a handful of willing volunteers.
...and those volunteers are going to become more and more scarce if Zarqawi can't gin up "victories" in the Islamic news media (e.g. blowing up Iraqi police recruits).
Do Chechnyan Muslims really want to die in the heat of Iraq, for instance, rather than fighting for their own homeland, if they see nothing but setbacks for Zarqawi?!
Chechnya has become rather quiet. Ditto for Kashmir. Ditto for Israel/Palestine. Again for Kosovo/Bosnia. Ditto once more for the U.S. homeland itself.
Out of more than 6,000 polling stations in remote Afghanistan, the Taliban and Al Qaeda remnants there could only close a dozen...a wholly ineffective battle against our successful elections there this month.
Also of note is that so far our remote embassies in Africa have remained untouched since 1998. That's low-hanging fruit. If Al Qaeda can't hit those buildings, then it doesn't have much ability at all to project force.
Other low-hanging fruit would be piracy. Al Qaeda shows great weakness by so far failing to hi-jack and/or sink Western ocean-going commerce on those many giant, slow-moving vessels that must pass through narrow Asian and African straights.
Cargo ships around the world sell berths for their voyages, and no airport metal and explosives detectors check said passengers...yet Al qaeda seems limited right now to very small strikes such as a few individual bombers hitting the London subway system (once successfully, though minor compared to a WW2 bombing of said "underground," and a 2nd time was a complete failure for them at all levels).
Leni