WASHINGTON – Osama bin Laden’s most recent outreach effort to America’s “fifth column” – an audio-taped message in which he threatens more attacks while offering a “truce” to America in the terror war – will only backfire and strengthen American resolve to liquidate Al Qaeda, analysts said yesterday.

Portions of the 10-minute recording, Mr. bin Laden’s first dispatch to America in more than a year, were first aired yesterday morning on a Qatar-based, Arabic-language television network, Al-Jazeera. Later in the day, the Central Intelligence Agency confirmed that the voice on the audiotape belongs to Mr. bin Laden. According to analysts, the terrorist ringleader recorded the message in early December.

Mr. bin Laden’s overtures met with immediate resistance from the Bush administration, as Vice President Cheney, in remarks delivered yesterday in New York at the Manhattan Institute, pledged to remain unflinching in America’s prosecution of the war on terror.

The broadcast came less than a week after an American air strike in Pakistan, targeted at a bin Laden deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, killed some of the terrorist network’s top leaders and relatives of Mr. Zawahiri. The tape reflected an awareness of trends in American politics and public opinion that would have been accurate as of its estimated December recording date, and apparently sought to exploit increasingly vocal anti-war sentiment here.

“We know that the majority of your people want this war to end and opinion polls show the Americans do not want to fight the Muslims on Muslim land, nor do they want Muslims to fight them on their land,” Mr. bin Laden said, according to an English-language translation on Al-Jazeera’s Web site. “Bush tried to ignore the polls that demanded that he end the war in Iraq,” the terrorist added.

Saying his inspiration for the message to the American people was “the continuous deliberate misinformation given by your President Bush,” Mr. bin Laden proffered a cessation of hostilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, wars that he said “are definitely going our way.”

“We do not mind establishing a long-term truce between us and you,” Mr. bin Laden said.

Al Qaeda’s leader also menaced additional violence in America, dismissing claims that Americans’ stepped-up efforts to protect themselves had successfully rebuffed attempted Al Qaeda attacks. “The new operations of Al Qaeda have not happened not because we could not penetrate the security measures,” Mr. bin Laden said. “It is being prepared, and you’ll see it in your homeland very soon.”

Analysts yesterday said Mr. bin Laden’s “truce offer” and his threat of more attacks were directed in part at American opponents of the war who would use Mr. bin Laden’s suggestion of a cease-fire to argue that America’s military actions against terrorists can safely be scaled down. [Americans will react to the Al Qaeda leader’s truce offer in the spirit of General McAuliffe’s reply to the Nazis’ demand for surrender – “Nuts!” – The New York Sun said in an editorial on page 8.]

According to the vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Danielle Pletka, the tape may represent an instance of Mr. bin Laden’s being “too clever by half” in assuming that Americans may respond like Europeans to a false offer of peace. In April 2004, Mr. bin Laden issued a similar audio recording in which he enticed European countries to stop “attacking Muslims,” and to withdraw their troops from the Middle East, by wooing them with a non-aggression pact. Spain, which had been the target of a deadly Al Qaeda subway attack just a month before that recording, promptly withdrew its troops from Iraq after the bombing.

Ms. Pletka and other observers said that any expectations on Mr. bin Laden’s part of a similar response from Americans would end only in disappointment.

“There is, regrettably, a fifth column in this country,” a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and terrorism analyst, Andrew McCarthy, said. “Some of it fully intends to be a fifth column, and there are other people who are fellow travelers.”

“And I think that, to the extent that he can play to those people, they’re his best shot at defeating us,” a former U.S. attorney, Mr. McCarthy, who prosecuted the government’s case against the terrorist Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, said of Mr. bin Laden. “In order to win, they don’t have to have military success – they have to just sap our will to both fight and protect our fellow interests.” A retreat from President Bush’s military strategy to defeat terrorism, and a return to the law-enforcement approach favored by President Clinton at the behest of the anti-war movement, would represent an ideal turn of events for Mr. bin Laden, Mr. McCarthy said.

Yet “when most people in America think of Al Qaeda, they don’t think about Iraq, they think about 9/11,” Mr. McCarthy said. “And we don’t want a truce with Al Qaeda – we want to wipe them out.”

Evidence that Mr. bin Laden’s attempts at negotiation had only steeled Americans’ resolve to see his operation and its leaders destroyed emerged swiftly in response to the tape yesterday.

Mr. Cheney, addressing a free-market think tank in New York, did not discuss specifics of the bin Laden tape, but spoke more generally of America’s inevitable triumph over terrorism.

“When I visited Iraq and Afghanistan,” Mr. Cheney said, “I assured our forces that the American people do not support a policy of passivity, resignation, and defeatism in the face of terror. This nation made a decision: We will never go back to the false comforts of the world before September 11, 2001.”

“We will engage these enemies with the goal of victory, and with the American military in the fight, that victory is certain.”

At his daily briefing yesterday, Mr. Bush’s press secretary, Scott McClellan, echoed Mr. Cheney’s statement of resolve. “We do not negotiate with terrorists,” Mr. McClellan told reporters. “We put them out of business.”

And while Democrats have grown increasingly critical of the president’s wartime leadership, two leading senators yesterday joined the administration in rejecting Mr. bin Laden’s statements.

Senator Schumer, a Democrat of New York, said in a statement yesterday: “We don’t let terrorists set the agenda, and we will not give up until bin Laden and his supporters are captured or killed. We don’t make truces with murderers … The murder of more than 2,700 people at the Twin Towers on 9/11 will not go unpunished.” Senator Biden, a Democrat of Delaware and the ranking member on the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, called Mr. bin Laden’s truce offer “a desperate act,” adding that the terrorist’s “cold-blooded actions speak louder than his empty words.”

Despite the dismissals of Mr. bin Laden, however, some analysts cautioned that valuable clues about Al Qaeda operations may be found in the tape’s contents – and also in what the message did not contain. Mr. McCarthy said he found it “very interesting” that it was Mr. bin Laden, not Mr. Zawahiri, issuing the tape after the Pakistan attacks, because if Mr. Zawahiri were alive and well, it would have provided Al Qaeda with an opportunity to taunt America about a failed military assassination attempt.

A terrorism analyst in Washington and a fellow at the Hudson Institute, Christopher Brown, said yesterday that Mr. bin Laden’s warning of an impending attack may not have been an empty threat, not because of Mr. bin Laden’s statements, but because of a January 6 message from Mr. Zawahiri.

According to Mr. Brown, a pattern has emerged over the last eight messages from Mr. Zawahiri whereby every two messages are followed about 30 days later by an Al Qaeda attack – in Saudi Arabia, in London, and in Bali. If the pattern continues, Mr. Brown said, a new attack would be due in about a month. The analyst also pointed to recent postings on Al Qaeda Web sites threatening an imminent attack on “the land of the Romans,” which Mr. Brown said could mean Italy or could be a figurative reference to America.