DAR AL HARB/ISLAM - U.S.A./UMMAH: U.S. MILITARY REBUILDING MOSQUES

U.S. losing battle for Muslim hearts and minds, critics say
By Philip Dine
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

WASHINGTON - As debate continues over the war in Iraq, the United States appears to be faltering on another front: the battle for hearts and minds in the Muslim world.

In the effort known as public diplomacy - winning friends through good works and international public relations _the United States appears to be losing to radical Islamists, critics say.

One of the chief critics is Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, R-Mo., who returned this week from a brief trip to Iraq with other congressional Republicans.

Bond said he saw a mosque that soldiers had rebuilt, calling it the "type of assistance in Iraqi communities that is critical to winning the broader war on terror."

But he doesn't think the administration is doing enough to publicize such efforts in the Islamic world.

"We can't win in this war if there isn't a strong voice out there saying what the United States is trying to do," he said in an interview last week.

Tom Kean, chairman of the Sept. 11 Commission, agreed.

"Right now our image in the Arab world and the rest of the world is that of a man in a tank," Kean said. "Instead of opening libraries in that part of the world, we've been closing them, cutting exchanges, reducing educational programs."

Ken Gude of the Center for American Progress says the United States has done "a staggeringly bad job" of explaining itself to the rest of the world. For example, he says the United States failed to capitalize on its newfound popularity in the areas engulfed by the 2004 South Asia tsunami by not explaining to other Muslim nations what it had done to help and why, and then responded insufficiently to the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan.

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