News man Feb 25, 2003 www.aljazeerah.info

Al-Jazeerah, Opinion Editorials

The messages from U.S. embassies around the globe have become urgent and disturbing: Many people in the world increasingly think President Bush is a greater threat to world peace than Iraqi President Saddam Hussain.

U.S. embassies are the eyes and ears of the U.S. government overseas, and their reports from the field are closely read at the State Department. The anti-war protests by millions of people last week in the cities of major U.S. allies underscored a theme that the classified cables by U.S. embassies had been reporting for weeks.

"It is rather astonishing," said a senior U.S. official who has access to the reports. "There is an absence of any recognition that Saddam is the problem." One ambassador, who represents the United States in an allied nation, bluntly cabled that in that country, Bush has become the enemy.

Although senior White House officials have insisted that U.S. policy toward Iraq will not be affected by public opinion, they acknowledged over the past few days that they need to confront the worldwide mood opposing a move to war.

Polls have indicated that Americans are more likely to support an invasion of Iraq if they believe it has international backing. Anti-war protests were held in dozens of American cities also.

This week, the administration plans to begin a coordinated effort to draw attention to what one official called "the plight of the Iraqi people, with a focus on human rights and freedom and Saddam's brutality."

As part of that initiative, the administration scheduled a briefing on Monday on Bush's plans for humanitarian assistance and reconstruction in Iraq, with participants from the White House and Pentagon.

Secretary of State Colin L. Powell embarked late last week on a series of media appearances in Germany, France, Russia and the Middle East to help explain the administration's urgency in confronting Iraq over its banned weapons programmes.

"We know that there is great anxiety, that there are many, many people who do not want to see war," Powell told a Russian reporter.

Still, White House officials are unapologetic about their overall approach, which is based on forcing an early confrontation with Iraq rather than agreeing to the stated wishes of several European allies to allow UN weapons inspections to continue.

White House officials even contend that they expected this change in momentum toward those opposing an early move to war. Bush, in his public comments last week, appeared to shrug off the protests.

"History has proven that the closer you are to potential hostilities, the more vocal the opposition," White House communications director Dan Bartlett said. "There is always going to be a faction of people that don't agree.

But I think anybody who gives a fair look at history on this will see that this president and this administration is acting responsibly and is attempting in every way possible to resolve this issue peacefully."

Bush said that he had no intention of recalibrating his approach based on the global protests. "Size of protest, it's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group," Bush said.

"The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security - in this case, the security of the people." Analysts and U.S. officials suggest a number of reasons the president has become the subject of such vitriol overseas.

Some of it stems from personality: Bush's blunt manner and frequent references to religion appear especially grating to European ears, these analysts and officials say.

But much of it is rooted in substantive questions about the role of U.S. power in the world and whether Bush is properly using it in his battle with Saddam.

"The debate (overseas) has not been about Iraq," a State Department official said. "There is real angst in the world about our power, and what they perceive as the rawness, the arrogance, the unipolarity" of the administration's actions.

But, pointing to Bush's seemingly dismissive statements about the protests, the official said the concerns reflected in cables from American "overseas posts" appeared to have little impact on White House decision-making.

Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service

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