Republicans Say Bush Doesn't Promote The Good Things In Iraq Enough In The Islamic World

And with a thunderous DUH ... it was good!

Not only is Bush not doing enough to highlight the accomplishments of the coalition in Iraq to the American people, but he isn't getting that message across to the Islamic world either.

Post Dispatch:

Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond, R-Mo., who returned Monday from a brief trip to Iraq with other congressional Republicans 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.

Not only is he right, but he isn't the only one outside the blogosphere saying this.

Ken Gude of the Center for American Progress says the U.S. has done "a staggeringly bad job" of explaining itself to the rest of the world. For example, he says the U.S. 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.

Well, some of that is correct. We shouldn't have to keep shelling out money to countries that hold protests burning pictures of our president in effigy to prove we are the good guys. We've been doing that for a long time now. However, he is correct in criticizing the US in its failure to showcase the tsunami aid. I would also like to see Bush call the Muslim world out, and ask where they all were when the Christians were committing genocide against the Muslims in the Balkans ... cause we were there.

The article cites other examples of missed opportunities to pimp our image out the the Muslims around the world.