WASHINGTON -- The battle plan is set for Iraq, but the United States is behind in a public relations campaign to soothe world ire over President George W. Bush's unilateralist tendencies.

The massive anti-war demonstrations last weekend, polls abroad showing a growing unhappiness with U.S. policy and Washington's woes at the United Nations, all add up to a growing distrust of the United States.

Despite the outpouring of international sympathy following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington is now paying the price for such unpopular moves as withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and its campaign against the new International Criminal Court.

Bush's "axis of evil" rhetoric and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's gripes about France and Germany's stance as "old Europe," have not helped polish the U.S. image abroad.

According to recent polls, Bush is pushing record unpopularity in Germany and in France eight out of ten people said they opposed a U.S.-led war against Iraq.

"A little more than one year ago, America was basking in international solidarity generated by the crime of September 11, 2001, and in worldwide admiration for its spectacularly effective military termination of the Taleban regime in Afghanistan," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was national security adviser to former U.S. president Jimmy Carter.

Today, he said, "the cross Atlantic vitriol is unprecedented.

There is disarray even among close allies (and) worldwide public opposition to the war," Brzezinski wrote in an op-ed in the ***Washington Post*** Wednesday. In another editorial, this one in Wednesday's ***New York Times***, Thomas Friedman wrote: "It's legitimate for the Bush folks to focus the world on Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, but two years of their gratuitous bullying has made many people deaf to America's arguments."

Certain points pushed by the Bush administration, such as the alleged link between Baghdad and the terrorist network Al-Qaeda, believed responsible for the September 11 attacks, have not gone down well abroad, said Lee Feinstein, of the Council on Foreign Relations.

"Most people are not buying it," he said.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, criticized for staying home a little too much in recent months, has stepped up interviews with the foreign press to help fight the growing communication deficit.

Rumsfeld said he did not take offense at the massive peace demonstrations, saying they were simply the by product of good democracy.

"There are an awful lot more people who didn't demonstrate than who demonstrated. And demonstrations occur in democracies. That's what we do. We have free speech. And that's fine and that's fair.

And these are tough issues," Rumsfeld said, adding that the Iraqis themselves had no freedom to demonstrate.

The White House said it would not be swayed, and compared the demonstrations to the massive peace protests in the 1980s against the deployment of U.S. missiles in Europe.

"The United States stood on principle, the American president did what he thought was right to preserve the peace. As a result, the Berlin Wall came down, and the message of the protesters, better neutral than dead, turned out to be a false message," Fleischer said Tuesday.

Earlier that day, Bush said, "size of protest, it's like deciding, well, I'm going to decide policy based upon a focus group. The role of a leader is to decide policy based upon the security." (AFP)