A new survey shows the US public is unhappy with the Bush administration's handling of Iraq and the Muslim world in general.
The latest poll reflects a growing disquiet seen in other recent surveys over US involvement in Iraq and a dip in President George W Bush's overall job approval rating.
The poll, to be published in next month's edition of Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, found nearly six in 10 Americans were worried about the outcome of the war in Iraq.
Daniel Yankelovich, head of nonprofit research group Public Agenda
"Soon the grumbling may become too loud for the Bush administration to ignore," wrote Daniel Yankelovich, who heads Public Agenda, a nonprofit research group that did the poll for the council. It is the first in a new "foreign policy index" to be conducted every six months.
The Bush administration insists that Iraq is on the road to establishing a democracy that would help bring about peace, but the president's credibility on Iraq has been slowly eroding among the US public in recent months amid a continuing bloody insurgency.
Asked whether the United States was meeting its objectives in Iraq, 56 per cent in the poll said the United States was not while 39 per cent said it was.
The findings were based on a random sample of 1,004 adults over the age of 18 who were interviewed between June 1st and June 13th, 2005, before a surge of violence in Iraq in recent weeks. The margin of error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.
When asked to name the most important global problems facing the United States, Iraq and terrorism were the top concerns. Immigration and US relations with the Muslim world were also becoming "hot-button" topics.
Three quarters of those polled worried the United States might be losing the trust and friendship of other countries and that there might be growing hatred of the United States in Muslim countries.
When asked an open-ended question on how the rest of the world saw the United States, nearly two-thirds said the rest of the world had a negative view and one-in-10 used the word "bully" or "bullying."
"So far, public thinking is a disquieting mix of high anxiety, growing uncertainty about current policy and virtually no consensus about what else the country might do," said the report accompanying the poll.
A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll last month found a majority of the US public doubted the United States would win the war in Iraq and believed the Bush administration deliberately misled Americans over Iraq's weapons capabilities when it went to war in 2003.