WASHINGTON, Aug 29: The United States has succeeded in convincing Muslims that Americans are not their enemy, although there are still some misgivings about US policies toward the Islamic world, the State Department said on Tuesday.

The US administration launched a major campaign to improve its image in the Islamic world after Sept 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, carried out by Muslim extremists. Last month the Bush administration also set up a separate department for improving the US image abroad.

Assessing the successes and shortcomings of this campaign, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told a briefing in Washington that the United States would continue to reach out to the Muslim world.

“I think the understanding that the United States is not waging a war against Muslims has sunk in,” said Boucher, adding that “the effort needs to be long-term.”

He said Muslims also understood that terrorism was a threat “not just to American society, but to all governments who aspire to some sort of freedom, some sort of stability, some sort of modernization.”

Despite this claim, recent public opinion polls suggest that Muslims, particularly those in the Muslim world, were still not fully convinced that the United States was a friendly nation. They see US policies in the Middle East and elsewhere in the Islamic world as insensitive to Muslims and their interests.

Muslims generally believe that the Americans would go to any extent to protect Israel and its interests in the region, even at the cost of hurting Muslims, the polls suggest.

Referring to such surveys, Boucher said: “The polls are out there that show that the disposition — the general disposition or people’s attitudes is quite strong — often quite strong against the United States. And we have to deal with that.”

“The US absence from the playing field for many years,” and not the US policies towards the Muslims, was responsible for this change of attitude toward Washington, Boucher said.

He said that because of budget constraints in the 1990s, the United States “restricted its operations” in the Islamic world and “redirected them elsewhere.”

“So many of these more long-term efforts are going to have to take time before we kind of, hopefully, see some kind of turnaround in the general attitudes towards the United States,” he added.

Boucher said the United States was now targeting more basic questions, such as “who we are and what we stand for,” while dealing with Muslims.

He said besides sending out speakers to the Islamic world to explain the US position, the State Department had also arranged visits by Arab and Muslim journalists to the United States to enable them “to learn more about us.”

Boucher said that there were fundamental values that the United States and the Muslim world shared with each other and the State Department was trying to emphasize these values. He said on its web pages, the State Department now had more information about “Muslim life in America.”

There were also brochures and videos emphasizing the fact that the United States and the Muslim world had “a lot more in common than people think,” the spokesman said.

The government-sponsored web page about Muslim life in America has caused some controversy in the United States where some religious figures have accused the US government of promoting one religion over others. “But we certainly don’t view it that way,” said Boucher.

When pointed out it was not how Muslims lived in the US, but policies toward issues like Palestine and Iraq that caused the friction, Boucher said: “There are people who will disagree with US policy. We’ll make our strongest efforts and best efforts to get people to understand what we’re doing and why we’re doing it and to get them to agree with US policy, whether it’s the efforts that we’re making with the Israelis and the Palestinians or the effort that we all need to make to stop the threats from Iraq.”

“The issue is a little more than that, though. To make these arguments convincingly, you have to have ... a willingness to listen. And in many ways, that’s where identifying values, conveying a sense of who we are, what we stand for, what we’re about, is necessary to lay the ground for the arguments on policy to take place and to take place in an atmosphere where we can understand each other.”