WASHINGTON, Aug 20: Despite the effort and money spent to improve its image among Muslim nations, the US government could better organize its public diplomacy and the American people should help get the message across , said National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in a speech on Thursday.

"There's more that the government should do," Condoleezza Rice said while speaking at the US Institute of Peace, making a pointed comparison with the effort made during the Cold War.

"We should be looking very hard at what new resources are needed. But so should this country be looking," she said. Though Ms Rice gave a rundown of what she called laudable initiatives since the Sept 11, 2001, attacks by President George Bush and his administration on "moving ahead on that agenda of engaging the Muslim world", she conceded in a question-and-answer session that US public diplomacy was lacking.

"We are obviously not very well organized for the side of public diplomacy," she said, adding that increased funding for new radio and television channels targeting the Muslim world and "doubling the funding of the National Endowment for Democracy" was not enough.

Her experience as a university professor, Ms Rice said, taught her that universities "ought to be looking at what they're doing to engage the Muslim world, what they're doing to encourage people to study these cultures, what they're doing to train people in these languages".

She said that as "a Cold War Baby" she learned that Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were "extraordinarily important" in delivering clear and truthful messages behind the old Iron Curtain.

"I also know that we as a country mobilized ourselves not just in the government, but in universities to study the Soviet Union and east European languages, and to send our best and brightest into the study of those societies," Ms Rice said.

"And I know that we as a society, leave alone the government, we as a society are not yet mobilized in that way with regards to the Muslim world," she added. Ms Rice also tried to dispel the notion that "we do everything unilaterally," noting the Bush administration had been moving ahead on the "agenda of engaging the Muslim world" and has been busy building "an international coalition from which to do that".

She said in the last Group of Eight summit in June, when the participants turned to "how the Forum for the Future would evolve, ... it was the United States that was most insistent that this not be a dialogue between governments, but a dialogue among civil society and, indeed, between government and civil society".

The optimistic view of US efforts to engage the Muslim world, however, were not shared by some experts and US officials. "It's worse than failing. Failing means you tried and didn't get better. But at this point, three years after Sept 11, you can say there wasn't even much of an attempt," Shibley Telhami, a member of a White House-appointed advisory group on public diplomacy and Brookings Institution scholar, told The Washington Post.

"Today Arab and Muslim attitudes toward the US and the degree of distrust in the US are far worse than they were three years ago. (Osama) bin Laden is winning by default," he added.

"This is all feel-good mumbo jumbo," said an unnamed State Department official familiar with public diplomacy efforts to win over the Muslims. "If this is so important, where's the money?" -AFP