WASHINGTON, Dec 19: The Pentagon is devising a new strategy to improve America's image in the Muslim world which, according to a recent US report, continues to decline rapidly.

US officials say the new strategy will be strongly influenced by a recent report of the Defence Science Board on Strategic Communications, a 40-member task force of diplomatic, military, academic and business experts that advises the Pentagon on policy matters.

The report warns that "American direct intervention in the Muslim world has paradoxically elevated the stature of, and support for, radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single digits in some Arab societies".

US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld had ordered a similar exercise for improving US image in the Muslim world three years ago as well but the plan, envisaged by the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence, was later abandoned.

But Washington is once again realizing the need for a new strategy for boosting America's image among the Muslims following reports that America's enemies are winning the propaganda battle across the Islamic world.

The motto of this renewed campaign is to convince the Muslims that America is against radicals and not against ordinary Muslims or Islam. But the Pentagon's policymakers acknowledge that it's an uphill task, a fact strongly pointed out by the defence science board: "The critical problem in American public diplomacy directed toward the Muslim world is not one of 'dissemination of information' or even one of crafting and delivering the right message. Rather, it is a fundamental problem of credibility.

Simply, there is none." "The United States is without a working channel of communication to the world of Muslims. Inevitably, therefore, whatever Americans do and say only serves the party that has both the message and the 'loud and clear' channel: the enemy," the panel says.

"Muslims see Americans as strangely narcissistic - namely, that the war is all about us. As the Muslims see it, everything about the war is - for Americans - really no more than an extension of American domestic politics and its great game," the report says.

"America's negative image in world opinion and diminished ability to persuade are consequences of factors other than the failure to implement communications strategies," the report declares.