More broadly, the Bush Administration needs to apply the same energy and focus to peace making that it has, since 9/11, to war making.  We cannot let the American face to the world be permanently capped by a U.S. Army helmet.

This transition will not be easy for President Bush, both because there continue to be evil people out there planning to hit us, but also because it will require him to curb the very people in his administration who brought us victory in Afghanistan and Iraq .

But I am convinced that the greater risk our country faces now is that a critical mass of the world's population will become convinced (if they are not already) that the U.S. is the enemy of progress and positive change.

We must rebalance our approach to the world. We must demonstrate that we can be as unified and directed in the pursuit of peace as we have proven to be in the pursuit of war.  We must, it seems to me, begin to reverse a tide of world opinion that views America as a part of the problem and not a part of the solution to the challenges that confront our interdependent globe.

   

Casimir A. Yost is Director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University .  He has worked in the U.S. Senate and for Citibank of New York in Pakistan , Saudi Arabia and Tunisia .  This article is adapted from remarks given at the Women's National Democratic Club.