by Michael Pan and Amanda Terkel
August 24, 2004

Our credibility at home and abroad has never been lower. With no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq, horrific abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, and no foreseeable end game for the U.S. in Iraq, most are hesitant to trust the Bush administration. A June 2004 poll by CBS News and The New York Times reported that 79 percent of the national adult population believed that Bush was either hiding something or completely lying in his statements about the war. The story abroad is hardly better. In a March 2004 Pew survey of European and Middle Eastern countries, a majority in seven of the eight nations surveyed believed U.S. and British leaders lied about the Iraq war.

Why is credibility so important? The conventional wisdom focuses on credibility for credibility's sake, but misses the real point: the war on terrorism cannot be won if the rest of the world mistrusts the United States.

At the start of the war on terrorism, the Bush administration sent a clear message to the world's nations: "You're either with us, or against us." After three years, it appears that far too few are with us. While America must always stand up for itself, we can neither protect nor defend ourselves if we continue to go it alone. Without meaningful and sustained international cooperation, we can neither fight terrorism effectively nor win. Here's why:

*Securing the world's ports. The Container Security Initiative (CSI) is designed to place customs inspectors in ports worldwide in order to pre-screen 70 percent of U.S.-bound cargo. Only a few of the 20 planned ports worldwide have entered the program. The current list of CSI participants is heavy on ports in Europe and Asia, but lacks any ports in the Middle East and includes only one in Africa. The United States needs to work with the entire international community to quickly expand this program to reduce the huge vulnerability of the world's ports.

The rest is here.