A career Soldier and general officer who helped build up Iraqi forces after the U.S. invaded that country says critics of the proposed Islamic community center in New York City are only hurting American military and national interests.

“It’s counterproductive to paint all Muslims as part of the problem out there and to contribute to [terrorist] recruiting efforts,” retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul D. Eaton told Military.com in an Aug. 18 interview. “You don’t want to turn [Muslims] into the enemy because we generalize on everything that happened on 9/11.”

Eaton today is senior advisor to the Washington-based National Security Network, which develops policy papers and recommendations intended to improve American foreign policy.

Eaton said he understands the importance of winning over people as opposed to alienating them. In Iraq he served as the commander of the Coalition Military Assistance Training Team which was responsible for overseeing the training of the Iraqi military from 2003 to 2004.

 ”Part of my task was to paint the security forces as allies and not as … an enemy,” he said. “So getting that turned around was a significant part of my duties. To get coalition forces to see Iraqi soldiers I was graduating as a part of the coalition, part of the alliance.”

It’s every bit as important in the United States to make sure Muslim citizens are not viewed as the enemy, he said, but that’s what some in the media and politics are doing. He pointed to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich on Aug. 16 likening the center’s backers to Nazis’ wanting to put up a sign next to the Holocaust museum in Washington.

“The last thing we want to do is set a cultural depiction of all Muslims as ‘fill-in-the-blank,’ ” Eaton said.

The center’s planners have all the permits in place to proceed, but are fighting an uphill public relations battle to renovate a building two city blocks from New York City’s Ground Zero into an Islamic community center that would also include rooms for prayer.

The “Cordoba House” has been dubbed the “Ground Zero Mosque” by critics, though founder Feisal Abdul Rauf said it is not a mosque but a community center that will include a prayer room.

There has been widespread public condemnation of city officials for letting the project move forward. While many vocal critics do not dispute the legal right of backers to build Cordoba House, they argue it is insensitive given its proximity to the World Trade Center site.

A statewide poll conducted by Sienna College and released Aug. 18 found 63 percent of voters surveyed oppose the project and 27 supporting it, The Associated Press reported.

The American Legion, in an online poll of its members, is finding opposition to the project is even more widespread. As of Aug. 18, nearly 2,500 people had voted, with 68 percent opposing the center as “a slap in the face” to the victims of the 9/11 attacks, and another 23 percent saying it shouldn’t be built because “the entire site should be classified a historic landmark.”

Only 9 percent said the center should be built.

Joe March, a spokesman for the American Legion, noted that the poll is informal and that the Legion has not taken a stand one way or the other on the center.

The center has become a political issue for office holders and those seeking office in November, with President Obama one day underscoring the project planners have every legal right to build the center, then backing off a bit by saying he was not actually endorsing the project.

New York’s senior senator, Chuck Schumer, has largely remained quiet on the subject, reportedly only issuing a statement that he is “not opposed” to it.

But a Republican seeking to take Schumer’s senate seat in November has made it one of his issues. Gary Berntsen, the former CIA operative who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, says the proposed center will be taken over by radicals “intent on imposing their murderous and hateful ideology mere footsteps away from sacred ground in Manhattan.”

Berntsen’s comments were from a letter Berntsen sent to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo urging an investigation into the mosque and its funding. Military.com was unable to reach Berntsen by post time.

 According to Eaton, the highly-charged accusations will only make it harder for the U.S. to win over allies in the Muslim world.

“From a military perspective we’re trying to build coalitions,” he said, and noted a lesson from World War II.

“When we sent American men and women to Great Britain to stage for D-Day we gave them a pamphlet,” he said. “On it, it said: ‘It’s always impolite to criticize your host. It’s militarily stupid to criticize your allies.’ ”

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