This year, the Time magazine has chosen Russian President Vladimir Putin as its person of the year for 2007. The choice of the editors at Time for their 2007 edition will undoubtedly rile many circles in the United States who see Putin is someone who has taken the US to task.

Putin has been highly critical of President Bush's foreign policy, speaking out against the US invasion of Iraq.

More recently, Putin was highly critical of the administration's plans to place a missile defence shield in Poland and the Czech Republic. The Russian president at first tried to persuade Bush to use existing facilities in former Soviet republics in Central Asia. When that failed, Putin made it known he would aim Russian missiles at a number of European cities.

Ignoring his own retort to brute military force to put down armed rebellions in Muslim republics, such as Chechnya, Putin did not hesitate to deride the United States for its use of blatant force in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a recent comment, Putin described Americans as "snotty".

In the article describing its choice, Time reported that President Vladimir Putin had returned Russia from chaos "to the table of world power".

Indeed, in recent months, Putin has emerged on the world political scene as an astute politician who has joined President Bush in pushing for a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli dispute. It was Putin's direct intervention, in the form of a personal telephone call to Syrian President Bashar Assad that convinced the Syrians to participate in the Annapolis Middle East peace conference last November. Syria's participation was vital to the "success" of the Annapolis hoopla.

And despite the fact that Damascus only sent its deputy foreign minister, nevertheless, the fact that Syria was there, in the same room as the Israeli foreign minister, was significant. Putin will be hosting a second round of "Annapolis" in Moscow next January.

In justifying its choice, Time reminds its readers that in making its selection for the person of the year, they tend to go for the person who has had the greatest impact on events, in either a positive or negative way.

"He's not a good guy. But he's done extraordinary things," Time's managing editor, Richard Stengel, said of Putin, who many observers of Russian politics see as a "new tsar of Russia".

According to the magazine, Putin came out ahead of four other contenders to the title: former US vice-president Al Gore, the writer JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, the Chinese president Hu Jintao, and Gen David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Iraq.

"Under Putin's leadership, Russia re-emerged as a constructive and reliable partner in shaping international relations," said Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov.

Time said Putin's "sharp vision" has led Russia with dauntless persistence and that he embodied the spirit of "Mother Russia". The magazine passed over the negative aspects of Putin's hunger for absolute power; the recent parliamentary elections which were criticised by the European Union as being unfair. Nor did they make any mention of Putin's clamp-down on the country's liberal opposition.

The conservative Fox News channel said Time gave the honour to the wrong man. Bill O'Reilly said Petraeus should be man of the year, as he is credited in turning around the outcome of the war in Iraq.

"You have to wonder what is up with the editors at Time magazine. Putin is probably important in the great scheme of things, but what American can honestly say that the person of the year is anybody but General David Petraeus?" asks the channel.

Bill O'Reilly, one of the conservative network's most outspoken defenders said Petraeus should be man of the year.

Fox's John Gibson wrote: "If Patraeus had not taken over the war effort it would be slogging along at a dispiriting and deathly pace, and the election season right now would be dominated by Iraq."

Gibson goes on, "So why would Time pick Putin? To avoid reminding you that Time and its cohorts in the mainstream media were so wrong on Iraq. The last thing anybody in the big media wants to do is underscore that they were wrong on Iraq: That they were way too pessimistic and way too convinced that we were going to lose this war."

Claude Salhani is editor of the Middle East Times and a political analyst in Washington