JEDDAH, Feb 22: The war on Iraq "was undertaken on false assumptions, perhaps on false claims," said Zbigniew Brzezinski, a former US national security adviser.

Brzezinski, who was national security adviser in the Carter administration, was speaking to a forum attended by some 3,000 delegates. He, however, vehemently denied that the war qualified as terrorism when a delegate at the Jeddah Economic Forum suggested it. "It would be demagogic to suggest that the war in Iraq is terrorism," he said, defining terrorism as "the deliberate killing of innocent people for political purposes".

Brzezinski was not the only American criticizing the actions of the Bush administration. George Soros, the chairman of the Soros Fund Management, said there was a sort of fundamental misconception in Presidents Bush's mind. "When he [Bush] says freedom will prevail, he means Americans will prevail."

He said the war in Iraq was also draining the US treasury and represented 25 percent of the American budget deficit. "That we may be wrong, this is something that he just doesn't seem to admit.

He seems to think that we aught to be right, we are the dominant power in the world, therefore we must be right. That is very dangerous because that comes very close to saying that might is right.

"We are the most successful open society in the world. Yet we don't understand the principles of open society. We are not in a position to determine which country is democratic and what form of democracy a country should take," Soros said.

Madeleine Albright, former US secretary of state, compared the west to Alexander the Great in its conquest-style planting of democracies. Soros also candidly responded to suspicions that Arabs voiced regarding the democratization of countries rich in natural resources. He said that the root to this lay in companies needing authority to extract or refine or in any number of ways work with a nation's natural resources.

With this goal, the companies formed relationships with the nations' rulers. Such relationships were formed without regard to how the rulers were actually ruling their people.

"Countries which are rich in natural resources, very often have very bad governments, or have a lot of internal conflict and turmoil fighting over the resource," Soros said.

The solution to this 'resource curse' phenomenon, Soros said, lied in insisting on greater transparency - transparency within the government and the companies that are allowed to work with the resources.