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LONDON, May 22: President George Bush has alienated Muslims around the world by using absolutist Christian rhetoric to discuss foreign policy issues, former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright says. “I worked for two presidents who were men of faith, and they did not make their religious views part of American policy,” she said, referring to Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, both Democrats and Christians.
“President Bush’s certitude about what he believes in, and the division between good and evil, is, I think, different,” said Ms Albright, who has just published a book on religion and world affairs.
“The absolute truth is what makes Bush so worrying to some of us.”
Mr Bush, a Republican, has openly acknowledged his Christian faith informs his decisions as president. He says, for example, that he prayed to God for guidance before invading Iraq.
Some Muslims have accused him of waging a crusade against Islam, comparable with those of the Middle Ages. The White House says it has nothing against Islam, but against those who commit terrorist atrocities in its name.
But Ms Albright says the president’s religious absolutism has made US foreign policy ‘more rigid and more difficult for other countries to accept’.
In her book, ‘The Mighty and the Almighty’, Ms Albright recalls how Mr Bush, while he was governor of Texas, told Christians he believed God wanted him to be president.
She quotes from his speech to his party convention of 2004, when he told Republicans: “We have a calling from beyond the stars to stand for freedom.”
“Some of his language is really quite over the top,” Mr Albright said during a trip to London to promote her book. “When he says ‘God is on our side’, it’s very different from (former US president Abraham) Lincoln saying ‘We have to be on God’s side’.”
IRAQ WORSE THAN VIETNAM: The 69-year-old, who worked for Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s and was Bill Clinton’s secretary of state from 1997-2001, says the occupation of Iraq ‘may eventually rank among the worst foreign policy disasters in US history’.
She describes it as arguably worse than the Vietnam war — not in terms of the number of people killed but because the Middle East is a more volatile region than southeast Asia.
She also bemoaned ‘the growing influence of Iran’ in the region and warned sectarian violence between Shia and Sunnis could escalate into an all-out ‘Arab-Persian conflict’.
“We should not be contributing to what is a long historical struggle between the Sunni and Shia,” she said.
—Reuters
