WASHINGTON, March 7: Billionaire US financier George Soros said on Friday President George Bush was leading the world in the wrong direction towards war in Iraq.

“Here we are now, on the eve of war with Iraq. I am obviously in favor of removing Saddam,” Soros said in a lecture at Johns Hopkins University.

“Yet, I am profoundly opposed to the Bush administration’s policies. Not only in Iraq but altogether,” he said.

“It is not merely that the administration’s policies may be wrong. It is that they are wrong and I would go even further, they are bound to be wrong because they are based on a false ideology.”

The dominant faction in the Bush administration wrongly believed the United States might gave it the right to impose its will on the world, he said.

Bush and his administration had declared that people who were not with them were against them. “These are the views of extremists, not adherents to the open society,” Soros said.

A Hungarian who fled his country during the 1956 uprising against Communist rule, Soros made his fortune speculating on the financial markets — famously hastening the collapse of sterling during Britain’s 1992 crisis over participation in European monetary union.

In recent years he has delegated management of his Quantum Fund to concentrate on his philanthropic foundations which function in 30 countries around the world with the self-proclaimed goal of “transforming closed societies into open ones.”

“The Bush administration also claims to be fostering democracy by invading Iraq,” Soros said.

“But democracy cannot be imposed from the outside,” he added.

“To claim that we are invading Iraq for the sake of establishing democracy is a sham and the rest of the world sees it as such. The North Atlantic alliance has been severely disrupted and both NATO and the European Union are in disarray.”—AFP