Iraq worst disaster for US foreign policy - Albright

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Iraq worst disaster for US foreign policy - Albright

 

Fri Feb 23, 2007 8:46 AM GMT

 

 

ATLANTA (Reuters) - Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said on Thursday the war in Iraq would go down in history as the worst disaster in U.S. foreign policy.

 

President George W. Bush has squandered the moral authority established by former President Jimmy Carter in his presidency when he pursued a foreign policy that promoted human rights as a central goal, Albright said during a public conversation with the former president at the Carter Center in Atlanta.

 

"I think that Iraq is going to go down in history as the greatest disaster in American foreign policy because we have lost the element of the goodness of American power and we have lost our moral authority," she said.

 

"The job of the next president will be to restore the goodness of American power," she said.

 

Albright worked for Carter in the late 1970s, was appointed by President Bill Clinton as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and then secretary of state, the first woman to hold that position.

 

The current administration mistakenly believes it can bring peace by unilateral action, she said.

 

It has also failed to engage sufficiently in a search for peace between Palestinians and Israel and failed to adequately support Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, she said.

 

"The Bush administration has really wasted a lot of years (in the Middle East) because they did want to distance themselves from the work" that Clinton had done, she said.

 

Carter said the war in Iraq and the administration policy of preemptive war had spread fear of the United States around the world. "They have seen our unwarranted invasion of Iraq and the bombing. We don't know how many tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis it's killed," Carter said.

 

"And now with almost all of our allies withdrawing and increasing our people, I think that all of that is causing a great deal of fear that the United States resorts first to the use of military power and secondly to negotiation," he said.