New Delhi
5 September 2006
The George W Bush Administration needs to pursue a "moral, not
moralistic, foreign policy" and it should end its blind pursuit of transformational
diplomacy and rethink its obsession with imposing democracy on the unwilling after
what has happened in Iraq and West Asia, according to a former United States secretary
of state.
Dr Madeleine K Albright, who served in the Bill Clinton Administration, on Tuesday said
democracies were not built by thunderbolts raining down from above. "Our (US) presence
in Iraq is both solution and problem. Violence is continuing in Iraq and the growing
influence of Iran is a major unintended consequence (of US intervention in Iraq)," she
observed before going on to ask countries to help evolve an exit strategy for the US in
Iraq.
Earlier, delivering an address on "America, India and Democracy in the 21st Century" as
part of The Aspen Institute India's democracy series, Dr Albright said democracies
should be built bottom-up, not top-down as the Bush Administration likes to believe.
"Democracy must grow from within and has to be inclusive," she said, hastening to add
that it was "wrong strategy to ban Islamist groups."
"Excluding them gives them a stake to destroy" the possibility of promoting democracy,
Dr Albright said referring to the Hamas in Palestine and the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt. Criticising President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice for their
"overblown rhetoric" about how democracy was vital for stability and security in West
Asia, she said there was nothing inherent in West Asia that countries there could not
become democracies.
It was "totally ridiculous" to believe that democracy was a western value, she said, but
cautioned that terrorism posed a serious challenge to open societies and countries on
their own should devise ways to strike a balance between freedom and security. "We
don't know how to fight terrorism because we don't know what creates terrorists," she
observed and called for greater cooperation between and among democracies of the
world.
She called for a global approach to promotion of democracy. "The list is lengthening,"
she said, referring to Latin America, Pakistan and the former Soviet republics besides
China, Russia, Iran, Syria, Sudan and Venezuela.
Dr Albright teaches at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service. She chairs the National
Democratic Institute for International Affairs. She is also principal of The Albright Group,
an international advisory firm. Dr Albright was the first woman secretary of state and the
highest ranking woman in the history of the US Government.
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