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WASHINGTON -- Soon after she became secretary of State in 1997, Madeleine Albright took a trip around the world, the first half-dozen stops in Europe. The only religious item on the agenda: Germany's ban on Scientology as a cult.
"The period of such innocence is over," Albright says now. Since 9/11, the West's conflict with Islamic extremism has dominated U.S. foreign policy. In The Mighty & the Almighty: Reflections on America, God, and World Affairs (HarperCollins, $25.95), Albright argues that policymakers need to do more to understand religion and tap its power to help resolve global conflicts.
She says the failure to do that -- to understand Islam and the force of its divisions -- has contributed to Bush administration missteps in Iraq.
"To some extent, I think it's worse than Vietnam," she says at her firm's posh offices, three blocks from the White House. "The unintended consequences and the unplanned aspect of Iraq is what I think puts it in this position of being perhaps the worst (foreign-policy) disaster" in U.S. history.
Among its impact on a strategic region: empowering Iran and eroding America's moral authority after the Abu Ghraib prison abuses.
Just as memories of the Vietnam War shaped Americans' attitudes toward the world for decades afterward, she predicts that "there will be an Iraq syndrome."
White House spokesman David Almacy responded: "We are working to change the status quo in a troubled region of the world by advancing democracy to lay the foundation of peace for generations to come. For too long, U.S. foreign policy was based on the faulty premise that we could achieve stability in the Middle East at the expense of democracy."
President Bush has never counted Albright as an ally, though she did back the war in Afghanistan. She advised Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 and sounds ready to embrace Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008, if she runs. "She's fantastic," Albright says.
Albright turns 69 in two weeks. She has always been blunt. "There has been such incompetence and such blundering" in Iraq, she says, which despite making some political progress in recent days "is not exactly a great poster child for democracy."
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