PARIS, January 13 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Former U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright criticized U.S. President George W. Bush’s concentration on Iraq and his desire to unseat Iraqi president Saddam Hussein, a French paper Monday, January 13.

In an interview with the French Le Figaro daily, Albright said North Korea is far dangerous than Iraq, pointing out that it [North Korea] threatened to create seismic waves in Asia on the contrary to the Iraqi position in the Middle East.

The U.S.A, on the one hand, is rest assured that North Korea is led by a dictator, a nuclear juggernaut and has a one million-strong army, while it, on the other, has no information about the weapons possessed by the Iraqi president, she added.

It is true that Bush wants to see a “regime change” in Iraq. But why does he insist on doing as such when Pyongyang poses real threats? Albright wondered.

The former Clinton’s Secretary of State said that Saddam could be contained and the North Korean danger far outweighed the Iraqi one, asserting that North Korea’s possession of nuclear arms and medium-range missiles was a case in point.

The daily quoted Albright as saying that the U.S. did everything in its power to avert a military build-up in Asia by assigning U.S. troops to South Korea and providing Japan with armed protection. The U.S., in addition, paid due attention to China and was keen on not letting it become the Asian cop; therefore, the U.S. should keep up its foothold in the Asian region by watching North Korea closely, Albright added.

“Confused Man”

Albright went even further when she lashed out at Bush’s hotchpotch foreign policy, describing him as a confused man.

Bush said his prime goal was to root out Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network and now he made a surprising policy shift by making Iraq first, al-Qaeda second and North Korea third and I think he has no solutions to crises, Albright said.

Washington and Pyongyang at loggerheads

On the current tensions between Washington and Pyongyang, Albright told Le Figaro that Washington had advanced, by leaps and bounds, in its protracted talks with North Korea; however, negotiations were brought to a halt when she left office, but she kept Secretary of State Colin Powell and Bush’s National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice posted on the outcome of her talks with North Korean officials.

The Bush administration, in effect, did not translate its attention to the North Korean problem into concrete steps. But if the incumbent U.S. administration committed a blunder by not building on the efforts exerted by the former administration vis-à-vis the North Korean crisis, the North Korean President Kim Jong Il was also blamed for deciding to go on with his underground nuclear program, Albright said.

Albright underlined that if Bush had made use of the outgrowth of Clinton’s U.S.-North Korean negotiations, the situation would have been much different.

She defended the North Korean president by saying that he was a flexible sort of a person, who admitted that his country had been an economic basket case and hoped to change the current situation for the welfare of his country.