Bush faces broadside from ex-president Jimmy Carter

On the day his Adminstration turned its back on an international germ warfare treaty, President Bush faced a broadside from one of his predecessors in the White House, Jimmy Carter, who savaged his handling of a host of foreign policy issues, from missile defence to the Middle East.

In an interview with a local newspaper in his home state of Georgia, the former Democrat President declared himself "disappointed with almost everything he (Mr Bush) has done," accusing him of abandoning his moderate promises and caving in to conservatives across the board.

Mr Carter's remarks in one sense are scant surprise. Since his defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980, he has carved out a niche as a respected, liberal-minded voice on foreign affairs, often acting as an independent emissary on foreign issues rather than as a representative of American power.

Nonetheless - despite the gradual demise of the old Washington convention that partisanship stopped at the ocean's edge - it is most unusual for a former President to criticise directly the foreign policy of a successor, let alone in the blunt language used by Mr Carter.

His disquiet, moreover, is shared by many senior Democrats in Congress, as well as many of America's allies abroad.

Underlying Mr Carter's alarm is a sense that the narrowness of Mr Bush's victory last autumn obliged him to govern from the centre.

"I hoped," he told the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, "that coming out of an uncertain election, he would reach out to people of diverse views, I thought he would be a moderate leader." Instead the opposite was taking place.

In many ways, the complaints might have come from the mouth of any of Mr Bush's myriad critics in Europe, exasperated by what they see as Washington's high-handed, unilateral behaviour on a host of issues, from missile defence to the planned permanent international criminal court, to international treaties on global warming and small arms - and most lately its dismissal in Geneva yesterday of a pact to enforce a ban of biological weapons.

Mr Carter urges the current President to reverse track and embrace the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gases.

He deems the Bush administration's cherished missile defence shield to be "technologically ridiculous," and likely only to increase tensions with Russia.

On the Middle East, he accuses the current President of being too soft on Israel and its settlements on the West Bank, noting pointedly that Mr Bush's own father "George Sr took a strong position on that issue, and so did I."

- INDEPENDENT