-The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has said the leadership of the United States in the world has broken down and he has in an interview with the British Muslim lifestyle magazine Emel urged a change in US foreign policy.
Interviewed for the December issue of the magazine, the spiritual leader of the world-wide Anglican Communion commented: ‘We have only one global
hegemonic power. It is not accumulating territory; it is trying to accumulate influence and control. That’s not working.’
He contrasts this approach with how the British Empire governed India. ‘It is one thing to take over a territory and then pour energy and resources into administering it and normalising it.’ said Williams.
‘Rightly or wrongly, that’s what the British Empire did – in India, for example,’ he said. ‘It is another thing to go in on the assumption that a quick burst of violent action will somehow clear the decks and that you can move on and other people will put it back together – Iraq for example.’
The United States had lost the moral high ground since 11 September 2001, Williams asserted. He urged that it launch a ‘generous and intelligent programme of aid directed to the societies that have been ravaged; a check on the economic exploitation of defeated territories; a demilitarisation of
their presence.’
In the same interview the Anglican leader said Muslims needed to acknowledge that the political solutions in the Islamic world ‘were not the most
impressive’.
Williams cited Pakistan where he said, ‘The Pakistan Christian minority is persecuted by the overwhelming Muslim majority, which ought to be more
confident and generous about its identity.’
The US Embassy in London in a statement on 25 November rejected the archbishop’s claim that the United States did not help to rebuild countries
and pointed out that ‘billions of dollars of financial, technical and medical assistance had been given to the people of Iraq’. President Bush had doubled overseas development assistance and tripled aid to Africa, it stated.
