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Madeleine Albright, Former US Secretary of State

ANDREW MARR: Madam Secretary, welcome back to London. It's very nice to have you here. I think we've still got Margaret Beckett in Derby.

I don't know if you've got any woman to woman advice you'd like to give her before we move on?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well first of all I'd like to welcome her to this wonderful position and also to a group that has been created of all women ministers throughout the world. I am the Chair, there are about 600 of us, so I hope that you will join us in that position. It's a lot of support that is needed if you are a woman minister.

ANDREW MARR: Thank you very much.

MARGARET BECKETT: Thank you very much.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: And I would like to also tell her, I know she's been asked whether she'll have trouble with foreign leaders as a woman minister. I can just tell you that you will have more problems with the men in your own government.

ANDREW MARR: I think Margaret Beckett knows that very well. Okay. Thank you very much indeed Foreign Secretary for joining us. Mrs Albright, you've just written a book about religion and politics for obvious reasons. Bill Clinton who did the forward to the book said this is an absolute mine field that you're walking into, particularly in America where people, including, above all, your president, describe their political crusade or convictions in pretty strongly religious fundamentalist black and white terms. So how dangerous is this do you think?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well I think that it is a fairly complex subject and I come at it from a little bit of a different angle. When I was Secretary I was among those kinds of people who used to say this conflict is complicated enough, let's not bring God and religion into it.

But I think the more that one analyses what is going on now in so many different places, I think that you can't eliminate God and religion and I think we ought to be trying to use the forces that are out there of religious people in order to find what unites us, not divides us, and if you read any of the holy books they all have blood curdling parts in them, but they also have some where there are some common threads of peace and justice, and I'm still a problem solver, I'm not a theologian and I'm not a mystic. But I do think we need to look at things a bit differently.

ANDREW MARR: But you make the point in your book that if you are a jihadi in Al-Qaeda you can find things in the Koran which justify what you're doing, but actually, if you tried to find similar things in the Bible you could find them there too.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Absolutely, and the thing that I'm saying is that you cannot judge Islam by Al-Qaeda just the way you cannot judge Christianity by the Ku Klux Klan, and so what has to happen is for us to try to find the parts in our holy books that actually bring people together. Now I know it sounds a little too fantasy like, but I do think we are in such a terrible state that I think we do need to look for some common threads.

ANDREW MARR: After 9/11 you described yourself as a hawk. You were in favour of going after Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and much more recently you've been back into the Whitehouse to talk to President Bush. But you're much more critical when it comes to Iraq.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I am, and let me just say, it's never easy to be abroad and criticise one's own government but I am very worried about Iraq. I have written in my new book that I'm afraid it's going to turn out to be the greatest disaster in American foreign policy. I hope I'm wrong, but just in listening to various interviews, I know that we have terrible - we generally - terrible problems in terms of violence.

I'm very glad that this new government has been formed, but as we know, they have not been able to assign very important ministries of defence and interior and there are insurgencies going on, but the main problem that I see is the.. are the unintended consequences of this war. The biggest one, frankly being at the moment is that the country that gained the most out of this war is Iran. So I am very worried about it.

ANDREW MARR: You talk in the book about Shiite Muslims being in a position of political power in the region they haven't had for a thousand years.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well they definitely have risen and what we have the danger of are Shia Sunni conflicts, in other words Persia Arab conflicts, and I think that people didn't think that through enough before they went in which is why I'm advocating that our diplomats need to understand much better the religious implications of what they do. It's one thing for them to understand the language and the culture, but unless you're deeply knowledgeable about various religious differences, you make gross generalisations and I think it leads into terrible problems.

ANDREW MARR: Mr Alawi, the former Prime Minister of Iraq, said on this programme that he thought the country was going through civil war now and there's been a great debate about whether it's actually going to break up or not.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well I think it would be a great danger if it broke up. It was created during the Second World War by bureaucracies frankly, some of them British, and it's an artificial country, but I think at this stage, if it were to break up, it would have deep implications obviously on Turkey and the Kurdish issue.

It would give additional power to Iran and the South with the Shia. And then the centre, which is primarily Sunni is not homogeneous either, and one is unclear as to what role the Saudis might play or Jordanians and so I think it's better to keep it together with some understanding that there needs to be local autonomy with some central control and distribution of oil revenues.

ANDREW MARR: You mentioned Iran just now. For those of us on this side of the pond trying to gage what's really going on inside the administration, the Pentagon, when they're preparing for whatever might happen with Iran, is terribly difficult. Can you help us, can you talk us through the situation at all?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well it's pretty difficult on our side too. I think that any leader, it's almost like boiler play, will say we can't take a military option off the table. I mean that's just kind of standard. The question is whether there's a military option being put on the table, but that is unclear.

At the meeting at the White House generally there are discussions about this, and plus discussions that I've had on the outside, I think there's every effort to try to handle this diplomatically. However, what some of us have been suggesting is while the multilateral track at the UN is good, and certainly in partnership with the EU, I think personally that the US should be having direct talks with Iran, not in order to appease them but to make very clear that certain things must be done.

ANDREW MARR: And of course you've been attacked by all the rightwing radio shows and all the rest of it for even suggesting talking to Iran.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Right. Actually I've been compared to Neville Chamberlain which for somebody who was born in Czechoslovakia is really an insult.

ANDREW MARR: Pretty offensive, yes.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: But I think that you can't get much done if you don't have face to face talks. That is not appeasement and it's not negotiating. I think we need to look at the larger picture here. I also think that the letter that the Iranian President Ahmedinejad sent to President Bush needs to be responded to.

Not by President Bush as a pen pal but in a larger context in a speech given by a high level administration person because while the letter is filled with invective and lies and sabre rattling, there are issues addressed not to President Bush but to the wider world and I believe we, with the British, we need to be talking about what we're for in this battle of ideas, not what we're against.

ANDREW MARR: And do you think there's any chance that President Bush might actually engage in some kind of direct dialogue with Iran?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I have no way of telling. I have no insight into that.

ANDREW MARR: Just on you yourself, obviously a democrat, we're at a time when there's a lot of jostling in your party about the next presidential nomination. Al Gore is coming out again a bit, and of course Hillary Clinton has been running this pre-campaign campaign. Is there any chance that Madeleine Albright will be back one day do you think in office in the United States?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well I love public service but� and I'm hoping very much the Democrats get re-elected. I think it's very, very important because even though I'm sitting here in a foreign country, I must say I think I'm very critical of what's happening in the United States, but I would like to see Democrats back and of course I'd be happy to help in whatever way, but you usually don't get the same job twice, and that was a pretty good job.

ANDREW MARR: A pretty good job to have first time round. George Bush's ratings are now at an historic low for modern times. Do you think your party has a real cracking chance this time?

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: I definitely do, but first we have to deal with the Congressional elections of 2006, and that's part of what's really wrong.

Our system is based on checks and balances and Congress, having been controlled by the same party as the President is just not doing its job in oversight, and I think that has been a real down side of how the war has been progressing, all kinds of questions about eavesdropping and various issues that are troubling Americans. So I'm hoping very much that we'll get a Democratic Congress.

ANDREW MARR: Absolutely , now Hillary versus Condi, that would be a great one, wouldn't it.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well I'm not sure that.. you know.. Condi has never run for anything. Hillary is a remarkable person and a very good friend.

ANDREW MARR: Is she.. I mean some people say that she's too divisive, even now, to win. But others say no, no, she's moved, she's got a position, she's got a huge amount of money behind her, she's a really serious candidate.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Well she hasn't said she's going to run, and even her husband says he doesn't know, so how would I? And she is running very strongly for the Senate but I think she is a remarkable person and the Unites States is ready for a woman President.

You know people thought a woman couldn't be Secretary of State, somehow we did okay. I just think that she is remarkable. But you know.. she is the one who has to announce whether she's running or not.

ANDREW MARR: Well we'll watch with great interest. Madeleine Albright, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: Thank you.

ANDREW MARR: Very kind indeed.

INTERVIEW ENDS

NB: this transcript was typed from a recording and not copied from an original script.

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