GERMANY: Former chancellor Gerhard Schröder has blamed the strong religious beliefs of US President George W Bush for strains in relations between Berlin and Washington over the Iraq war.
After friendly beginnings and Mr Schröder's profession of "complete solidarity" with the US after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, the temperature dropped between the two capitals in 2002 when Mr Schröder openly opposed the US-lead war in Iraq.
In his new memoir, Decisions: My Life in Politics, Mr Schröder says he found Mr Bush to be a "very pleasant and open" person, but he became sceptical of his religious "absoluteness".
"What bothered me, and in a certain way made me suspicious despite the relaxed atmosphere, was again and again in our discussions how much this president described himself as 'God-fearing', something he saw as the highest authority," writes Mr Schröder. "It can lead to difficulties when someone bases their political actions directly on prayer - from communion with God . . . Anyone who tries to legitimise political decisions this way simply cannot allow these decisions to be changed through criticism or an exchange of ideas. Because if you do, you then breach the mission from God."
The former German leader accuses the US government of hypocrisy for demanding secular reform elsewhere in the world while pushing for the opposite at home. "We criticise rightly that in most Islamic states the role of religion for society and the character of the rule of law are not clearly separated. But we fail to recognise that in the US, Christian fundamentalists and their interpretation of the Bible have similar tendencies."
Mr Schröder blames his election defeat last year on union leaders and nervous left-wingers inside his Social Democratic Party (SPD), who opposed his social and economic reforms and broke away to form a new party allied with the reformed communists.
The former leader is surprisingly mild towards his political foes, describing Oskar Lafontaine, his ally and finance minister turned arch-enemy, as "the best political person I have ever met".
He describes Bavarian state premier Edmund Stoiber as a "careful if not anxious person", who declined the presidency of the European Commission when Mr Schröder offered it to him with the agreement of French president, Jacques Chirac.
He barely mentions his successor in the chancellery, except for a swipe in a weekend interview that the grand coalition of SPD and Christian Democrats (CDU) "lacks leadership".
