Washington: Eight years after bashing the Clinton administration for squandering US resources on "nation building" around the world, Condoleezza Rice is singing a different tune.

Then, as the chief foreign policy adviser for Republican presidential candidate George W Bush, Rice denounced the use of the US government assets for the promotion of human rights and democracy abroad as naive and wasteful.

Now, after serving as President Bush s national security adviser and secretary of state, Rice says she has changed her mind in an article entitled "Rethinking the National Interest" for the upcoming issue of "Foreign Affairs," the venerable journal of the international relations elite.

In it, Rice says the events of the past eight years, notably the September 11,2001,terror attacks, make nation building the concept she once maligned essential to US policy.

"We recognize that democratic state building is now an urgent component of our national interest," Rice writes, acknowledging her conversion to the cause from the position she staked out in a "Foreign Affairs" essay titled "Promoting the National Interest" during the 2000 campaign.

"In these pages in 2000,I decried the role of the United States, in particular the US military, in nation building," she writes. "In 2008,it is absolutely clear that we will be involved in nation building for years to come."

Rice says the military should not be given this duty alone and has proposed the creation of a civilian reserve corps to do most of it. She also insists that nation building cannot be done only after a state fails.

"We must help weak and poorly functioning states strengthen and reform themselves and thereby prevent their failure in the first place," she says.

Source : PTI