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pying the Middle East nation.
''Democracy cannot be imposed from the outside,'' he argued. ''I have been actively involved in building open societies in a number of countries through my network of foundations. Speaking from experience, I would never choose Iraq for nation building,'' he added.
Soros says his primary aim in getting involved with ACT is to mobilize civil society and convince people to go to the polls next year ''and vote for candidates who will reassert the values of the greatest open society in the world''.
The anti-Bush campaign is gathering support from anti-war groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and academics.
''The Soros initiative should gain support as the situation in Iraq worsens, and as the public becomes more aware that President Bush took us to war based on false information about Iraq's weaponry and about its connection to terrorist groups,'' John Quigley, professor of law at Ohio State University, told IPS.
''A president who initiates war on such (false) premises should not be re-elected,'' said Quigley.
''There is no question that if you really look at the deeper situation (about the Bush administration), George Soros is right,'' says Rob Wheeler, organizer of the Uniting for Peace Coalition and U.N. Representative of the Association of World Citizens.
''The president and his administration is surely leading the country in a 'false and dangerous situation' and they must be stopped,'' he told IPS.
''The question is, really, what issues ACT will focus on and how tough they will be on the president,'' he added.
The Hungarian-born Soros says he is not backing any candidate for the U.S. presidency.
Besides Bush, Soros also targets U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, author of the Patriot Act, a highly controversial law that has restricted civil liberties in the guise of fighting terrorism.
Anyone who opposes the Patriot Act, says Ashcroft, is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. Ashcroft's remarks have prompted a rejoinder from Soros: ''These are views of extremists, not adherents to an open society.''
A graduate of the London School of Economics, Soros says one of his political pursuits was to defeat communism and transform former closed societies in the Soviet Union into open societies.
Last week, he closed down his operations in Russia, where he spent over one billion dollars promoting democracy in a country that was the cradle of communism. Russia, he said, had weathered all its crises, and needs no outside support to survive.
Still, the OSI is known to spend over 450 million dollars annually to create open societies in several developing nations and Eastern European countries.
Ironically, although his anti-Bush campaign has strong supporters in the current U.S. anti-war movement, Soros is still vilified by anti-globalization groups, who criticize him for his strong advocacy of free market economies and the global capitalist system.
As a currency trader, he is accused of making his fortune by manipulating markets, mostly in developing countries. He is known to have made a billion dollars on a single day by speculating on the British pound.
In an article in 'Covert Action Quarterly' last year, Heather Cotton said that Soros' foundations and financial machinations are partly responsible for the destruction of socialism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
''He has set his sights on China. He was part of the full court press that dismantled Yugoslavia,'' she writes.
Soros' role, she said, is to tighten the stranglehold of globalization and the ''New World Order'' while promoting his own financial gain.
Cotton writes that while anti-globalization forces were freezing in the streets outside New York's Waldorf Astoria Hotel in February 2002, Soros was inside addressing the World Economic Forum, the traditional platform for the world's economic elites.
''As the police forced protesters into metal cages on Park Avenue, Soros was extolling the virtues of the 'open society'."
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