In a speech at Harvard University and during a student forum later, Clinton said the US-led coalition now at war must defeat terrorism, calling it "a struggle for the foal of this new century."

But he also said that the US government was no saint in the current conflict. He urged Americans to do more to help struggling Muslim families, asserting that only "a higher level of consciousness" in the United States will help bring the West and the Islamic world closer together.

"We all have to change," Clinton said. "The world's poor cannot be led by people like Mr. bin Laden who think they can find their redemption in our destruction. But the world's rich cannot be led by people who play to our shortsighted selfishness, and pretend that we can forever claim for ourselves what we do not for others."

At several points, Clinton said the United States should acknowledge its own flaws as it strives to influence Muslim nations.

"There is a war raging within Islam today about what they think about the modern world in general and the United States in particular," Clinton said. America can exert influence, he said, by admitting its own faults and making clear that the West does not pose a threat to the Islamic faith or to the economic well-being of Muslims.

"We cannot engage in this debate without admitting that there are excesses in our contemporary culture," he said, without offering specifics.

US officials, not terrorists, should define America in the eyes of Muslims, Clinton said, by explaining that Americans fought to defend Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo, and by noting that Muslims also died in the Sept. 11 attacks.

He said he should have worked harder - and fought congressional resistance - to support overseas "nation-building," a strand of activist foreign policy that fell out of favor after American soldiers were killed in Somalia in 1993.

In Afghanistan, he said, there was not enough outreach to political and ethnic groups, though he contended that his administration's overtures to the Taliban were rebuffed. But he faulted the US government for abandoning Afghanistan in the late 1980s, when Western diplomats might have played a more influential role in the region.

"We walked away from Afghanistan when the Soviets left," he said. "That was a mistake."

Clinton called on the current Bush administration to adopt a strategy of development aid, targeted debt-relief, and new trading opportunities to strengthen ties with Muslim nations.

The government can also fight terrorism better by improving technology to locate terrorists and potentially dangerous illegal immigrants, he said, calling existing systems "woefully inadequate."

In response to a student's quuestion about the Camp David talks between Israel and the Palestinians that broke down in the summer of 2000, Clinton said that he never expected success during those negotiations, but that he thought that a final deal would be reached in the last weeks of his presidency. He said he supported the creation of a Palestinian state.