US Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Tuesday President Bush's linkage of Iraq, Iran and North Korea into an "axis of evil" was "not a rhetorical flourish," while the Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said military spending increase is needed to prepare US troops for future wars.
Powell: Sino-US Ties Improving, Bush Administration is Serious on "Axis of Evil"
Powell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that China-US relations are developing rather smoothly ahead of President George W. Bush's visit to Beijing this month, despite a year of turbulence since he took office.
"The relationship is back on an improving track," said Powell, attributing progress to a desire by both sides to heal the scars left by a crisis over a US EP-3 spy plane bumping into a Chinese jet over South China Sea.
Powell stressed that despite their ideological differences, the United States and China should cooperate in areas where they had common interests, including Beijing's entry into the World Trade Organization, peace efforts on the Korean peninsula and battling HIV/AIDS.
"On such issues we can talk, and produce constructive outcomes," Powell said, laying out the case for engagement with China, a school of diplomacy favored by one of several competing camps in the Bush administration.
Powell also acknowledged there were areas in which the US and China "decidedly did not see eye to eye".
"On such issues we can have a dialogue and try to make progress. But we do not want the issues where we differ to restrain us from pursuing those where we share common goals," Powell said.
"That is the basis on which our relations are going rather smoothly at present."
Since terror attacks on September 11 fundamentally altered much of its foreign policy, the United States has praised China for its intelligence assistance during its campaign against terrorism.
Powell also praised that China had played a constructive role in his initiative to downplay tensions between India and Pakistan.
"Beijing was not trying to be a spoiler but instead was trying to help us alleviate tensions and convince the two parties to scale down their dangerous confrontation -- which now it appears they are beginning to do."
"All of this cooperation came as a result of our careful efforts to build the relationship over the months since the EP-3 incident."
Bush will visit Beijing for a day-and-a-half arriving on February 21, 30 years to the day since then president Richard Nixon and Chinese leader Chairman Mao Zedong held epochal talks which led to China's emergence on the world stage.
He is due to meet Chinese President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji, on a tour of Asia which also includes stops in Seoul and Tokyo.
In more than two hours of wide-ranging testimony on the State Department's annual budget request, Powell said that Bush's linkage of Iraq, Iran and North Korea into an "axis of evil," was "not a rhetorical flourish. He meant it."
He also said that Iraq's overture to the United Nations to resume talks should amount to "a very short discussion," because weapons inspectors should immediately be allowed back in that country without conditions.
Powell also said that the United States expects to meet Russia's demand for a "legally binding" agreement on reducing nuclear warheads, whether that takes the form of a treaty ratified by Congress or some less formal document. By saying so, Powell confirmed comments by senior administration officials last week.
"It isn't enough just to say that they are dangerous regimes," he told Senator Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, a fellow Vietnam veteran who worried aloud that Mr. Bush might be stepping into a quagmire like Lyndon B. Johnson in Southeast Asia.
"That action is required doesn't mean that a war is going to start tomorrow, or that we're going to invade anybody," Secretary Powell added. "In fact, it may mean, in the short term, a focus on the policies that we have in place with respect to each of the three countries he mentioned, and other countries that might have been mentioned."
Mr. Powell also faced questioning from the committee's chairman, Senator Joseph R. Biden, Democrat of Delaware, who said he feared that the interim Afghan government could not survive unless the international peacekeeping force in that country was expanded to other areas from its current focus in Kabul only, with or without the help of United States troops. A senior Republican member, Richard Lugar of Indiana, raised similar concerns.
"All of that is under consideration," Mr. Powell told Mr. Biden, while repeating that "the president is quite determined that we not put US combat units on the ground to essentially perform military police and security kinds of functions."
Rumsfeld: Big increase in military spending needed
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday the biggest military spending increase in two decades is needed to prepare US troops for future wars even as they fight today's battle against terrorism.
Those tasks are made harder because the Pentagon also needs to rebuild after a "decade of overuse and underfunding," he said in promoting the administration's US$379 billion budget plan to the Senate Armed Services Committee.
"When the Cold War ended, a defense drawdown took place that went too far ... overshot the mark," Rumsfeld said. "Now, through the prism of Sept. 11, we can see that our challenge is not simply to fix the underfunding of the past."
Instead, Rumsfeld said, the Defense Department has three difficult missions at once -- win the worldwide war on terrorism, restore forces with what he called long-delayed investments in weapons, personnel and facility improvements and transform the military for 21st century warfare.
"Our adversaries are watching what we do, they're studying how we have been successfully attacked, how we are responding and how we may be vulnerable in the future," he said of the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on America.
"And we stand still at our peril," he said.
Rumsfeld was appearing with the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Air Force Gen. Richard Myers, to woo support for the budget plan Bush submitted to Congress on Monday.
For the fiscal year starting Oct. 1, the plan would add US$48 billion in budget authority to the Pentagon's spending. Bush would add more each succeeding year, reaching US$451 billion in spending authority for 2007.
When past years' budgets are adjusted for inflation, that would be second only to former President Ronald Reagan's 1985 budget of US$451.8 billion. In 1981, Reagan's first year in office, the Pentagon budget grew by nearly 25 percent.
The committee chairman, Sen. Carl Levin, opened the hearing by praising the job America's military has done in the first stage of what officials say will be a yearslong war on terrorism -- the campaign to root al-Qaida terrorist and Taliban supporters from power in Afghanistan.
(China Daily February 6, 2002)
