No need to change Iraq, Afghanistan policy: US

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal">WASHINGTON: Despite suffering "casualties", US policies in Iraq and Afghanistan were working and there was no need for mid-course correction, US Secretary of State Colin Powell said on Monday.<br /><br />"We have a good strategy and we are executing that strategy. The results are that two despotic regimes are gone," he told <span style="" font-style:="" italic="">CNN</span>.<br /><br />Powell said though US was suffering casualties, it needed "to stay on the course and was trying to generate more support from the international community".<br /><br />"We have to stay on the course," he said."Are there difficulties? Yes. Are terrorists trying to take advantage of the situation? Yes. Are we taking casualties? Regrettably, yes."<br /><br />Pointing out that there are now 29 nations in the coalition, Powell said, "we are not there alone". Current efforts to secure a new UN resolution, he added, would broaden that coalition.<br /><br />Powell said that the US had "no apologies" for launching the invasion of Iraq without the full backing of the UN. <br /><br />He claimed Iraq had "weapons of mass destruction and programmes to develop weapons of mass destruction at the time we took the action that we took". <br /><br />However, Democrat Senator Edward Kennedy, appearing on the same programme, criticised the Bush administration''s Iraq policy saying it did not have an "exit strategy" and stressed that the US "should have stayed with the United Nations in the first place".<br /><br />"For the secretary (Powell) to suggest that we have a successful strategy flies in the face of the fact that we are seeing Americans killed daily," he said.<br /><br />"It is difficult to understand how you can have a successful policy in Iraq when you don''t have an exit strategy," Kennedy said.<br /><br />The senator said that the UN needs to be "fully engaged" in Iraq and not simply take a back seat to the Americans.<br /><br />Asked if Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defence Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the current policy''s biggest cheerleaders, should resign, as Democratic Congressman David Obey has suggested, Kennedy said: "I think the policy should resign." <br /><br />He hoped that President Bush would "recognise the failed policies of the past" and endorse full international cooperation. "We should have stayed with the United Nations in the first place," Kennedy said.<br /><br />He said the Congress would have questions about the amount of money President George W Bush now wanted for the Iraq operation.<br /><br />"We shouldn''t just be writing a blank cheque for this administration to continue to squander this money over there," he said. "This is not an issue of partisanship. That is an issue of national security. It is a makeshift operation over there and the people who are suffering are the American servicemen. That has to change." </div> </div>