WASHINGTON: The United States called Monday on Iran to end its "hateful rhetoric" after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's attacks on Israel but said it still wanted talks with Tehran to mend relations. President Barack Obama "disagrees vehemently" with Ahmadinejad, who branded Israel a racist state, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters. He said it vindicated the decision by the country's first African-American president to shun the UN conference on racism in Geneva. "This is hateful rhetoric. It's, I think, one of the reasons why you saw the administration and the president determined that its participation in this conference was not a wise thing to do," he said. But Gibbs added, "We continue to evaluate our policy and understand that from a larger foreign policy framework, doing things the same old way is not likely to bring about the change we need in our foreign policy." State Department spokesman Robert Wood said Ahmadinejad's "rhetoric is unhelpful, it's counterproductive and it just feeds racial hatred." "We want to have a direct dialogue with Iran, but Iran needs to do a number of things to get back in the overall good graces of the international community," Wood told reporters.
BAGHDAD: Nearly 500 U.S. Army combat engineers who specialize in clearing roads of explosives started shifting to southern Afghanistan."We are probably going to be the beginning of the influx you are going to see to Afghanistan," Lt. Col. Kevin Landers, commander of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 4th Engineer Battalion, said as crews packed crates and cleaned vehicles for the flight to Kandahar.Obama has ordered 17,000 more U.S. soldiers and Marines to Afghanistan to bolster the 38,000 American troops already battling the resurgent Taliban."We are going to take this footprint out of Iraq," said Landers, whose battalion received word of its reassignment last month just after taking command of clearing roads in Baghdad of bombs and debris.
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