CINCINNATI, Ohio, Aug 16 (AFP) - US Secretary of State Colin Powell said Monday the US-led military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have enhanced stability and spread democracy worldwide.
"Fifty-five million people in Afghanistan and Iraq have been liberated and are now looking to the future with hope," Powell told the annual national conference of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Powell's remarks came hours after President George W. Bush appeared at the same convention to announce plans to recall up to 70,000 troops from Europe and Asia in the most dramatic realignment of US military forces since the end of the Cold War.
"For decades, America's armed forces abroad have essentially remained where the wars of the last century ended," Bush told the veterans. "The world has changed a great deal, and our posture must change with it."
In his own speech, Powell touched briefly on the president's planned redeployment, which Bush characterized as a way of improving US troops' flexibility to meet unpredictable future challenges and enemies across the globe.
Bush's plan to pull out troops from the Cold War-era bases, Powell said, is comparable to the force reductions that America was able to make in then-East Germany following the collapse of communism and the removal of the Berlin Wall.
Largely reiterating familiar administration themes, Powell both defended the war on terrorism and predicted that the United States ultimately would prevail in the struggle.
"Free people do not stay free long if they permit an enemy to strike at a time and place of their choosing," Powell said. "It will be a long fight, but we will succeed."
The differing reactions to the war in Iraq and animosity toward America in some quarters throughout the world, Powell suggested, is largely an outgrowth of the nation's towering global presence.
"The world looks to us with a mixture of respect and resentment because we are powerful," he said.