US Democrats demand new foreign policy

MANCHESTER (AFP) - Democratic presidential candidates demanded a total overhaul of US foreign policy Sunday, chiding China over Darfur, and urging intense diplomacy over Iran and Pakistan.

In their second televised debate, the 2008 candidates for the party nomination castigated President George W. Bush over Iraq, clashed over the rationale for the war, and the best way to get troops home.

But they also ripped into the administration over its wider foreign policy, and accused Bush of disdaining diplomacy and fracturing US alliances abroad.

Veteran Senator Joseph Biden made the most impassioned appeal, demanding a US-backed no-fly-zone in Darfur, and the dispatch of 2,500 NATO troops.

"You could take out the Janjaweed tomorrow," Biden said, referring to militia accused of atrocities in Darfur, during the debate in New Hampshire, which holds the first primary nominating contests next January.

"I went there, I sat in the borders, I went in those camps. They're going to have thousands and thousands and thousands of people die. We've got to stop talking and act," Biden said.

Another candidate, former US ambassador to the United Nations Bill Richardson, even suggested a US boycott over the Beijing Olympics in 2008, if China did not accept Western attempts to defuse the crisis.

"We need China, to lean on China, which has enormous leverage over Darfur," Richardson said.

"And if the Chinese don't want to do this, we say to them, maybe we won't go to the Olympics."

Senator Hillary Clinton, front runner for the party nomination, meanwhile pledged to focus "like the proverbial laser" on the US 'war on terror' ally Pakistan.

She suggested the appointment of a high-level presidential envoy to mediate tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Clinton's top rival in national polls, Senator Barack Obama, warned that the US presence in Iraq was making it more difficult to deal with Pakistan, and under-pressure leader President Pervez Musharraf.

"If people in Pakistan believe that the US is an occupying force, it makes us more subject to the kinds of difficulties that we're seeing in Pakistan today," he said.

Clinton also said she would mandate a new, more intense effort to seek a diplomatic solution to the nuclear showdown with Iran.

"We still have to make it clear that Iran having a nuclear weapon is absolutely unacceptable. We have to try to prevent that at all costs," she said.

Asked what she would do if diplomacy failed, Clinton said : "I'm not going to get into hypotheticals, because we've had an administration that doesn't believe in diplomacy."

Former Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Edwards and Biden also demanded more US engagement in an international effort to frustrate Iran's nuclear program -- which Tehran maintains is not aimed at making nuclear bombs.