| America yesterday dismissed the European initiative to create a multi-national force headquarters as irrelevant because of a lack of political will to spend more on defence. "Reference was made to the meeting today in Belgium where four of the nations of the union have come together and created some sort of a plan to develop some sort of a headquarters," Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State, said witheringly. "But what we need is not more headquarters. What we need is more capability and fleshing out the structure and the forces that are there with the equipment that they need." Mr Powell did not hide the Bush administration's dissatisfaction with European defence capabilities and its anger at the French-led blocking of Nato aid to Turkey and opposition to the United Nations authorising war with Iraq. "The individual countries of Nato have not done a good enough job on this," he told members of the Senate foreign relations committee. "They talk about it, we have plans there are always new initiatives coming along." |