Obama blames Republicans for "dumb" cuts

WASHINGTON: President Barack Obama on Friday blamed Republican refusal to compromise on deficit cutting for "dumb" and "unnecessary" spending cuts about to slam into the fragile US economy.

The arbitrary and automatic $85 billion dollar cuts, known as the "sequester" will begin later Friday, in a self-inflicted wound brought about by deep ideological polarization between the president and his foes in Congress.

"I am not a dictator. I'm the president," Obama said, warning he could not force his Republican foes to "do the right thing", which he sees as raising revenues to combine with targeted spending cuts in a deal to cut the deficit.

"These cuts will hurt our economy, will cost us jobs and to set it right both sides need to be able to compromise," Obama said.

Appearing irritated after meeting top congressional leaders including Republican House speaker John Boehner and top Republican Mitch McConnell, Obama denied blame in the showdown.

"If Mitch McConnell or John Boehner say, we need to go to catch a plane, I can't have Secret Service block the doorway, right?" he said, when asked why talks on averting sequestration had broken up.

"I'm presenting a fair deal. The fact that they don't take it means that I should somehow, you know, do a Jedi mind meld with these folks and convince them to do what's right?"

Boehner emerged from the talks with the president to tersely signal to reporters that Republicans would not budge on Obama's key demand for a deal which be partly based on raising extra tax revenues.

"Let's make it clear that the president got his tax hikes on January 1. This discussion about revenue in my view is over," Boehner said, alluding to the outcome of the so-called 'fiscal cliff' showdown late last year.

"It is about taking on the spending problem in Washington."

Obama was bound by law to initiate the automatic, indiscriminate cuts, which could wound the already fragile economy, cost a million jobs and harm military readiness, by 11.59 pm in the absence of an deficit cutting agreement.

The hit to military and domestic spending was never supposed to happen, but was rather a device seen as so punishing that rival lawmakers would be forced to find a better compromise to cut the deficit.

But such is the dysfunction in gridlocked Washington that neither side tried very hard to get a deal.

The drama instead evolved into the latest philosophical standoff over the size, role and financing of government between Obama, who won re-election vowing to protect the middle class, and fiscally conservative Republicans.

Obama, in effect extending the campaign that won him re-election in November, has mounted a fierce public relations offensive designed to maximize his leverage by pouring blame on Republicans for the cuts.

He acknowledged Friday that the impact of the cuts would not be immediate, but would nevertheless hurt middle class Americans in a "slow grind" squeeze which he said could cost more than half a point of economic growth.

"So every time that we get a piece of economic news over the next month, next two months, next six months, as long as the sequester's in place, we'll know that economic news could have been better if Congress had not failed to act."

Republicans accuse Obama of inflating the impact of the sequester and of using scare tactics, and believe he has painted himself into a political corner.

Although the cuts trim significant amounts from domestic and defense spending, they do not touch entitlements -- social programs like Medicare health care for the elderly and pension schemes.

Many budget experts believe that only cuts to those programs will be able to restore the prospect of long-term fiscal stability.

Obama says he is ready to make painful choices on such funding, but says he will not allow Republicans to preserve tax breaks for the rich and saddle the most needy with the bill for tackling the deficit.

Republicans simply say that Obama is not serious about cutting spending, and is unwilling to take on his own party, which views entitlement programs as an almost sacred trust.

The White House warns that the indiscriminate cuts are written into law in such a way that their impact cannot be alleviated.

It says 800,000 civilian employees of the Defense Department will go on a mandatory furlough one day a week and the navy will trim voyages. The deployment of a second aircraft carrier to the Gulf has been canceled.

About 70,000 children less than five years old will be cut from the Head Start preschool program, resulting in the elimination of 14,000 teaching positions. Services for special needs kids will also take a hit.

Authorities warn that average wait times for passengers at US immigration will increase by 30-50 percent and may exceed four hours during peak times.

-AFP/ac

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Manik Sarkar, son of tailor, to be Tripura chief minister again

AGARTALA: Tripura chief minister Manik Sarkar, set to assume office for a fourth time after leading the Left to a huge electoral win, is the son of a tailor who still washes his own clothes.

An unassuming man, the 64-year-old got down to work no soon than he was declared the winner from Dhanpur constituency. He met CPM leaders and activists at Sonamura, 60km from here.

On Thursday, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) bagged 49 of the 60 seats while its ally Communist Party of India won one seat. The Congress finished with only 10 seats.

It was the best result for the Left since 1978 when the legendary Nripen Chakraborty-led CPM swept 56 seats. This time, Sarkar helped the Left Front increase its 2008 tally by one seat.

Undoubtedly, the "poorest" chief minister in India, Sarkar, according to documents filed with the Election Commission, has Rs.10,800 in cash.

In line with CPM rules, Sarkar gives away his salary to the party, which pays him Rs 5,000 a month.

He is probably India's only chief minister who does not own a home, car or bank balance worth mentioning.

He does not even have a mobile phone and has never used the red beacon on his official car.

Sarkar's wife Panchali Bhattacharjee, 62, who retired as a government employee in 2010, has Rs 22,015 in cash and Rs.24,52,395 as savings. The couple has no children.

She said her husband still washed his clothes every morning.

"My wife's pension can sustain us. My expenses are a small pot of snuff and a cigarette a day," Sarkar said.

After the death of his mother in 2009, Sarkar inherited a small house worth Rs.200,000 in Agartala. He donated it to his younger sister.

Sarkar's father Amulya was a tailor and mother Anjali was an employee of the state health department.

Sarkar joined politics in 1967 and was elected secretary of the CPM's Tripura unit in 1993.

A bachelor of commerce from Calcutta University, Sarkar was first elected to the Tripura assembly in a 1980 bypoll and again in 1983.

He is the second in the northeast to be the chief minister for 15 years or more after Gegong Apang of the Congress who ruled Arunachal Pradesh for 24 years over two periods (1980-99 and 2003-07).

On Thursday, Sarkar defeated his Congress rival Shah Alam by 6,017 votes. In 2008, Sarkar's winning margin was 2,918.

"This is a verdict in favour of development, peace and stability besides good governance," Sarkar told reporters.

According to a CPI-M leader, Left Front leaders will meet here Friday and decide when to form a new government.

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WHO: Small cancer risk after Fukushima accident

LONDON (AP) — People exposed to the highest doses of radiation during Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in 2011 may have a slightly higher risk of cancer but one so small it probably won't be detectable, the World Health Organization said in a report released Thursday.

A group of experts convened by the agency assessed the risk of various cancers based on estimates of how much radiation people at the epicenter of the nuclear disaster received, namely those directly under the plumes of radiation in the most affected communities in Fukushima, a rural agricultural area about 150 miles (240 kilometers) north of Tokyo.

Some 110,000 people living around the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant were evacuated after the massive earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011 knocked out the plant's power and cooling systems, causing meltdowns in three reactors and spewing radiation into the surrounding air, soil and water.

In the new report, the highest increases in risk appeared for people exposed as infants to radiation in the most heavily affected areas. Normally in Japan, the lifetime risk of developing cancer of an organ is about 41 percent for men and 29 percent for women. The new report said that for infants in the most heavily exposed areas, the radiation from Fukushima would add about 1 percentage point to those numbers.

"These are pretty small proportional increases," said Richard Wakeford of the University of Manchester, one of the authors of the report.

"The additional risk is quite small and will probably be hidden by the noise of other (cancer) risks like people's lifestyle choices and statistical fluctuations," he said. "It's more important not to start smoking than having been in Fukushima."

Experts had been particularly worried about a spike in thyroid cancer, since iodine released in nuclear accidents is absorbed by the thyroid, especially in children. After the Chernobyl disaster, about 6,000 children exposed to radiation later developed thyroid cancer because many drank contaminated milk after the accident.

In Japan, dairy radiation levels were closely monitored, but children are not big milk drinkers there.

WHO estimated that women exposed as infants to the most radiation after the Fukushima accident would have a 70 percent higher chance of getting thyroid cancer in their lifetimes. But thyroid cancer is extremely rare, one of the most treatable cancers when caught early, and the normal lifetime risk of developing it is about 0.75 percent. That risk would be half of one percentage point higher for women who got the highest radiation doses as infants.

Wakeford said the increase in such cancers may be so small it will probably not be observable.

For people beyond the most directly affected areas of Fukushima, Wakeford said the projected risk from the radiation dropped dramatically. "The risks to everyone else were just infinitesimal."

David Brenner of Columbia University in New York, an expert on radiation-induced cancers, said that although the risk to individuals is tiny outside the most heavily exposed areas, some cancers might still result, at least in theory. But they'd be too rare to be detectable in overall cancer rates, he said.

Brenner said the numerical risk estimates in the WHO report were not surprising. He also said they should be considered imprecise because of the difficulty in determining risk from low doses of radiation. He was not connected to the WHO report.

Some experts said it was surprising that any increase in cancer was even predicted.

"On the basis of the radiation doses people have received, there is no reason to think there would be an increase in cancer in the next 50 years," said Wade Allison, an emeritus professor of physics at Oxford University, who was not connected to the WHO report. "The very small increase in cancers means that it's even less than the risk of crossing the road," he said.

WHO acknowledged in its report that it relied on some assumptions that may have resulted in an overestimate of the radiation dose in the general population.

Gerry Thomas, a professor of molecular pathology at Imperial College London, accused the WHO of hyping the cancer risk.

"It's understandable that WHO wants to err on the side of caution, but telling the Japanese about a barely significant personal risk may not be helpful," she said.

Thomas said the WHO report used inflated estimates of radiation doses and didn't properly take into account Japan's quick evacuation of people from Fukushima.

"This will fuel fears in Japan that could be more dangerous than the physical effects of radiation," she said, noting that people living under stress have higher rates of heart problems, suicide and mental illness.

In Japan, Norio Kanno, the chief of Iitate village, in one of the regions hardest hit by the disaster, harshly criticized the WHO report on Japanese public television channel NHK, describing it as "totally hypothetical."

Many people who remain in Fukushima still fear long-term health risks from the radiation, and some refuse to let their children play outside or eat locally-grown food. Kanno accused the report of exaggerating the cancer risk and stoking fear among residents.

"I'm enraged," he said.

___

Mari Yamaguchi in Tokyo and AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter in New York contributed to this report.

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Benedict Departs Vatican for the Last Time as Pope

Pope Benedict XVI bade his final farewell to the faithful today, lifting off from the Vatican in a white helicopter as the first pope to resign in six centuries.

Just before 5 p.m. local time, Benedict, 85, walked out of the Vatican for the last time as pope, waving to a cheering crowd in the Courtyard of San Damaso as he entered a black Mercedes for the short drive to a nearby heliport.

In a tweet sent from Benedict XVI @Pontifex as his motorcade rolled to the heliport, Benedict said, "Thank you for your love and support. May you always experience the joy that comes from putting Christ at the centre of your lives."

READ MORE: Pope Benedict XVI Delivers Farewell Address

With church bells ringing across Rome, he then embarked on the 15-minute flight to Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence just south of the city and his home for the coming months when he'll be recognized by the church as His Holiness Benedict XVI, Pope Emeritus.

When Benedict landed in the gardens at Castel Gandolfo, he was greeted by a group of dignitaries, including the governor of the Vatican City state Giovanni Bertello, two bishops, the director of the pontifical villas, and the mayor and parish priest. Off the helicopter and back into a car, Benedict headed to the palace.

Vincenzo Pinto/AFP/Getty Images

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In the plaza at Castel Gandolfo, a crowd of supporters, many waving flags or banners, some peering out of windows, gathered to welcome Benedict. When Benedict finally appeared on the balcony, the crowd erupted in applause.

"Thank you for your friendship, your affection," Benedict told them.

Benedict said he was "just a pilgrim starting the last lap of his earthly journey."

After his brief address to the crowd, Benedict waved one last time and walked back into the palace as the sun set around the square.

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In his final remarks earlier in the day to colleagues in the Roman Catholic Church, Benedict had promised "unconditional reverence and obedience" to his eventual successor.

Benedict, in a morning meeting at the Vatican, urged the cardinals to act "like an orchestra" to find "harmony" moving forward.

Benedict spent a quiet final day as pope, bidding farewell to his colleagues and moving on to a secluded life of prayer, far from the grueling demands of the papacy and the scandals that have recently plagued the church.

His first order of business was a morning meeting with the cardinals in the Clementine Hall, a room in the Apostolic Palace. Despite the historical nature of Benedict's resignation, not all cardinals attended the event.

Angelo Sodano, the dean of the College of Cardinals, thanked Benedict for his service to the church during the eight years he has spent as pontiff.

Pope Benedict's Last Sunday Prayer Service

For some U.S. Catholics in Rome for the historic occasion, Benedict's departure is bittersweet. Christopher Kerzich, a Chicago resident studying at the Pontifical North American College of Rome, said Wednesday he is sad to see Benedict leave, but excited to see what comes next.

"Many Catholics have come to love this pontiff, this very humble man," Kerzich said. "He is a man who's really fought this and prayed this through and has peace in his heart. I take comfort in that and I think a lot of Catholics should take comfort in that."

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WikiLeaks: Manning says he wanted "public debate" on war

WASHINGTON: US Army private Bradley Manning told a military tribunal on Thursday that he leaked incident logs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks in order to start a "public debate."

"For me they represent the underground realities of the conflicts of Iraq and Afghanistan," Manning told the court, after his lawyer said he plans to plead guilty to some of the charges leveled against him over the leaks.

The 25-year-old, who is being held in military custody pending trial, said he would plead guilty to ten of the less serious of the 22 charges against him, but would deny aiding America's enemies, a crime which carries a life term.

Even if the court agrees to pursue only the lesser allegations, Manning still faces 20 years in military custody for leaking classified material to Australian activist Julian Assange's WikiLeaks whistle-blower website.

Reading a statement to the tribunal, Manning said he had initially attempted to contact traditional media outlets -- the Washington Post, the New York Times and Politico -- before deciding to pass the documents to WikiLeaks.

He sent the organization, which campaigns against government secrecy and publishes leaked information on a secure website, two military logs of daily incidents during the US campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"At the time I believed, and I still believe, these are two of the most significant documents of our time," he said, adding that he wanted to "spark a domestic public debate about our foreign policy and the war in general."

He also provided a vast trove of US diplomatic cables and cockpit video from a US helicopter gunship involved in an incident in which Iraqi civilians died.

Manning explained that he had chosen to work with WikiLeaks as it seemed to him, from what he had read, that the group "exposed illegal activities and corruption" and was "almost academic in nature."

Manning's plea offer was presented to a military tribunal at Fort Meade in Maryland by his lawyer David Coombs, and the young soldier confirmed to the court that he understood the implications of his offer.

He intends to plead guilty to "unauthorized possession and willful transmission" of the video and of documents recounting civilian deaths during US operations Iraq and Afghanistan.

He will also admit "knowingly, intelligently and voluntarily" providing WikiLeaks with the classified diplomatic cables.

Judge Denise Lind asked Manning whether he understood the implications of his plea offer: "Do you understand this? Do you have questions about this? Do you still want to go forward with this?"

"Yes, your honor," he replied, before reading out a 35-page statement of his own attempting to outline his motivation in leaking the material.

-AFP/ac

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18-month-old stuck in US for 7 months finally returns home

KOLKATA: Indrashis Saha, the 18-month old baby who spent seven months in custody of the US child protection agency in New Jersey returned to Kolkata on Wednesday.

Initially zapped by the reception after a 10-hour flight, he clung onto his grandmother's arms as if he had missed all that attention for months.

Indrashis' software engineer father Debasish Saha had gone there to work on a project in July last. The baby injured his head after falling from his bed on August 9 2012. The hospital authorities where he was treated refused to hand over the child suspecting that the injury was due to negligence and Indrashis was taken away by the child protection agency.

"It has been a long and anxious wait. My grandson must have gone through lots in the past seven months. We will make up whatever he has lost all these months," said maternal grandmother Pragati Basak who has been granted custody.

Indrashis boarded the Emirates flight from Newark with his uncle Bhaskar Kundu at 11 pm (IST) on Tuesday. The flight halted in Dubai two hours behind schedule due to technical reasons.

Kundu was suggested along with the paternal grandparents and maternal grandmother for custody. Representatives of US child protection agency visited the houses of each before granting custody to Basak.

"The battle was long but we finally won. Due to differences in cultural, social and family values, the West probably takes it as negligence whenever a problem arises with our children in their country. I am thankful to everyone who stood us by, specially the President of India and Congress leader Om Prakash Mishra," said grandfather Nirmal Chandra Saha.

Mishra too was at the airport on Wednesday to receive the baby. The retired school head master from Balurghat had approached Pranab Mukherjee in October.

Indrashis' mother Pamela is expected to return India soon though Debasish will come back after the completion of the project.

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Vt. lye victim gets new face at Boston hospital

BOSTON (AP) — A Vermont nurse disfigured in a 2007 lye attack has received a new face at a Boston hospital.

Carmen Blandin Tarleton's full facial transplant at Brigham & Women's Hospital included transplanting a female donor's facial skin to Tarleton's neck, nose and lips, along with facial muscles, arteries and nerves.

Hospital officials say the 44-year-old Thetford, Vt., woman suffered burns on more than 80 percent of her body after her estranged husband attacked her.

Tarleton's sister said Wednesday she showed "great appreciation" for the gift she's been given.

The donor's family believes their loved one's spirit lives on in Tarleton.

Tarleton has undergone more than 50 surgeries. The latest took 15 hours and included a team of more than 30 medical professionals.

Tarleton once worked as a transplant nurse.

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Bring on the Cuts: Some Want the Sequester

Mark Lucas wouldn't mind seeing America's defense budget cut by billions.

"There's quite a bit of waste within the military," Lucas, who serves as Iowa state director for the conservative group Americans for Prosperity (AFP), told ABC News. "Being in there for 10 years, I've seen quite a bit of it."

With the budget sequester set to kick in on Friday, the former Army ranger is among a small chorus of conservatives saying bring on the cuts.

Read more: Bernanke on Sequester Cuts: Too Much, Too Soon

Lucas cited duplicative equipment purchases, military-run golf courses and lavish food on larger bases -- unlike the chow he endured at a combat operations post in Afghanistan with about 120 other soldiers.

"These guys would have very good food, and I'm talking almost like a buffet style, shrimp and steak once a week, ice cream, all this stuff," Lucas said. "They had Burger Kings and Pizza Huts and McDonald's. And I said to myself, 'Do we really need this?'"

Lucas and AFP would like to see the sequester modified, with federal agencies granted more authority to target the cuts and avoid the more dire consequences. But the group wants the cuts to happen.

"We're very supportive of the sequestration cuts but would prefer to see more targeted cuts at the same level," said the group's spokesman, Levi Russell.

As President Obama and his Cabinet members are sounding the sequester alarm bells, AFP's willingness shows that not everyone is running for the hills.

Charles Dharapak/Pool/AP Photo

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Obama traveled to Norfolk, Va., on Tuesday to speak at a shipyard about cuts and layoffs to defense contractors. In his most recent weekly radio address, he told Americans that the Navy has already kept an aircraft carrier home instead of deploying it to the Persian Gulf. And last week, he spoke before national TV cameras at the White House, warning that first responders would be laid off.

Homeland Security Secretary Jane Napolitano has warned that the sequester will "leave critical infrastructure vulnerable to attacks." Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has warned that air travel will back up after the Federal Aviation Administration furloughs air traffic controllers. And the heads of 18 other federal agencies told Congress that terrible things will happen unless the sequester is pushed off.

Some Republicans have accused the president of scaremongering to gin up popular support for tax hikes. Obama has warned of calamity and demanded compromise in the next breath, and a few Republicans have rejected this as a false choice.

Read more: Boehner Hopes Senate 'Gets Off Their Ass'

"I don't think the president's focused on trying to find a solution to the sequester," House Speaker John Boehner told reporters at a press conference on Tuesday. "For 16 months, the president's been traveling all over the country holding rallies, instead of sitting down with Senate leaders in order to try to forge an agreement over there in order to move the bill."

After Obama spoke to governors at the this week, Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal told ABC News' Jonathan Karl outside the White House that the president is exaggerating the sequester's consequences.

"He's trying to scare the American people," Jindal said. "He's trying to distort the impact."

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Iran upbeat on nuclear talks, West still wary

ALMATY (Reuters) - Iran was upbeat on Wednesday after talks with world powers about its nuclear work ended with an agreement to meet again, but Western officials said it had yet to take concrete steps to ease their fears of a secret weapons program.

The United States, China, France, Russia, Britain and Germany offered to ease sanctions slightly in return for Iran curbing its most sensitive work, but had made clear they expected no breakthrough in the talks in Kazakhstan, the first in eight months.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the talks had been "useful" and that a serious engagement by Iran could lead to a comprehensive deal in a decade-old dispute that has threatened to trigger a new Middle East war.

Iran's foreign minister said in Vienna he was "very confident" a deal could be reached and its chief negotiator said he believed the Almaty meeting could be a "turning point".

The two sides agreed to hold expert-level talks in Istanbul on March 18 to discuss the offer, and return to Almaty for political discussions on April 5-6, when Western diplomats made clear they wanted to see substantive movement by Iran.

"Iran knows what it needs to do, the president has made clear his determination to implement his policy that Iran will not have a nuclear weapon," Kerry said in Paris.

A senior U.S. official in Almaty added: "What we care about at the end is concrete results."

ISRAELI WARNING

Israel, assumed to be the Middle East's only nuclear-armed power, was watching the talks closely. It has strongly hinted it might attack Iran if diplomacy and sanctions fail to ensure that it cannot build a nuclear weapon. Iran denies any such aim.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said economic sanctions were failing and urged the international community to threaten Iran with military action.

Western officials said the offer presented by the six powers included an easing of a ban on trade in gold and other precious metals, and a relaxation of an import embargo on Iranian petrochemical products. They gave no further details.

In exchange, a senior U.S. official said, Iran would among other things have to suspend uranium enrichment to a fissile concentration of 20 percent at its Fordow underground facility and "constrain the ability to quickly resume operations there".

This appeared to be a softening of a previous demand that Iran ship out its entire stockpile of higher-grade enriched uranium, which it says it needs to produce medical isotopes.

Iran says it has a sovereign right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, and wants to fuel nuclear power plants so that it can export more oil.

But 20-percent purity is far higher than that needed for nuclear power, and rings alarm bells abroad because it is only a short technical step away from weapons-grade.

Iran's growing stockpile of 20-percent-enriched uranium is already more than half-way to a "red line" that Israel has made clear it would consider sufficient for a bomb.

ELECTION LOOMING

The U.S. official said the latest proposal would "significantly restrict the accumulation of near-20-percent enriched uranium in Iran, while enabling the Iranians to produce sufficient fuel" for their Tehran medical reactor.

Iran had previously indicated that 20-percent enrichment was up for negotiation if it received the fuel from abroad instead.

Chief negotiator Saeed Jalili suggested Iran could discuss the issue, although he appeared to rule out shutting down Fordow. He said the powers had not made that specific demand.

Western officials were aware that the closeness of Iran's presidential election in June is raising political tensions in Tehran and made rapid progress unlikely.

One diplomat in Almaty said the Iranians appeared to be suggesting at the negotiations that they were opening new avenues, but that it was not clear if this was really the case.

"Everyone is saying Iran was more positive and portrayed the talks as a win," said Iran expert Dina Esfandiary of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. "I reckon the reason for that is that they are saving face internally while buying time with the West until after the elections."

The Iranian rial, which has lost more than half its foreign exchange value in the last year as sanctions bite, rose some 2 percent on Wednesday, currency tracking web sites reported.

(Additional reporting by Fredrik Dahl in Almaty, Georgina Prodhan in Vienna, Zahra Hosseinian in Zurich, Gabriela Baczynska in Moscow, Dan Williams in Jerusalem and Marcus George in Dubai; Writing by Timothy Heritage and Fredrik Dahl; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

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US "can't dictate" to the world: Pentagon's new chief

WASHINGTON: America cannot "dictate to the world" and must work with allies and build relationships with other nations, US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said shortly after being sworn in Wednesday as the new Pentagon chief.

On his first day at the job, Hagel reinforced his reputation as a reluctant warrior as he told an auditorium of civilian officials and military officers that America was a powerful country but could not accomplish its goals without forging strong alliances.

"I've always believed that America's role in the world ... has been one that should engage the world. We can't dictate to the world. But we must engage in the world," Hagel said.

"No nation, as great as America is, can do this on their own. We need to continue to build on the strong relationships that we have built."

Defense secretaries often adopt a tough tone to signal resolve to America's adversaries, but Hagel's comments echoed President Barack Obama's emphasis on extricating the country from a decade of ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

US troops have pulled out of Iraq in 2011 and roughly 66,000 American forces are due to withdraw from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, a drawdown that Hagel will be charged with overseeing.

Hagel told the Pentagon audience that the United States was ultimately a force "for good."

"We make mistakes. We've made mistakes. We'll continue to make mistakes.

"But we are a force for good. And we should never, ever forget that, and we should always keep that out in front as much as any one thing that drives us every day."

Hagel, 66, took his oath of office at about 8:30 am (1330 GMT) at the Pentagon as his wife looked on, becoming the first combat veteran from the Vietnam conflict to take up the post.

In his remarks to Pentagon employees, Hagel spoke without notes and struck an upbeat tone despite a nasty debate in the Senate over his nomination that saw him struggle to win enough votes for confirmation.

Despite the bitter atmosphere that prevailed at his confirmation hearing, in which he was pummeled by his former Republican colleagues over his statements on Iran and Israel, officials said Hagel would seek to cooperate with Congress.

"Senator Hagel has signaled his very strong commitment right away to get down to business, to get deeply invested in the work of the Pentagon and its military and civilian workers," Pentagon spokesman George Little told reporters Tuesday.

"His goal is to look to the future."

Although Hagel's opponents failed in the end to derail his nomination, their hostile stance signaled that the former infantryman would have little breathing room when it comes to working with Congress, without the kind of bipartisan support some of his predecessors enjoyed.

After a bruising Senate confirmation hearing and a 10-day delay engineered by Republicans, senators voted 58-41 to approve Hagel on Tuesday. But in 2011, senators approved his predecessor, Leon Panetta, for the job by a unanimous vote.

Within 48 hours after being sworn in, Hagel will confront steep automatic cuts to the Pentagon's budget of roughly $46 billion which are due to kick in Friday amid political deadlock in Congress.

He also will have to grapple with a major troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, renewed threats posed by a defiant North Korea and turmoil in the Middle East.

Hagel's searing experience in the jungles of Vietnam has shaped his cautious view of military power, and he has often said war should be a last resort only after diplomacy has been exhausted.

In Vietnam, Hagel served with his brother as an infantry squad leader and saw combat first-hand in the Mekong Delta, earning two Purple Hearts after suffering shrapnel wounds to his chest and burns to his face.

He still has some shrapnel fragments lodged in his chest.

-AFP/ac

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