Democrats call for Powell mission to Mideast

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- With violence in the Middle East escalating, two leading Senate Democrats said Sunday the Bush administration should ratchet up the level of U.S. diplomacy by getting Secretary of State Colin Powell more directly involved.

"I think there needs to be something dramatic done, and that means the president has to step up his involvement," said U.S. Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Delaware, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, on CBS' "Face the Nation."

"I know [U.S. envoy Gen. Anthony] Zinni is there, but I think the secretary has to be more visible and the Arab states have to be more visible."

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U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Connecticut, said the suicide bombers menacing Israel "are cut from the same cloth" as the hijackers who carried out the September 11 terror attacks in the United States.

Lieberman urged the Bush administration to back Israel's military moves while, at the same time, stepping up diplomatic efforts.

"I fear that a fanatical group of extremist terrorists has captured, hijacked the very legitimate cause of Palestinian nationalism," he said on "Fox News Sunday." "Unfortunately, tragically, the forces that Israel is facing are exactly the ones that struck us September 11 and that we continue to face in our own war against terrorism.

"I think this is the time not to stop the Israelis from doing what they are doing in their self-defense, even while we try with, I hope, much bolder moves by the Bush administration to enter the diplomatic fray there between the Israelis and the Palestinians."

Lieberman, a leading moderate voice among Senate Democrats and the party's 2000 vice presidential nominee, said he believes the time has come to take diplomatic efforts to a more senior level by sending Powell to the region.

"Even while [the suicide bombings are] going on, I think we've got to try to bring the parties together to talk again about a political settlement, including demanding from the Palestinians a clear statement that their goal is statehood, not the annihilation of our ally, Israel," he said.

Biden said that U.S. diplomats, in conjunction with Arab countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, should push for a political settlement that goes beyond a cease-fire and has Palestinian statehood as the ultimate objective.

"I think something has to be dramatically done to give some hope," he said. "Otherwise, this is a spiral that is going to continue. The Israelis are going to just get a lot more aggressive and understandably so."

U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, who just returned from a trip to the Middle East where he met with Arafat and Zinni, agreed that "we need to propose a political settlement at the end of the security rainbow, to try to give some hope to these 18-year-olds who are really just posing a threat which can't be stopped."

Specter also said that Zinni told him a plan exists for a "very limited number" of U.S. troops to be used as a peacekeeping force in the Middle East "if we were ever to stabilize the situation."

Specter and Biden expressed support for using U.S. troops.