Pax Americana Is Changing - Part 21 - Bush Is Satisfied With Iraq's New Govt.

US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair met in Washington on May 25 and gave their support for new Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his national unity government. They agreed on limited withdrawals from Iraq. But both refused to set withdrawal timetables. The US now has about 134,000 troops in Iraq; Britain has 7,200.

When Blair travelled to Baghdad after Maliki's government was approved by the House of Representatives (parliament) on May 20, the British leader echoed Bush's frequent formulation that any withdrawal must be "conditions-based", tied to the level of violence in Iraq and the growing capacities of Iraqi forces to take over. Blair then said: "We have to move as fast as we can on it, but it has to be done in a way that protects the Iraqi people".

Blair and Maliki said in a joint statement that "by the end of this year, responsibility for much of Iraq's territorial security should have been transferred to Iraqi control". Maliki, however, said British troops would pull out of Amara province this summer. Amara is one of the four provinces which they patrol in southern Iraq.

Maliki predicted that Iraqi troops would assume the lead in 16 of 18 Iraqi provinces by end-2006. But Bush administration officials quickly sought to qualify that assessment, with White House spokesman Tony Snow saying: "We are not going to harness ourself to an artificial timetable. The conditions on the ground tell us that our job's not done".

Brigadier General Carter Ham, deputy director for regional operations for the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he did not know of plans for a specific withdrawal, adding: "You can't do it too fast". Ham warned against "rushing to failure".

Bush officials have said at times that they would like to have 100,000 troops in Iraq by the end of the year. Reports in London said that, in a phased and co-ordinated move, Britain would hand control of Muthanna Province to Iraqi security forces in July, after which the Americans would do the same in Najaf. But British officials have predicted that it might take four years before troops could leave more troubled areas. A Blair spokesman in London on May 25 said he could not comment on claims that the US and British troop deployments might be substantially reconfigured, shifting resources to more volatile areas.

At the end of their Washington talks late on May 25, Bush and Blair acknowledged that they had both made mistakes in Iraq over the last three years. Striking a sombre note during a 45-minute joint press conference at the White House, both stuck to the script on ruling out a clear timetable to exit Iraq.

Bush distanced himself from hopes that US troops could fall to 100,000 from 135,000 by end-2006. He cautioned: "It is kind of hard to have a conversation [about timing] when you don't have a defence minister [in Iraq]". In a rare declaration of personal regret, Bush for the first time said he had been wrong to use the phrase: "bring it on" - a reference to the challenge he had once confidently laid down to the insurgents in Iraq. "Saying 'bring it on', kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people. I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner, you know. 'Wanted, dead or alive', that kind of talk, I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted". He added that for the administration in Iraq, the biggest error had been the Abu Ghraib prison, saying: "We've been paying for that for a long period of time".

Blair, while reaffirming the decision to invade Iraq and oust Saddam's Ba'thist dictatorship, conceded that: "probably in retrospect, though at the time it was very difficult to argue this, we could have done de-Ba'thification in a more differentiated way than we did".

In a sign of the warmth of the personal relationship between the two men, Bush strongly defended Blair's leadership and hailed his resolve in refusing to be driven by opinion polls about Iraq. "Don't count him out", he said, when asked what he would miss about Blair as prime minister. "I know a man of resolve and vision and courage, and...my attitude is I want him to be here so long as I'm the president."

Blair, who has faced renewed pressure to stand down as prime minister following the recent local elections in the UK when the Labour Party fared poorly, responded with a sheepish look and added: "Probably not wise to say anything more at all".

The two leaders, whose political obituaries will be dictated by the fate of Iraq, both sought to shift the focus to the future and place Iraq in the wider context of reform of the Middle East and democratisation of the region. Bush said there was "no question that the Iraq war has...created a sense of consternation here in America", and cited the daily toll of civilian deaths in Iraq. Yet the key question from Americans was: "Can we win? That's what they want to know".

Iran was a central issue in the Bush-Blair talks on May 25-26. Bush declined to comment directly on whether he would agree to the overtures from Iran for direct talks, and instead blamed the Iranian president for having "walked away from the table.... We've got to continue to work to convince them that we're serious, that if they want to be isolated from the world, we will work to, you know, to achieve that". He added that the 17-page letter from the Iranian president sent to Bush in April "didn't address the issue of whether or not they're going to continue to press for a nuclear weapon. That's the issue at hand" (see this week's News Service in news22-IranWarGamesMay29-06).