Bush Meeting With Critics of Iraq War

SEA ISLAND, Ga. – As President Bush plays host Tuesday to world leaders critical of his Iraq policies, White House officials hope the Group of Eight summit helps the president and his adversaries set aside their differences.

Bush stacked his meetings Tuesday with leaders from countries critical of the Iraq war: Russia, Canada and Germany. His first meeting, though, was with Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi of Japan, whose country sent hundreds of troops to southern Iraq on a humanitarian mission.

Iraq and the broader Mideast have eclipsed the official economic agenda of the annual gathering of powerful countries – the United States, Japan, Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Canada and Russia.

U.S. officials did, however, announce G-8 agreement Tuesday on fighting famine on the Horn of Africa, eradicating polio, cutting poverty and developing an HIV vaccine. U.S. officials expected agreement among the eight countries on new steps to counter the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and a declaration on promoting democracy was expected Wednesday.

Turkey’s prime minister warned Tuesday, however, that the success of the Middle East initiative depends on resolving conflicts in Iraq and between Israel and the Palestinians.

“Solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem is an urgent matter above everything else,” Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters at the Ankara airport before leaving for the summit.

“As long as we don’t solve these problems, as long as we don’t achieve these, it won’t be easy to implement the project,” he said.

Anticipating that line of criticism, American officials said the document will include a firm rejection of the idea that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has stalled democratic and human-rights reforms.

Overall, Bush administration officials say they sensed an opening on Iraq, thanks to a confluence of positive developments and what they see as the absence of the bitter disagreements that have characterized other recent summits.

The establishment of an interim Iraqi government last week marked the beginning of the end of the U.S. occupation, they say, and the caretaker government’s president was due to arrive at the summit Tuesday evening.

Images of Bush meeting with Ghazi al-Yawer on Wednesday will send a powerful symbolic message about the president’s intention to give Iraq full sovereignty, aides say.

The White House believes it has all but secured a U.N. Security Council resolution to endorse the handover of political power to Iraqis in three weeks and to authorize a U.S.-led force to remain in Iraq.

But the White House’s cautious hope that violence had diminished in Iraq was shattered in an eruption of violence Tuesday.

Two car bombs exploded in separate cities, killing at least 14 Iraqis and one U.S. soldier. Dozens were wounded, including 10 American soldiers. A U.S. Marine was killed in action west of Baghdad, and elsewhere, six coalition soldiers – two Poles, three Slovaks and a Latvian – were killed while defusing mines.

U.S. officials acknowledged their previous goal of drawing in more foreign troops was all but gone, even with the new resolution. Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said the hope now was that the new resolution would convince those countries with troops already in Iraq to “stay the course.”

But the administration launched an unprecedented effort here to throw a spotlight on what it views as a good news story, arranging wall-to-wall interviews between journalists and normally invisible aides in the National Security Council.

The administration also is pursuing the broader effort to spur the spread of democracy in the Middle East at large. The final document will press Mideast governments to step up efforts at promoting democracy and human rights and encourage greater participation by non-governmental groups, according to a senior U.S. official who briefed hundreds of journalists only under condition that his name not be used.

“The idea that we were somehow buying stability by turning a blind eye to the absence of freedom has been exposed, and exposed in the form of extremism,” Rice told reporters at a media center in Savannah, some 80 miles north of the summit site.

The G-8 countries reached consensus on four humanitarian issues, according to Jim Wilkinson, deputy national security adviser. Each measure seemed tailored to burnish Bush’s “compassionate conservative” credentials in an election year.

-On famine in the Horn of Africa, the eight countries were endorsing efforts to improve worldwide hunger-monitoring and response efforts, to raise agricultural production and bring “food security” to 5 million Ethiopians by 2009.

-They were agreeing to take “all necessary steps” to eradicate polio by the end of next year. The disease remains a problem in 15 countries.

-On fighting poverty, they were backing efforts to allow migrant workers to send money home less expensively by cutting in half transaction costs, which can reach 15 percent. They were placing special emphasis on the Mideast.

-They were announcing a Global HIV Vaccine Enterprise program to accelerate the development of a vaccine against the AIDS virus. The initiative would streamline research and development efforts.