KEY POINTS:
WASHINGTON - President George W. Bush last night met Iraq's struggling Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, with Washington's entire strategy in the country unravelling, and America's patience all but exhausted at seeing United States troops trapped in the midst of what amounts to a civil war.
The meeting, in Amman, Jordan, because Baghdad itself was deemed too dangerous, was delayed and began after US officials insisted the Iraqi leader was not offended by a critical White House memo and had not snubbed Bush.
The top-level US Government memo portrayed Maliki, in the bluntest of terms, as either an ignorant or mendacious leader, unable or unwilling to take the measures necessary to restore stability.
The leak to the New York Times of the five-page memo by National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley in its entirety was almost certainly deliberate. It appears intended by the White House to signal what the Bush Administration expects the Iraqi Government to do and what steps the US might take to help shore up the Prime Minister - in whom, officials say, Washington despite everything still has confidence.
But the undeclared message of the leak is that time is running out, as Republicans as well as Democrats increasingly conclude that Iraq is a lost cause and the war no longer worth fighting, and a bipartisan panel under James Baker, the former Secretary of State, prepares recommendations for a revamped US strategy.
Reports yesterday suggested that the Iraq Study Group will recommend that the US military shift from a combat role to a support role in Iraq, and will call for a regional conference that could lead to direct US talks with Iran and Syria.
Bush had expected to meet Maliki earlier yesterday, along with Jordan's King Abdullah, but found out that the Jordanians and Iraqis had decided a three-way gathering was unnecessary.
Hadley wrote that Maliki, "impressed me as a leader who wanted to be strong, but was having difficulty figuring how to do so". His intentions "seem good", but reality on the bloody streets of Baghdad suggested the Prime Minister was "either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions, or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into action". But the weakness of Maliki was brutally underlined yesterday as parliamentarians and ministers loyal to the virulently anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr temporarily at least pulled out of the assembly and the Government in protest at the Amman summit, saying it was "provocative and against the will of the Iraqi people".
The Prime Minister, a Shiite, is critically dependent on the support of Sadr - whose Mehdi army militia, observers say, is more potent than the Iraqi forces under the command of the Government.
Despite the ever-escalating carnage in Iraq, Bush steadfastly refuses to describe the fighting as a civil war.
But yesterday, Colin Powell, Secretary of State between 2001 and 2005, said conditions in Iraq now "meet the standard of a civil war".
The semantics are highly important. Acknowledgment by the White House that Iraq has indeed descended into civil war would only increase pressures here for American forces to be withdrawn swiftly, further reducing Washington's already shrinking ability to influence events.
- INDEPENDENT
