Bush & Blair: June 30 date inviolate.

[Timber Loftis]

Today's NYTimes:

Bush and Blair, in a Show of Unity, Stand Firm on Iraq Policy
By DAVID STOUT and TERENCE NEILAN

Published: April 16, 2004

WASHINGTON, April 16 — President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain said today that the June 30 deadline for returning sovereignty to the Iraqis is inviolate, and that Washington and London were united in completing their mission there, as they have been in other causes.

"The prime minister and I have made our choice," Mr. Bush said. "Iraq will be free."

Mr. Blair said, "It was never going to be easy," But he said that he was as committed as Mr. Bush to an Iraq that would be a shining example of freedom, to its own people and throughout the Middle East.

The prime minister, in a phrase that surely must have sounded good to Mr. Bush, said their two nations were committed to eradicating "not just terrorism, but the breeding grounds of terrorism."

Mr. Bush has argued that the campaign in Iraq is that kind of campaign, and some administration officials, notably Vice President Dick Cheney, have suggested that there were at least contacts between Saddam Hussein or his minions and the terror network of Al Qaeda. Others have been more circumspect. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said in January that no concrete evidence had been found of a link between the Hussein regime and Al Qaeda.

But there is nonetheless wide agreement now that post-Hussein Iraq has become a magnet for anti-American militants of all stripes who are opposed to the American occupation there.

Whatever serious disagreements Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair have had over strategy in Iraq, they were not in evidence in the White House Rose Garden, where the leaders answered questions for a half-hour with the reds, whites and blues of the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack as a resplendent background.

Mr. Bush said he backed the outlines of a proposal put forth by the special United Nations envoy in Iraq, Lakhdar Brahimi, to dissolve the Iraqi Governing Council and replace it with a caretaker government when Iraqi sovereignty is restored at midyear. The president said he was confident that the Brahimi plan would be supported by a broad majority of the Iraqi people.

Mr. Bush, who before the war in Iraq had expressed great dissatisfaction with the United Nations, and Mr. Blair went out of their way today to say that the international organization now had a vital role to play.

"We have been involving the U.N. throughout," Mr. Blair said, adding that it would doubtless be involved even more as the transition date drew near and the last, desperate holdouts for the old, tyrannical Iraq realized that they could not win.

When a reporter asked both leaders if they had misled their peoples in going to war in Iraq, given the fact that no weapons of mass destruction had been found there and that no link had been established between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Blair responded by recalling the Hussein government's repeated defiance of United Nations resolutions over the years.

Mr. Blair has suffered politically at home and in Europe for standing with the Bush administration on Iraq. By all evidence, the two like each other personally, whatever their policy differences.

As American and Iraqi civilian casualties have risen this month, and as more foreigners are being taken hostage, a united front between London and Washington is important for Mr. Bush, who has consistently portrayed the campaign in Iraq as a multinational effort.

Although Mr. Blair gave no indication of unease in his public appearance with Mr. Bush, he was expected to express his disquiet over the situation in Iraq in private. Britain has sent 12,000 troops to the campaign.

One point on which he and Mr. Bush are in agreement is the need for a United Nations Security Council resolution on the transfer of power in Iraq. The outlines of such a plan were accepted by the Bush administration on Thursday, and Mr. Blair told reporters after a meeting with Secretary General Kofi Annan that it was important for the United Nations to have a larger role in Iraq before the June 30 deadline for a transfer of sovereignty.

Critics of Washington's policies say that the United States' hard-line tactics after the killings of four American contractors in Falluja have only succeeded in increasing civilian casualties and uniting Iraqis against the occupation.

Britain's former foreign secretary, Robin Cook, who quit Mr. Blair's government in 2001 in protest over Iraq, told the BBC that Mr. Blair would be "a false friend" if he "doesn't fairly bluntly put it to President Bush that he is pursuing policies in Iraq that are going to get into increasing difficulty there."

He stressed that Mr. Blair had "put a lot of his political capital on the line to support that relationship," adding, "President Bush owes it to him to listen today."

In an article published today in The Independent, Mr. Cook said that Mr. Bush was wrong to think that he could make progress in Iraq by military means "regardless of political cost."

"The most important job for Tony Blair today," Mr. Cook said, "is to convince the Bush administration that they are not engaged in a military operation to beat a discrete enemy, but in a political exercise to win the hearts and minds of a whole people."

It is also likely that Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush will discuss the Middle East peace process, and particularly the president's support for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to have Israel disengage from the Gaza Strip, while rebuffing the Palestinians' longstanding insistence on the right of refugees to return to land lost to Israel in 1948.

The president and the prime minister said in their public appearance that the Sharon plan was a good way to get back to the "road map" for a lasting Middle East peace, the pillars of which would be a free and prosperous Palestinian state existing side by side with Israel.

The president's support, which represented a major policy shift for the United States, has come under widespread criticism in Europe.