President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair are likely to present a united front today when they hold their first face-to-face meeting since a surge in violence in Iraq produced new strains between the two powers leading the military coalition.
Mr. Blair, who met with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan yesterday before flying to Washington, has been steadfast in his support of the coalition mission in Iraq, despite a recent spike in casualties and rising criticism from within his ruling Labor Party.
“Whatever differences they have in private, I think in public you will see no distance between Bush and Blair,” said Nile Gardiner, a specialist in U.S.-British relations at the Heritage Foundation.
“They both know there’s a sense of a lack of direction on Iraq, and there are qualms that both need to address publicly,” he said.
For Mr. Bush, the White House meeting and Rose Garden press briefing today will showcase that the leading ally in the administration’s “coalition of the willing” against Saddam Hussein remains committed to the troubled postwar mission.
For Mr. Blair, the brief get-together will advertise Britain’s continuing special relationship with Washington at a time when European leaders in Spain and other countries that backed the U.S.-led war have been forced from power.
“There is a battle we have to fight, a struggle we have to win, and it is happening now in Iraq,” Mr. Blair wrote in an uncompromising defense of the war and the reconstruction effort published in the London Observer earlier this week.
Further cracks in Mr. Bush’s European support were revealed yesterday when Poland’s foreign minister, during a visit to London, said the U.S. approach to suppressing resistance in Fallujah and Najaf was too aggressive and harmful to the political process.
Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz said in a British Broadcasting Corp. radio interview that there had been “massacres on both sides” in the battle between U.S. and Iraqi forces in Fallujah, a conflict that has inflamed world opinion.
“What we see on our media every day are pictures of massacres in Iraqi cities: massacres on both sides, action and reaction,” said Mr. Cimoszewicz, whose country oversees the deployment of coalition troops in Iraq’s south. He said Poland remained committed to the mission, but added that U.S. forces had “overreacted” to the brutal killing of four American civilian contractors last week.
“That is not the way we are going to solve the political problems existing there,” he said. “What we need to do is to deliver more security and normal life to the majority of Iraqis.”
Polish commanders in Iraq complained to their U.S. counterparts yesterday that they had no warning of U.S. plans to go after radical Shi’ite cleric Sheik Muqtada al-Sadr, fueling riots across the Shi’ite-dominated south.
Mr. Blair also finds himself under some political pressure to demonstrate that his close alliance with Mr. Bush is producing results.
The prime minister has pressed the U.S. government to take a more active role in solving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Downing Street had a muted reaction to Mr. Bush’s embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s program for a partial withdrawal from disputed lands, a plan harshly criticized by Palestinian leaders.
Mr. Blair also has been keen for a larger role of the United Nations in Iraq’s political reconstruction, a position to which Mr. Bush has moved closer in recent weeks.
• Paul Martin contributed to this article from London.
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