Washington – President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair on Tuesday embraced a tentative plan to forgive the debt of poor African nations “on a path to reform” but failed to come together on Blair’s calls to double aid to the troubled continent and tackle global warming.
The leaders expressed confidence that the remaining details of a deal on African debt relief could be worked out among them and with the other countries attending next month’s summit of major industrialized nations in Gleneagles, Scotland.
The leaders’ agreement represented a milestone of sorts for the Bush-Blair relationship, in which the British leader has risked his own political standing at home to provide staunch support for U.S. policies on Iraq – but not often gained reward from the White House.
Standing alongside Blair, Bush also for the first time addressed a 2002 memo to the prime minister from a top British intelligence official suggesting that the United States had bent intelligence to justify a decision to invade Iraq and sought British cooperation in doing so.
“There’s nothing farther from the truth,” Bush said. “Both of us didn’t want to use our military. It was our last option.”
Said Blair: “The facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all.”
Their face-to-face talks, the first since Blair narrowly won what Bush called a “landmark victory” for a third term, touched on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iraq’s halting progress toward stability and efforts to turn Iran away from nuclear weapons pursuits.
In between talks in the Oval Office and a working dinner in the White House residence, Bush and Blair made it plain that Africa was their top agenda item and sought to minimize differences.
Bush aides have said the United States wants to ensure that Blair’s hosting of the July summit is deemed a success. But Blair has made global warming and dramatically stepped-up aid to Africa the main topics of the meeting, and Bush has opposed most of what the British leader wants to do – or how he wants to do it.
Blair talked repeatedly about a key goal of Bush’s: requiring African countries receiving help to be committed to “governance against corruption, in favor of democracy, in favor of the rule of law.”
