Bush kicks off high-stakes foreign policy tour
By Sam Mackintosh,WNS Europe Bureau Chief
TALLINN - US President George W. Bush arrived in Estonia on Monday on the first stop of a European and Middle Eastern tour for crunch talks on his two biggest foreign policy headaches: Afghanistan and Iraq. After touching down late Monday evening, Bush was due for talks with Estonian officials Tuesday morning before leaving for neighbouring Latvia for the main event on his Baltic mini-tour: a summit with fellow NATO leaders. From the US point of view at least, the main topic of the NATO summit was to be Afghanistan and Bush's efforts to get NATO countries to do more to stamp out a tenacious Taliban insurgency in the south and east of the country. Currently British, Dutch and Canadian troops have been bearing the brunt of the fighting, and the US is keen to convince other alliance powers to contribute more. Efforts to bring lasting peace to the ravaged country -- where President Hamid Karzai can barely set foot out of Kabul -- are being stymied by a lack of equipment and the reluctance of countries like Germany and Spain to relax caveats, or conditions on how their troops operate. "If NATO is to be successful and to continue to complete this mission, obviously it will need enough troops and the right kind of troops to be able to do the mission. It will need troops in the right places," said Judy Ansley, Senior Director for European Affairs on Bush's national security council.
Powerful US Senator Dick Lugar, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, also challenged the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to prove itself. "Afghanistan has become a test case for whether we can overcome the growing discrepancy between NATO's expanding missions and its lagging capabilities," Lugar said in a speech in Riga on Monday. "Unfortunately, NATO capitals are making the military mission even more difficult by placing national caveats on the use of their forces," added the Republican lawmaker. From Riga, Air Force One heads on Wednesday to Jordan for talks on an even greater headache: Iraq. The trip was added to Bush's itinerary after one of the bloodiest weeks in the three and a half years since the US-led invasion to topple Saddam Hussein. On Thursday close to 300 people were killed across Iraq, most of them in a series of bombings in Baghdad's Shiite Sadr City neighbourhood. That provoked retribution killings against dozens of Sunnis which US forces were powerless to stop, heightening worries of an imminent all-out civil war. The US president was due to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki - defying threats by firebrand Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to pull out of a fractious government coalition if such a meeting went ahead.
Just before Bush arrived here, National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley acknowledged that the conflict in Iraq had reached a "new phase", but he refused to concede that it had descended into full-blown civil war. Jordan's King Abdullah II, who is hosting the Bush-Maliki meeting, has put pressure on Bush to redouble peace efforts across the Middle East, warning that the violence in Iraq is but one of three brewing civil wars. "The difficulty that we're tackling with here is ... the strong potential of three civil wars in the region, whether it's the Palestinians, that of Lebanon or of Iraq," he told ABC television on Sunday.
In Estonia, meanwhile, the concerns of the locals were more mundane. Suffocating security measures in place for Bush's stop-over here left many wishing his landmark visit was already over. "We've been told to carry our passports with us, otherwise we might not be allowed to go home," grumbled Marju, a pensioner, as she walked her dog between the concrete barriers and bollards near the hotel where Bush is staying.
posted by wnsworld @ 1:04 PM
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