US President George W. Bush is to meet with Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki today after making clear he does not support calls for US talks with Iran or withdrawing American troops.
Ahead of the two-day meeting with Maliki in Jordan, he refused to speak of civil war and said the fight in Iraq was part of a broader struggle between democracy and extremism across the Middle East.
Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki
Bush has said his goal is for Iraqis to take charge of their country's security before US troops can pull out.
A memo by White House national security adviser Stephen Hadley raised serious doubts about the Iraqi leader's ability to control sectarian violence.
"He impressed me as a leader who wanted to be strong but was having difficulty figuring out how to do so," Hadley said in a text of the memo published by The New York Times.
A senior administration official confirmed the existence of the memo, which included options to help strengthen Maliki, and said it had been an assessment by Hadley after he met Maliki in Iraq on October 30.
The Iraqi leader appeared to have good intentions, "but the reality on the streets of Baghdad suggests Maliki is either ignorant of what is going on, misrepresenting his intentions or that his capabilities are not yet sufficient to turn his good intentions into actions," the memo said.
Hadley told reporters yesterday the United States recognised that Maliki had a difficult task, but efforts by the Iraqi government and US-led coalition to take greater control of security in Baghdad had not succeeded.
"It has not produced adequate progress in an acceptable time frame," he said.
Jordan's King Abdullah, who will join Bush and Maliki at today's summit, said this week that "something dramatic" must come from the Amman meeting.
"We will discuss the situation on the ground in (Iraq), our ongoing efforts to transfer more responsibility to the Iraqi security forces, and the responsibility of other nations in the region to support the security and stability of Iraq," Bush said on Tuesday in Latvia, where he was attending a NATO summit.
"We'll continue to be flexible, and we'll make the changes necessary to succeed," he said. "But there's one thing I'm not going to do: I'm not going to pull our troops off the battlefield before the mission is complete."
Bush is also under pressure at home to shift gears after his Republican Party lost control of Congress in elections this month, partly due to the unpopular Iraq war in which more than 2,800 American soldiers have been killed.
Democrats, who take control of Congress when it convenes in January, believe the elections were a public mandate for change on Iraq, and some are calling for a phased withdrawal of US troops to begin next year.
Bush also rejected unconditional direct talks with Iran over helping its neighbour Iraq on the security front, saying Tehran must first stop uranium enrichment.
But he said it was up to Iraq to decide on its relationship with neighbours Iran and Syria.
"Iraq is a sovereign nation which is conducting its own foreign policy. They're having talks with their neighbours. And if that's what they think they ought to do, that's fine. I hope their talks yield results," he said.