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Diplomatic summit hits a series of eleventh-hour snags

New diplomatic brushfires broke out almost immediately among the plush cottages of the top-scale Sea Island resort, even as US President George W. Bush led Iraq's new interim ruler onto the world stage.

World leaders yesterday wrapped up the latest G8 summit after a new era of trans-Atlantic unity dissolved in just one day into fresh US-France spats and squabbles over Iraq's US$120 billion debt pile.

The summit of G8 industrialized nations had been billed as a chance to consign old animosity over the US invasion to history, after the West closed ranks to pass a new UN resolution on Iraq Tuesday.

Leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the US did manage to agree on Bush's controversial reform plan for the Islamic world.

They also endorsed an end-of-July target for an outline deal on the most divisive issues in global trade talks, unveiled measures to halt transfers of nuclear technology and endorsed airline security improvements.

Yesterday, the G8 leaders will meet several counterparts from Africa, including South Africa's Thabo Mbeki and Senegal's Abdulaye Wade, in a bid to head off claims they only pay lip service to the continent's woes.

Then Bush and other leaders will hold final press conferences. The US leader will go straight to Washington to pay his final respects to late former president Ronald Reagan, lying in state in Washington.

Interim Iraqi president Sheikh Ghazi al-Yawar's first international bow at the swank private beach resort hosting the rich-nations summit was a world removed from the violence of postwar Iraq.

"Mr President, I'd like to express to you the commitment of the Iraqi people to move towards democracy," he said at his first-ever meeting with Bush.

Bush replied: "I really never thought I'd be sitting next to an Iraqi president of a free country a year and half ago."

But just one day after France signed up to a US-sponsored resolution at the UN on Iraqi sovereignty, the fractious allies were at loggerheads again -- on a handful of issues.

They clashed on NATO's role in Iraq, after Bush called for a greater presence of the Western alliance in the occupation.
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