US meeting aims to shore up Iraqi PM

US President George W. Bush's two-day strategy session starting today at Camp David is intended to revive highly tangible efforts to shore up Iraq's new government, from getting the electricity back on in Baghdad to purging the security forces of revenge-seeking militias, White House officials said.

Three years of efforts to accomplish those goals have largely failed. Billions of dollars have been spent on both electricity and security, yet residents of Baghdad get only five hours to eight hours of power a day, and the US. ambassador acknowledged on Friday that the city is "more insecure now than it was a few months ago."

A senior officials involved in the strategy session characterized it as a "last, best chance to get this right," an implicit acknowledgment that previous US-led efforts had gone astray.

He said the decision to hold a joint Cabinet meeting tomorrow, between Bush's top advisers and the newly appointed Cabinet of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki through a video link from Baghdad, was intended to set an agenda for the new government that could begin to win the loyalty of disaffected Iraqis.

It is also an effort to hand off leadership to al-Maliki's government and, in an analogy used by several US officials, to begin to let go of the bicycle seat and find out if the Iraqi government can stay upright with less US support.

For Bush, the session comes at a critical moment in Baghdad and in Washington. His efforts to prop up two interim prime ministers with similar pledges of support largely failed. At home, he is trying to create a sense of political progress at a time when some Democrats -- and some in his own party -- are calling for significant numbers of US troops to come home by the end of this year.

No matter how that debate turns out, Congress has made clear that its willingness to pay for more Iraqi reconstruction is just about exhausted. Both US and Iraqi officials now acknowledge that they will have to seek billions in investment and aid from Persian Gulf nations that have been unwilling to contribute many dollars or any soldiers.

Bush on Friday made clear that the US commitment to the country will be long-term. Officials say the administration has begun to look at the costs of maintaining a force of roughly 50,000 troops there for years to come, roughly the size of the US presence maintained in the Philippines and Korea for decades after those conflicts.

But no decisions have been made, and Bush has carefully sidestepped any discussion of a long-term presence, insisting that US forces will be in the country only as long as the Iraqi government wants them there. Bush's aides said the meeting was not intended to focus on troop levels. But in many ways, that subject is the subtext of the entire discussion.

Providing electricity means securing pipelines and generators that have been prime targets of the insurgency. Enforcing a breakup of the militias that have infiltrated security forces could require a significant show of force.

Al-Maliki's plan is expected to be announced in coming days, and it will amount to what the US ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, said on Friday on PBS would be "a new plan for the security of Baghdad." Al-Maliki wrote on Friday in the Washington Post that among his first priorities would be to "re-establish a state monopoly on weapons by putting an end to militias."

Dealing with electric power and security were among the problems that the administration insisted, in briefings in the spring of 2003, it was prepared to tackle as soon as Saddam Hussein was deposed.

"None of these problems -- or even the solutions that are being proposed -- are new," said one former senior official who worked extensively on reconstruction, but did not want his name published because he still deals with the administration regularly. "What's been lacking is the political will."

Administration officials say they are not trying to reinvent the reconstruction, but rather relaunch it.

"Everybody views the completion of a truly unity government as a moment of opportunity," Dan Bartlett, Bush's senior counselor, said on Friday in his office at the White House. "That is exactly why this meeting is taking place now."

The session was planned, he said, before the killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi on Wednesday, the leader of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia, but Bush has made clear he thinks al-Zarqawi's elimination could help turn the tide.

Al-Maliki has said that solving the electricity problem, particular in Baghdad, and ridding the security forces of infiltrators who have killed Sunnis and other rivals, are his top priorities. But US officials acknowledge that to pay for some of al-Maliki's agenda, it will be necessary to raise money among Iraq's neighbors in the Persian Gulf.

As the prime minister's own tour of new electric facilities in Iraq this week made clear, the challenges are huge. The US has allocated US$4 billion to electricity projects around the country, at least US$2 billion of which has been spent. Yet the amount of power flowing through Baghdad's aging electric grid has not changed much.