Blair Gains Little in U.S. Visit
Bush stands firm against the British prime minister's
plans to
double aid to Africa and to tightly restrict greenhouse gases.
By Edwin Chen
Times Staff Writer
June 8, 2005
WASHINGTON — President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair
pledged Tuesday to continue working together to combat food shortages
and disease in Africa, even as they failed to agree on how to carry out
what Blair called "a real and common desire to help that troubled
continent."
Although the two leaders said the United States and Britain were
nearing an agreement on granting full debt relief to some of the
continent's most indebted nations, Bush did not budge from his
opposition to Blair's proposal that the United States and other major
industrialized nations double their foreign aid to Africa to about $80
billion by 2010.
Aware of Bush's position, the British prime
minister told the Financial Times a day earlier that he would not bring
up the matter during their meeting.
On another Blair initiative
— to impose tough restrictions on emissions of greenhouse gases, which
trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere — Bush also parted company with his
guest, saying that the United States needed to know more about global
warming before it could more effectively deal with the phenomenon.
And Bush flatly rejected the allegations in the so-called Downing
Street memo, written in July 2002 by a Blair foreign policy aide. The
document alleged that the White House was fixing its intelligence and
facts about the threat posed by then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to
justify an invasion to oust him.
"There's nothing farther from
the truth," Bush said during a brief news conference with Blair in the
East Room of the White House. The president suggested that the memo,
first reported in the Sunday Times of London and the topic of much
discussion on the Internet, had been dropped into the middle of
Britain's recent parliamentary elections in an effort to damage Blair
and his Labor Party.
Blair refuted the memo as well. "No, the
facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all," he said. At
the time of the memo, he said, "we were trying to look for a way of
managing to resolve this without conflict."
Bush sounded defensive more than once during the session with reporters.
The president rejected the suggestion that the United States lagged
behind most other industrialized nations in the percentage of gross
national product that it contributes in aid to Africa — 0.16%. Other
developed countries give an average of 0.24%.
"Now, in terms of
whether or not the formula that you commented upon are the right way to
analyze the United States commitment to her, I don't think it is," he
said. "… There's a lot of things that aren't counted in our desire to
spread compassion. But our country is — has taken the lead in Africa,
and we'll stay there. It's the right thing to do. It's important to
help Africa get on her feet."
Bush said his administration
had tripled aid to sub-Saharan Africa, to about $3.2 billion,
accounting for nearly a quarter of all aid to that region.
"I
want you to focus on what we have done, for starters…. What I like to
say is, my administration actually does what we say we're going to do —
and we have," he said.
"When I say we're going to make a
commitment to triple aid in Africa, I meant it, and we did. When I said
we're going to lead an initiative, an HIV/AIDS initiative, the likes of
which the world has never seen before on the continent of Africa, we
have done that, and we're following through. And so when I say we're
going to do more, I think you can take that to the bank, as we say,
because of what we have done."
Bush also announced a
$674-million U.S. contribution to food aid and other humanitarian
efforts, largely for the Horn of Africa. The funds have been
appropriated by Congress and would be separate from any new
contributions the United States might make next month at the Group of 8
meeting of industrialized nations in Gleneagles, Scotland, said White
House Press Secretary Scott McClellan.
Bush and Blair spoke of the importance of good governance on the part
of recipient nations in Africa.
"Nobody wants to give money to a country that's corrupt, where leaders
take money and put it in their pocket," the president said. "We're not
really interested in supporting a government that doesn't have open
economies and open markets."
On climate change, Blair
acknowledged that "everyone knows there are different perspectives on
this issue." But he said he was encouraged by "a common commitment and
desire to tackle the challenges."
Bush conceded that
greenhouse emissions posed "a serious long-term issue that needs to be
dealt with." And while calling for additional scientific research, he
also stated that his administration "isn't waiting around … we're
acting."
He cited his support for ways to "diversify away from
a hydrocarbon society," such as by promoting hydrogen fuel-cell
technology, clean coal, biodiesel fuel and "clean nuke."
Ivo
H. Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a public
policy center in Washington, said Bush's "defensiveness in his
offensive kind of way" during the news conference should have surprised
no one. Most of the issues that Blair brought with him — and raised
during their joint appearance — "clearly were not what [Bush] wants to
talk about," Daalder said.
"On one hand, he's trying to put a
good face on the fact that the prime minister of Great Britain had
stood by the president of the United States since at least Sept. 11,
2001, shoulder-to-shoulder, and came here to ask him to do more on some
issues that he cares a great deal about, and Bush basically said sorry,
he's not going to do it," Daalder said.
He added that Blair
should take solace in the fact that, although he may have gone home
largely empty-handed, he had won a moral victory simply by having come
to Washington and pressed his agenda in a very public way.
