Rice: Bush & Blair's branch of freedom key to secure world

Condoleezza: Bush and Blair's branch of freedom is key to more secure world
Common vision on Middle East will be at centre of state visit talks
Julian Borger in Washington
Saturday November 15, 2003
The Guardian UK

Tony Blair and George Bush will discuss the further transformation of the Middle East and their shared commitment to "the spread of freedom" during the US president's state visit next week, White House officials said yesterday.

In an interview in her White House office, the US national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, insisted that the Iraq war has neither damaged the close relationship between the US and British leaders nor weakened their shared sense of mission, particularly in the Middle East.

She argued that protesters expected to take to the streets against the president's visit should appreciate what the two leaders had done to promote the cause of democracy in the Middle East.

"Protests are a part of our democratic heritage and our democratic privilege," she said, adding that protesters should realise that US and British efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq "are finally getting those countries to the place that actually people might have the same privilege of protest".

Despite the protests expected in London next week, the Bush administration is determined to shift public opinion away from Iraq and towards the prospect of further change in the Middle East. It has also made it clear it is prepared to make efforts to remove irritants in the relationship, with one senior administration official promising it was "likely" that British companies would soon be able to bid on the main reconstruction contracts in Iraq.

The senior official also said talks were still under way to reassure Britain about the treatment and legal status of the nine British detainees at Guantanamo Bay, but said no final deal had been made. The US official, speaking privately, insisted that when it came to the development of a common European defence policy, Mr Bush trusted the assurances of the prime minister that it would not undermine Nato.

But Bush aides insist the two leaders would spend more time on the common visions they shared rather than the problems that trouble US-British relations.

"They're both leaders who are committed to the proposition that the spread of freedom is the key to a more secure world and to the ultimate defeat of terrorism, and I think they will spend quite a lot of time on this question of how the transformation of the Middle East can take place," a senior official said.

The starting point for that discussion was a speech by Mr Bush earlier this month in Washington, in which he compared today's opportunity in the Middle East to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.

"It's a great cause for the alliance and for Europe and America to carry out together and so I think there is a very strong desire to discuss that in some detail," the official said ahead of the president's trip, the first full state visit by a US president since Woodrow Wilson in 1918. Mr Bush arrives on Tuesday night and leaves on Friday.

Both Washington and London insist their views on the Middle East are close and converging despite longstanding differences on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mr Bush has ruled out military action against Syria or Iran for the immediate future, and Britain has persuaded the US that the European strategy of engagement with Iran is scoring results.

Meanwhile, Britain has accepted US policy to exert more diplomatic pressure on Syria to distance itself from radical Islamic groups.

On the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Ms Rice denied there were serious differences and said the US and Britain shared a common long-term commitment to the "road map" to peace, and a common impatience with the Palestinians' inability to stop bomb attacks on Israelis.

The approach towards Israel has differed in the past, but Ms Rice promised the US would take a firm line in opposing the construction of Ariel Sharon's "security fence" through the West Bank.

She said: "The two primary concerns are that this not be a fence that somehow prejudges an outcome, a territorial outcome. And secondly, that it not infringe, or it infringes as little as possible, on the lives of ordinary Palestinians."

Guantanamo Bay remains a potentially explosive issue that could test the strength of the relationship, squeezing Mr Blair between public outrage at the treatment of British inmates at the prison camp, and his prized relationship with the US president. The attorney general, Lord Goldsmith, has been in talks with the Pentagon for several months in an attempt to win assurances that the Britons captured in Afghanistan should be tried under basic legal norms.

But the military authorities have been reluctant to grant concessions, out of concern that other nations with citizens held at the Cuban base should demand equal treatment.

Though one US official said they were working with London on how to treat the British nine, Ms Rice would not even confirm that the British inmates would not face the death penalty.

"Any clarity about what is actually going to happen is going to have to wait," she said.

The US has played down another longstanding problem that has highlighted Mr Blair's difficulties in attempting to be the "bridge" between Europe and the US - a common European defence policy and the emergence of a European force.

While encouraging Europe to put more investment into defence, Washington has traditionally been anxious that the European initiative might detract from Nato's primary importance.

But the president's aides said that Mr Bush has accepted the assurances from Tony Blair that the European defence plan and Nato were not mutually incompatible.

"The president fully trusts the prime minister's transatlantic credentials and instincts," one aide said, adding that the only concern was that the new European initiative did not weaken Nato.

Again and again in briefings before the state visit, US officials returned to the subject of Mr Bush and Mr Blair's common sense of mission. They argued there was a shared commitment to tackle HIV/Aids, on which there will be a roundtable conference during the president's visit, and the alleviation of poverty in the developing world.

The White House said the two leaders would try coordinate their back-to-back chairmanships of the G8 group of industrialised nations over the next two years to further those goals.

"The alliance, and US-UK relationship right at the core of it... is actively engaged in making the world safer, with counter-terrorism and counter-proliferation, but our great contribution to the world has always been we've cared about making the world better," an American official said.