Downing Street Says » President Bush talks

The PMOS explained that the Prime Minister and the President would discuss the full range of issues that you would expect: trade, the DOHA round was at an important stage; Iran, which was also at an important stage, MEPP following Prime Minister Olmert’s visit to Washington; but the Prime Minister’s main message would be the impressions he had taken away from his visit to Iraq. To get a feel for that journalists could read the transcript of the Prime Minister’s interview, last night, with Al Jazeera as the Prime Minister’s main message was summed up in that interview. It was that, we, looking in on Iraq should not disenfranchise the people of Iraq by refusing to recognise the wishes of the Iraqi people as represented by their democratically elected government. That meant in terms of our presence there recognising that no member of the government that the Prime Minister had met there had asked for us to withdraw immediately. They certainly did not want us to stay forever, but we did not want that either. What they wanted was a steady transfer of control as Iraqi forces were ready. This would be what the Prime Minister would discuss this evening. He would also discuss the need for the international community as a whole, including through the UN, to get behind the democratically elected government of Iraq and support it. This meant restoring and improving it’s economy because even though that economy had grown by 10% this year it still had a lot of infrastructure improvements to be made. In addition as it guarded itself against the deliberate attempt by terrorists to destroy it he would say there was no excuse within the international community not to come behind a democratically elected government in Iraq.

As journalists knew the Prime Minister would give his third, in the series, of foreign policy speeches at 4pm UK time tomorrow. That speech would develop out of his thought on Iraq. He would say that the values of promoting democracy and of promoting development of a country were central to the approach needed in the international community as a whole. That meant standing up for democracy. It meant having agencies, which were not designed to meet the challenge of the world as it was in the immediate aftermath of World War II. It meant agencies that were designed to meet the challenges of today’s world where we had greater economic interdependence because of globalisation; where we had more freedom of movement and information; but also one in which we should not be afraid to stand up for a process of democratisation. He would say that this meant changes to international organisations such as the UN, including the Security Council, the IMF and other international bodies. Specifically to make them more transparent in the way they operated and more representative as well, but also to reflect a greater political will to take on hard issues and not duck them. One example of how we needed to make it more representative was to transform the G8 from a small club into a body, which would routinely include the emerging economies as well.

Asked what was meant when saying the whole international community should be behind Iraq, the PMOS said that the Prime Minister meant that we needed to recognise, as an international community, that Iraq now was in a different place. It was in a different place because 12,191,000 had voted. There was a government that represented Sunni, Shia and Kurd’s. We had a Cabinet that represented the three ethnic groups. There was a Presidency that represented the three communities too. It was the Iraqi government’s view that the international community should support them. We agreed with that. The one basic criterion that we should now defer to was what the Iraqi government wanted. It was the Iraqi government that represented the people of Iraq not the terrorists who were trying to destroy it.

Asked if they would discuss the redeployment of British forces within the coalition in regard to handing over provinces in the south first, the PMOS said that we had no problems whatsoever with what the Iraqi government wanted to do. 14 of the 18 provinces were relatively calm. As Prime Minister Maliki said this week they hoped to begin the process of taking control when their troops were ready in the summer. We agreed with that. It would be province by province when the Iraqi’s were ready. What mattered was what the Iraqi government wanted and we would listen to that.

Asked whether the Prime Minister would be seeing anyone else in Washington, the PMOS said that tomorrow morning he would also see representatives of the Senate, from both sides.

Asked whether the Prime Minister would collect his Congressional Medal of Honour, the PMOS said that as they may have gathered from this week’s schedule we had a lot on our plates already. There would be an appropriate time and moment for the Prime Minister to recognise the very real privilege he had been given by the award. At the moment our focus was on the substance of the trip. Asked if that time would be after the Prime Minister had left office, the PMOS said that the question was so highly speculative that all he could say was that we were focused on the here and now.

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» Thursday, May 25, 2006

President Bush talks

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