Bush to meet EU leaders in Austria

US President George Bush will today meet EU leaders for more than four hours of talks in Vienna.

The agenda for the annual meeting centres on reducing the West’s dependence on imported oil and gas, fighting terror, protecting intellectual property rights and discussing an EU plan to channel critically needed cash to the Palestinians.

President Bush planned to press his European counterparts to follow his lead and promise to eliminate government support for farmers, a sticking point in difficult talks for a global free-trade pact.

“If they can move in that direction, we’re going to be in the zone of getting an agreement by the end of the year,” the president’s national security adviser Stephen Hadley told reporters travelling to Austria on Air Force One.

The president also was urging European nations to keep to their pledges of financial assistance for Iraq’s reconstruction.

Mr Hadley would not name the countries that have not yet delivered, but he said the president believes that coming up with the money now is crucial to the success of the fledgling leadership in Baghdad.

The administration says only $3bn (€2.37bn) of $13bn (€10.3bn) promised has gone to Baghdad.

“That will strengthen this government in a way as few things will,” he said.

The president’s European stay could be complicated by the North Korea missile crisis.

There are indications that the communist state could at any moment test a long-range ballistic missile thought to be powerful enough to reach the west coast of the US.

“They seem to (be) moving forward towards a launch, but the intelligence is not conclusive at this point,” Mr Hadley said.

Washington has been threatening consequences if Pyongyang goes ahead with the launch, which would be its first since test-firing an earlier version over northern Japan in 1998.

Iran’s suspected nuclear ambitions also were sure to come up, but President Bush’s advisers played it down as a major topic of discussion.

Earlier this month, the US, Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia offered Iran incentives to impose a long-term moratorium on uranium enrichment, a process that can produce material for nuclear generators or bombs.

With the Bush administration insisting Tehran has “weeks, not months” to make a decision, Iran has so far neither rejected nor accepted the proposal.

That leaves the showdown in a holding pattern with little to discuss as Bush meets with EU leaders who are not the major players in the issue.

“The framework we’re operating under is already fixed,” Mr Hadley said.

Police were bracing for possibly large anti-Bush protests during the visit, which has the president in a series of meetings with Austrian president Heinz Fischer, Chancellor Wolfgang Schuessel and EU dignitaries including European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso.