Baghdad security and Lebanon top Bush-Maliki agenda

President George Bush retains confidence in Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki despite the failure of the Shiite politician’s signature effort to improve security in Iraq’s bloody capital, the White House said as Bush prepared to host the new leader.

Maliki was making his first visit to Washington today as the first democratically elected prime minister since the fall of Saddam Hussein. The chaos and bloodletting in Baghdad and the current fighting between Israel and the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon are at the top of his agenda with Bush.

“Yes,” White House press secretary Tony Snow said when asked whether Bush was still confident that Maliki could succeed.

The six-week old plan to enhance security in the Iraqi capital of Baghdad clearly is not working, and the two leaders probably will discuss a substitute, Snow said.

“I think that’s under consideration,” Snow said.

In London for talks ahead of his White House visit, Maliki said he feared the possible broader consequences of the two-week-old Israeli-Hezbollah fighting.

“I am afraid that what’s going on in Lebanon will be a great push towards fundamentalism,” Maliki said during a news conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The fighting has killed nearly 400, most of them Lebanese civilians.

Maliki also told BBC radio that Iraq will not collapse into civil war, but he acknowledged the sectarian violence is claiming 100 civilian deaths a day.

“There is a sectarian issue, but the political leaders ... are working on putting an end to,” it, Maliki said. “Civil war will not happen to Iraq.”

He confirmed UN data showing an average of 100 civilians a day were killed in May and June.

Bush praised Maliki’s security plan during an unannounced visit to Baghdad on June 13, but since then sectarian violence has continued to rise.

US officials have signalled that a new plan likely to be announced during al-Maliki’s visit would involve bringing more US troops into Baghdad.

American troops are stepping up operations in the Baghdad area to combat death squads and reduce the violence threatening the new unity government, a US general said yesterday.

US and Iraqi forces conducted 19 operations last week targeting death squads, US spokesman Major General William Caldwell told reporters. All but two were in Baghdad, he said.

“Clearly Baghdad is the centre that everybody is fighting for,” Caldwell said in Baghdad. “We will do whatever it takes to bring security to Baghdad.”

The Baghdad area recorded an average of 34 major bombings and shootings for the week ending July 13, the US military said. That was up 40% from the daily average of 24 registered between June 14 and July 13.

US officials believe control of Baghdad – the political, cultural, transport and economic hub of the country – will determine the future of Iraq. But the city’s religiously mixed communities have become the focus of sectarian violence.

Iraq’s army and police, which are heavily Shiite, have had trouble winning the trust of residents of majority Sunni neighbourhoods. Maliki’s plans for curfews and other measures have had no lasting effect.

The Bush administration is pinning its hopes for a relatively swift withdrawal of most US forces on the political and military success of the multi-ethnic government Maliki heads. Maliki was the compromise choice to lead the government this spring after months of political infighting that frustrated the Bush administration and sapped political support among Iraqis.

Vice President Dick Cheney said yesterday a rapid withdrawal from Iraq, as sought by some Democrats, would only provoke more al Qaida attacks on the United States.

Withdrawal decision will be made based on conditions in Iraq, not on “artificial timelines set by politicians in Washington,” Cheney told a crowd of more than 300 Republic supporters in Arkansas.

The war is increasingly unpopular in the United States, weighing down the president’s poll numbers and causing headaches for the White House as it looks to mid-term congressional elections this fall.

At least 2,565 members of the US military have died since the beginning of the Iraq war in March 2003, according to an Associated Press count. Far larger numbers of Iraqis have died, including hundreds in tit-for-tat sectarian killings in Baghdad.

Many of the death squads are believed to be associated with either Sunni or Shiite armed groups, targeting members of the rival sect as part of a struggle for power between the country’s two major religious communities.

The killings accelerated after the February 22 bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra and have steadily increased despite establishment of Maliki’s national unity government last May.

The rise in sectarian violence has shifted attention away from the Sunni-led insurgency most active in western Anbar province to Baghdad, a city of six million people with large communities of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds.

A senior Defence Department official said the remainder of a back-up force that had been stationed in Kuwait was also heading into Iraq. Some US military police companies are being shifted to Baghdad, involving between 500-1,000 troops, as well as a cavalry squadron and a battalion of field artillery troops, said the official.

In addition, the official said, at least two Iraqi military brigades will be brought into Baghdad from other parts of the country. Forces are being shifted to meet changing security demands in different neighbourhoods “to face the enemy where we think he is,” the official said.

There are generally about 3,500 troops in a brigade, and more than 800 in a battalion. Currently about 30,000 of the 127,000 US troops in Iraq are in Baghdad.

General George Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, discussed such measures with Maliki in Baghdad ahead of the prime minister’s visit to the United States. Casey contends that al Qaida had increased its killings in Baghdad to show it remains a force to be reckoned with after the June 7 killing of its leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.