Iraq looms large in British and US elections

In the US, the plight of the war-torn country dominated press coverage of the just-completed G-8 summit held at Sea Island, Georgia.

President George W. Bush, facing presidential elections in a few months, used the conference to signal to American voters greater cooperation with his European partners, editorializes Germany's mass circulation Bild Zeitung.

And while the President won approval this week of a United Nations resolution endorsing a new interim government in Iraq, smoothing the way for an upbeat meeting with fellow G-8 heads of state, "his appeals to G-8 leaders failed to bring promises of troops to help stabilize the country or an agreement on the amount of debt relief for Iraq," reports Bloomberg.

In England, Prime Minister Tony Blair received a "stinging rebuff" over his position on Iraq as the Labor party lost more than 300 seats on local councils in ongoing English elections. The number far exceeds normal opposition to the sitting government in an off-year election, reports the BBC.

The results from Thursday's local council polls - to be followed by London mayoral results on Friday night and European Parliament results on Sunday - were bad news for Britain's Labor government, reported CNN.

Projections indicated that Conservatives polled 38 percent of the vote, "putting them within striking distance of a majority at a general elections," reported CNN.

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How lasting the positive political fallout from the summit for Bush, and the negative election results for Blair, remains to be seen.

Experts point out that Americans have a notoriously short political memory, reports The Christian Science Monitor on Thursday.

'We're at a point there's going to be a Bush bounce,' says Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution in Washington. 'But we're still a long way from Nov. 2, and there will be other bounces along the way.'

Europeans made it clear that though they are cool to NATO troop deployments in Iraq, but that they support a " common objective of helping sovereign Iraq," comments Patrick M. Cronin, senior vice president and director of studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a Washington Post Q&A on the G-8 summit.

What should not be "missed" at the recent G-8 gathering, said Cronin, is:

the Bush Administration has held a relatively successful top-level meeting among some leaders with which its has sparred sharply in the past two years," said Cronin.... We have three elections coming up in the next 6 months: in Afghanistan, the United States and Iraq. If we can keep this kind of international consensus together until then, that would provide a good foundation on which to advance effective and concerted economic and security policies.

Peace did not break out in Iraq, it broke out at the G-8, quipped columnist Simon Jenkins in the Times of London (subscription).

"The best spin" to put on the upbeat pronouncements of agreement by Bush and Blair stemming from G-8, writes Jenkins in decided contrast to Cronin, is that: "

It is a cover for the earliest troop withdrawal, first to the barracks and then from Iraq altogether. Iraq is to be handed over not to democracy but to whatever comes next. There will be friendly faces for a time in Baghdad. But like those other laboratories of Western intervention in the region, Lebanon and Afghanistan, Iraq seems doomed to return to political ground zero, to anarchy, before finding its own path to salvation.

A proposal by the Bush administration to send NATO troops to Iraq was quickly revised to providing police training. Its outcome was left for a future meeting.

Deutsche Welle cites an editorial in the German newspaper Rheinpfalz that " no one is seriously thinking" of replacing coalition troops in Iraq with NATO soldiers.

It's not in the interest of the Bush administration for soldiers to be pulled out of Iraq by an alliance member as the Spanish have done. 'There is a way the alliance can get more involved in Iraq,' the paper suggested, 'and that's by training Iraqi security forces. But that's a discussion for the upcoming NATO meeting in Istanbul and not for the G-8 summit.'

Also...
• Q&A: Group of 8 summit ( The Christian Science Monitor)
• Terror report's 'good news' turns bad ( Guardian)
• Patterns of Global Terrorism 2003 Report ( US State Department)
• Bush Papers Over Differences with Chirac on Iraq ( Reuters)

• Feedback appreciated. E-mail Jim Bencivenga .