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Iraqi vice-president stands by charge Bush "brainwashed" Blair

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, Dec 20, IRNA
UK-Blair-Iraq vice-president
Iraqi Vice-President Tareq al-Hashemi Wednesday stood by his charge that US President George W Bush had "blackmailed" British Prime Minister Tony Blair with his refusal to announce a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq.

"This is the impression that I got," Al-Hashemi said when asked in an interview to clarify the accusation made while speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

He said that after a lengthy discussion with Blair, he promised to take up his withdrawal proposal with Bush just before he was planning to fly to Washington in early December.

"But I was observing the joint press conference that he made with President Bush after his visit and I saw him talking about something quite different," the Iraqi president said.

He told the BBC that it gave him the "impression that he raised this subject with President Bush and eventually he just changed his mind."
"I think he discovered that Mr Bush is still adamant that he's not going to declare some sort of timetable for withdrawal to avoid passing wrong messages to terrorism," said Hashemi, who is head of the Iraqi Islamic Party.

He told the Council on Foreign Relations on Tuesday that it was "quite unfortunate that your President made a sort of blackmail out of Mr Blair."
The Iraqi vice-president said he believed he had won the British prime minister's support for the formulation of an exit strategy and that he was "willing" and "convinced" over the timetable.

Both Bush and Blair have been criticized for not responding to the recent Iraq Study Group report, which said the situation in Iraq was "grave and deteriorating" and warned it was being made worse by the presence of US and British troops.

On Tuesday, the British premier was also criticized for getting too close to the US president by the country's leading foreign affairs think-tank.

"Tony Blair's successor(s) will not be able to offer
unconditional support for US initiatives in foreign policy and a rebalancing of the UK's foreign policy between the US and Europe will have to take place", said the retiring director of Chatham House, Professor Bulmer-Thomas.

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