Bush meets with Shiite leader at White House

updated 9:28 p.m. ET Dec. 4, 2006

WASHINGTON - President Bush told an Iraqi power broker on Monday that the United States was not satisfied with the progress of efforts to stop the sharp escalation of violence in Iraq.

Bush met at the White House with Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, the Shiite leader of the largest bloc in Iraq’s parliament.

Al-Hakim said that he “vehemently” opposes any regional or international effort to solve Iraq’s problems that goes around the unity government in Baghdad.

“Iraq should be in a position to solve Iraq’s problems,” al-Hakim said.

The president said he spoke with al-Hakim for more than an hour and said they had a “very constructive conversation.”

“I assured him that the U.S. supports his work and the work of the prime minister to unify the country,” Bush said, referring to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

“Part of unifying Iraq is for the elected leaders and society leaders to reject the extremists that are trying to stop the advance of this young democracy,” Bush said.

“We talked about the need to give the government Iraq more capability as soon as possible so the elected government of Iraq can do that which the Iraqi people want to secure their country from extremists and murderers,” Bush said. “I told his eminence that I was proud of the courage of the Iraqi people. I told him that we’re not satisfied with the pace of progress in Iraq. And that we want to continue to work with the sovereign government of Iraq.”

Rising expectations
These developments come amid an atmosphere of rising expectations about a new U.S. policy in Iraq and an acknowledgment by President Bush’s national security adviser that Bush accepts that a new approach is warranted.

National security adviser Stephen Hadley said Sunday that while Bush recognizes something different needs to be done, the president won’t use the recommendations due this week from the Iraq Study Group as political cover for bringing troops home.

“We have not failed in Iraq,” Hadley said as he made the talk show rounds Sunday. “We will fail in Iraq if we pull out our troops before we’re in a position to help the Iraqis succeed.”

He added: “The president understands that we need to have a way forward in Iraq that is more successful.”

But, with the leak of another insider’s secret memo, the second in a week, the administration found itself on the defensive.

The latest, first reported in Sunday’s New York Times, showed that Donald H. Rumsfeld called for a “major adjustment” in U.S. tactics on Nov. 6 — the day before an election that cost Republicans the Congress and Rumsfeld his job as defense secretary.

Hadley played down the memo as a laundry list of ideas rather than a call for a new course of action.

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