US - Jordan - Iraq Summit Cancelled

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AMMAN, Jordan - President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Thursday opened talks originally set for the day before but canceled following disclosure of U.S. doubts about the Iraqi leader's capabilities and a Baghdad protest of his attendance.

Instead of talks over two days, the stunning turn of events found Bush and al-Maliki meeting for a working breakfast that was to be followed by a longer session and a news conference. The Iraqi prime minister came to Bush's hotel.

White House counselor Dan Bartlett denied that the delay was a snub by al-Maliki directed at Bush or was related to the leak of a memo written by White House National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley questioning the prime minister's capacity for controlling violence in Iraq.

Two senior officials traveling with al-Maliki, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, said the prime minister had been reluctant to travel to Jordan in the first place and decided, once in Amman, that he did not want "a third party" involved in talks about subjects specific to the U.S.-Iraqi relationship.


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Fighting over who lost Iraq

The protagonists divide into three broad groups.

The Bush dead-enders. Although dwindling in number, President Bush's defenders will ascribe failure in Iraq to a loss of nerve, blaming media bias and liberal defeatists for sowing the erroneous impression that the war has become unwinnable. Bush loyalists will portray opposition to the war as tantamount to betraying the troops. Count on them to appropriate Ronald Reagan's description of Vietnam as "an honorable cause." Updating the "stab in the back" thesis, they will claim that a collapse of will on the home front snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in Baghdad as surely as it did in Saigon.

The buck-stops-at-the-top camp. Adherents of this second view are currently in the ascendant, attributing the troubles roiling Iraq to massive incompetence in the Bush administration. In a war notable for an absence of accountability, demands for fixing accountability are becoming increasingly insistent. Parties eager to divert attention from their own culpability are pointing fingers. Senior military officers target Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Congressional Democrats who voted for the war and neoconservatives direct their fire against Rumsfeld and Bush. The theme common to all of these finger-pointers: Don't blame us; the Bush team's stupidity, stubbornness and internal dysfunction doomed the American effort.

The conspiracy theorists. Even before the United States invaded Iraq, critics on the far left and far right charged that powerful groups operating behind the scenes were promoting war for their own nefarious purposes. Big Oil, Halliburton, the military-industrial complex and Protestant evangelicals said to be keen on defending Israel all came in for criticism and even grassy-knoll-style paranoia.

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