Bush Meets With Iraqi Council Members January 20, 2004 Asssociated Press By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - President Bush on Tuesday stepped up efforts to calm the dispute over transition to self-rule in Iraq, calling in a Shiite leader and also the president of the Iraqi Governing Council in a search for a compromise formula to end the U.S. occupation by July 1. Bush said he still hoped that timetable would hold, while Secretary of State Colin Powell said at the State Department that no specific plan to address Shiite demands for direct elections had been found. "We want refinements that make sense and get the support of all the parties," Powell said at a news conference. Bush's meeting with Shiite and Sunni leaders at the White House underscored the administration's determination to fashion an agreeable arrangement - and keep the July deadline intact. Powell spoke in terms of hoping to meet the deadline, not of definitely meeting it, as U.S. officials had last week. Speaking to reporters outside the White House, Adnan Pachachi, a secular Sunni who heads the council, said he and other members of the council had a "wide-ranging" discussion for about 40 minutes with Bush. The meeting included talk of ways to change the plan to hold regional caucuses across Iraq in May to pick a transitional governmental body. That body would then choose a provisional government, which would take over on June 30, essentially ending the U.S.-led occupation. "We are looking at various options and we hope to be able to make certain refinements, so to speak, to make it more transparent and more inclusive because we want to have a legislative assembly that will really reflect the desires of the Iraqi people and that is fully representative," Pachachi said. "A broad representative base is very important." Another member of the Iraqi Governing Council, Shiite leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, said the election was the main issue discussed with Bush. "We want the Iraqi people to express their view clearly, and the Iraqi people expressed their views through the demonstration yesterday and the day before and in addition to the position to the (leading Shiite cleric) Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, and we said clearly that we should have election in Iraq and that we should keep to the timetable of the transfer of sovereignty," he said. Pachachi said he and Bush also talked about how U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan had been asked to send a team to Iraq to determine if direct elections were possible. U.S. officials hope the U.N. team would conclude that early elections are impossible and convince al-Sistani to drop his demand for them. "We had excellent talks at the United Nations," Pachachi said. "We feel that the United Nations has a role to play and we have asked them to send a team, very soon, to Iraq to see whether it is feasible to hold elections within the next four months. "I think they will send it very soon because we want this mission to go to Iraq and present its report by the end of February, which is the deadline for the fundamental law (to detail a federal form of government)," he said. On a day virtually reserved for preparing his State of the Union speech, Bush got directly involved in the thorny issue that has prompted thousands of al-Sistani's followers to protest in the streets in recent days. "We discussed the situation in Iraq, Iraq-American relations and our plans for the future of Iraq - our efforts to create a viable and sturdy democracy in Iraq based on the rule of law and the quality of all citizens," Pachachi said. "We also discussed the process by which we hope to achieve full sovereignty by the 30th of June and the transfer of power to an Iraqi provisional government."
