December 2, 2006
Reporter’s Notebook
Facts and Body Language Bring Clues and Questions at Bush-Maliki Meeting
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Dec. 1 — Nobody expected a love fest when President Bush and Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq met in Jordan this week. As they wrapped up their breakfast at the Four Seasons hotel in Amman on Thursday morning, aides warned that reporters, dozens of whom were packed inside a brightly lit ballroom for a news conference, would be on the lookout for any sign of bad blood.

That’s when the president hugged the prime minister.

“Somebody said, ‘They’re going to try to see if there’s any tension between you,’ ” one senior administration official said. “So the president did a big hug, and put his cheek right next to Maliki’s. He started laughing, like, ‘See how close we are.’ ”

The question of how close Mr. Bush and Mr. Maliki are — or are not — was the subject of much speculation in Jordan this week. The official story line at the White House is that the two are comfortable and candid with each other, and that Mr. Bush, as he himself told reporters on Thursday, believes that Mr. Maliki is “the right guy for Iraq.”

The facts, though, raise questions.

Mr. Maliki, after all, scrubbed a meeting on Wednesday night between himself, Mr. Bush and King Abdullah II of Jordan, and did not see the president until Thursday morning, even though the two were staying at the same hotel. Mr. Bush, for his part, had to face Mr. Maliki after the leak of a memorandum written by Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, who raised doubts about the prime minister’s leadership.

The fates of these two politicians have been intertwined ever since Mr. Maliki, a taciturn 56-year-old Shiite who was an opposition leader when Saddam Hussein was still in power, became prime minister in April. The breakfast in Amman was their third face-to-face rendezvous.

It is a complicated entanglement. Mr. Bush, who has staked his presidency on success in Iraq, needs the Maliki government as an ally. But Mr. Maliki’s survival depends, in part, on his ability to demonstrate that he is his own man, not an American puppet. The president’s “right guy for Iraq” line might have gone over well in the United States, but it might not have done Mr. Maliki much good at home.

“It’s very clear that Bush needs Maliki. Period, end of sentence,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, an expert on Iraq at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. “I don’t think it’s clear that Maliki needs Bush.”

Theories abound as to why Mr. Maliki backed out on the Wednesday night meeting. The quickie pop analysis, by the ever-skeptical White House press corps, was that Mr. Maliki was irked by the Hadley memo. In the press center of the Amman Sheraton, after two White House officials struggled to put a positive spin on the surprise change of schedule, Mark Knoller, the longtime CBS News correspondent, summed up the sentiment with a catchy rhyme.

“The White House,” Mr. Knoller proclaimed, his voice booming into his microphone, “insists the scrubbing of the meeting was not a snubbing!”

The inherent hazards of challenging the official version of events meant that people who offered alternative accounts, like the senior administration official who described the presidential hug, would do so only on condition of anonymity.

Some suggested that if anyone was being snubbed by Mr. Maliki, it was the Jordanian king, who had irritated the Iraqi leader by meeting with Sunni Arab leaders in Iraq before the summit.

A Kurdish official offered yet another theory — that Mr. Maliki spent the night trying to quell a political uproar in Baghdad, where followers of Moktada al-Sadr, the anti-American Shiite cleric, had announced earlier in the day that they were boycotting the Maliki government over the meeting with Mr. Bush.

“By leaving it open that he had canceled a meeting with Bush, even though it was for one day, it could help him with street cred,” the Kurdish official said.

Whatever the reason, the Hadley memo clearly hovered over the summit, enough that Mr. Bush opened the breakfast meeting with a little ice-breaker at the expense of Mr. Hadley, who was by his side. “He said, ‘Mr. Prime Minister, do you know Steve Hadley?’ ” the senior administration official said of Mr. Bush. “He kind of looked back and smirked at Steve, and everybody laughed. It obviously served his purpose.”

Mr. Maliki, though, did not look very happy with Mr. Bush at the news conference. When the president heaped praise upon the prime minister, lauding him for his courage, Mr. Maliki barely looked Mr. Bush’s way. Though much was made afterward of the body language, White House officials blamed the language barrier, saying each man was listening intently into his earpiece for a translation of the other’s words.

But there did not seem to be any translation lag when the president asked if Mr. Maliki wanted to take a few extra questions from reporters. In an instant, Mr. Maliki’s head swiveled toward Mr. Bush, his eyes wide open in a glare as he blurted out, “We said six questions, now this is the seventh — this is the eighth — eight questions.”

Mr. Bush, who had promised minutes earlier that there would be no “graceful exit” from Iraq, quickly found a graceful exit from the news conference, grabbing Mr. Maliki’s hand for the obligatory handshake picture, before the two leaders disappeared behind a curtain of flags.