Bush to hold talks with Iraqi leaders

[Ron Burgundy]

AP - President Bush is stepping into Iraq's political divide, meeting with a top Shiite power broker at the White House next week and with the nation's Sunni vice president in January.

The president is under pressure to decide a new blueprint for U.S. involvement in Iraq, where sectarian violence threatens all-out civil war. The meetings suggest that Bush wants to become more personally involved in trying to bring warring factions together.

Just back from meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki on Thursday in Jordan, Bush is reaching out on Monday to another Shiite politician, Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, to seek ways to end the violence and keep Iraq's unity government intact.

The White House said Bush's meeting with al-Hakim did not mean that he was easing back on his support for al-Maliki -- a man the president has called the "right guy for Iraq." The White House said the meetings are part of a series of consultations he's having with top Iraqi officials.

"President Bush looks forward to an exchange of views and a discussion of important issues facing Iraq today," National Security Council spokesman Gordon Johndroe said.

To show he's not choosing sides, Bush is planning to meet next month with Iraq's Sunni Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, according to a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to disclose the president's advance schedule. He met with a top Kurdish official at the White House on Oct. 25.

"This is very much a game of political and strategic chicken, and nobody really knows where this is going -- either any of the Iraqi factions or the Bush administration," said Thomas Donnelly, a senior adviser in the Center for Security and International Studies' international security program.

"I think this is actually a reasonably clever move (on Bush's part) to try to regain the initiative. It also puts pressure on al-Maliki. Although they're going to stick with al-Maliki, they're going to hedge their bets, kind of prepare for a kind of Plan B on that front."

Al-Hakim, who backed a rival candidate over al-Maliki in the prime minister's race earlier this year, is leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. SCIRI is the largest party in al-Maliki's governing coalition. Many consider al-Hakim a more powerful political figure than al-Maliki because of his party's electoral strength among Shiites and its Badr Brigade militia, but al-Hakim says he's not interested in al-Maliki's job.

The Badr Brigade is widely blamed for some of the sectarian killings that have been tearing Iraq apart since the bombing of a major Shiite shrine north of Baghdad in February. Al-Hakim repeatedly has denied that the Badr Brigade was involved in the violence. He says the militia has been turned into a political organization.

Donnelly said al-Maliki is the glue that holds together the Shiite coalition, which has two powerful forces in al-Hakim and anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. The widening revolt within al-Maliki's divided government is showing no signs of subsiding, with 30 lawmakers and five Cabinet ministers loyal to al-Sadr continuing their political boycott to protest the prime minister's meeting with Bush in Jordan on Thursday.

Bush's meeting with al-Hakim is "definitely an attempt to send a shot over the bow of Muqtada al-Sadr," Donnelly said. "It's an attempt to keep al-Sadr from being an ever more powerful and influential figure."