Bush, Brown to meet at Camp David under Iraq shadow

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US President George W Bush (right) stands with Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown at Camp David in Maryland.

WASHINGTON, July 30 (AFP): US President George W. Bush holds talks with Gordon Brown Monday, with the new British prime minister hoping to secure support for a peace deal on Darfur and movement on stalled world trade talks.
But the divisive issue of Iraq is likely to loom large over proceedings as the two men and their foreign ministers sit around the table for what aides said were "wide ranging" discussions at Bush's Camp David, Maryland, retreat.
Even before arriving at a rainy Andrews Air Force Base just outside Washington Sunday evening, Brown again moved to quash speculation that he wants to distance his administration from the White House because of lingering resentment over Iraq.
Describing himself as an "Atlanticist" and a "great admirer of the American spirit of enterprise and national purpose", the former finance minister said he had come to reaffirm and even strengthen the so-called "special relationship."
"It is firmly in the British national interest that we have a strong relationship with the United States, our single most important bilateral relationship," he said, hailing shared values and history.
But after he named several Iraq war skeptics to senior ministerial roles, apparent disquiet in London at US foreign policy and no mention of US-British involvement in the Gulf in Brown's pre-visit statement, doubts remain.
Brown's spokesman Michael Ellam told reporters in London Sunday that Iraq, which controversially united Bush and former British prime minister Tony Blair in military action in 2003, would still be up for discussion.
And he rejected a report in The Sunday Times newspaper that Brown's foreign policy adviser, Simon McDonald, had sounded out the White House about a possible withdrawal of Britain's 5,500-strong force from southern Iraq.
Ellam said McDonald had made it clear to US foreign policy experts that Britain's position had not changed.
A report this month from a commission on Iraq chaired by the former international envoy to Bosnia, Paddy Ashdown, called for British combat operations to end and troops to be pulled out, regardless of the security situation.