al-Hakim meets Bush, calls for U.S. military to do more, rejects regional solution

President Bush yesterday told the leader of Iraq's largest Shiite Muslim party that the United States is not satisfied with the progress in Iraq and appealed for more help in fighting extremism and reconciling the country's increasingly fractured society.

But in a speech after their hour-long meeting, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim countered that U.S. troops need to do more to fight the insurgency and denied that the Shiite militias are fueling the sectarian strife in Iraq. It was one of the starkest criticisms of U.S. military strategy by an Iraqi leader.

"The strikes [the insurgents] are getting from the multinational forces are not hard enough to put an end to their acts, but leave them to stand up again to resume their criminal acts," Hakim said in a speech at the United States Institute of Peace. "This means that there is something wrong in the policies taken to deal with that danger threatening the lives of Iraqis."

The only way to eliminate the danger of a civil war, he added, was through "decisive strikes" against insurgents once loyal to former leader Saddam Hussein. "Otherwise we'll continue to witness massacres . . . against innocent Iraqis."

Read the rest at the Wshington Post

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