United States President George W. Bush leaves Belfast on April 8, 2003, following the end of a two-day summit with British Prime Minister Tony Blair to discuss postwar Iraq.

The two leaders meet at Hillsborough Castle and begin their sessions on April 7 with a half-hour walk through the gardens before dinner. The following day they hold a press conference and further talks, including a session on the Northern Ireland peace effort.

Bush and Blair, Bush’s closest ally in confronting Saddam Hussein, come together to discuss questions made increasingly urgent by the rapid military progress American and British forces have made and to plan for a postwar Iraq. They seek to bridge their differences over how much of a role to give the United Nations in rebuilding the country and putting together a new government.

Blair has been under pressure at home and from much of Europe to support giving the United Nations a strong role in stabilizing Iraq. The White House, however, has consistently signaled that it wants the United States and Britain to play the lead role in creating a new Iraqi government.

United States Secretary of State Colin L. Powell tells reporters traveling with the president that the United States is sending officials to the region to begin assembling a group of Iraqis who will constitute an interim governing authority and will be put in place alongside the American-led military and civilian authorities. In a sign of the speed with which the maneuvering for power in post-Hussein Iraq is unfolding, Ahmed Chalabi, the leader of the main Iraqi exile opposition group, the Iraqi National Congress (INC), is reported to be heading to Baghdad from southern Iraq.

“The hostilities phase is coming to a conclusion,” Powell says. “It’s time for all of us to think about the post-hostilities phase, how we create a representative government consisting of all elements of Iraqi society.”

Powell and British officials play down the magnitude of the differences between the United States and Britain over the United Nations role. The United Nations, Powell says, will have “an endorsing role to play to the interim authority to give it legitimacy,” a formulation that appears to reserve for the United States and Britain the right to select the leaders of the temporary postwar administration. A spokesman for Blair uses similar language, referring to the United Nations’ being involved “in a way that endorses that new Iraqi authority” as a step toward establishing a full-fledged Iraqi government.

Initially, primary responsibility for administering Iraq would rest with a team led by a retired United States Army lieutenant general, Jay Garner, and the interim Iraqi authority would be likely to begin assuming power after that, perhaps 90 days later, the British spokesman says.

Clearly wary of getting into another diplomatic squabble with other members of the United Nations Security Council, Powell and other administration officials have emphasized in recent days that the United States and Britain, having waged the war and paid for it with blood and money, will not be drawn into a negotiation with countries like France and Germany over the immediate postwar period.

Powell emphasizes, however, that part of his focus will now be on “healing” diplomatic wounds and granting the United Nations an important role once Iraq is stabilized.

Bush’s national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, arrives from Moscow on the evening of April 7, where she had met with President of Russia Vladimir V. Putin, who has broken with Bush over the war but whose country has longstanding economic interests in Iraq, including oil.

At the United Nations, Secretary-General Kofi Annan says he will travel to Britain, France, Germany and Russia in the coming week to test whether the Security Council might be able to agree on a postwar plan. He announces that he has been working on post-conflict issues with a special adviser, Rafeeuddin Ahmed. He says he expects the United Nations to play an important role, whether as a political facilitator or dealing with issues like reconstruction or human rights. “Above all, the U.N. involvement does bring legitimacy, which is necessary, necessary for the country, for the region and for the peoples around the world,” Annan says.

Bush’s trip to see Blair here is the third British-American summit meeting in as many weeks. It coincides with news that American forces are attacking the presidential palaces and other symbols of the Iraqi government in the heart of Baghdad and that British soldiers have taken control of Iraq’s second-largest city, Basra.

The presence of the two leaders draws crowds of antiwar protesters and set off a local debate about whether this city, which has been trying to put behind it a history of sectarian violence, is an appropriate location for a war council.

The city authorities in Belfast have to divert traffic and clear public buildings in various locations following a series of bomb scares. The scenes are reminiscent of the conflicted time before the Northern Ireland peace agreement in 1998 put an end to organized sectarian violence that cost the lives of more than 3,600 people over three decades.

In the conversations about Iraq, Blair plays his customary role of trying to bridge trans-Atlantic differences. He hopes to placate criticism at home and ease relations with his European neighbors by pushing for a United Nations resolution authorizing an interim governing authority.

He had earlier envisaged a more prominent role for the United Nations, but he emerged from his last meeting with Bush, at Camp David on March 27, emphasizing the need for the United Nations to endorse the transition plans rather than play a central part in the plans, as he had advocated at the first summit meeting, in the Azores on March 16.

Europeans express alarm at what they see as the marginalization of the United Nations. At the same time, European critics of the war, like France, Germany and Russia, may object to Blair’s compromise proposal on grounds that it legitimizes a war they oppose. Even in Britain, the one European country where the war has majority support, there is great resistance to American domination of the postwar running of Iraq. An opinion poll in The Daily Telegraph shows that while Britons’ enthusiasm for the war has grown to a high of 60 percent and their approval of Blair’s conduct has also risen, there is only 2 percent approval of an American-controlled administration of Iraq.

Powell says the United States is only trying to lay out a plan under which military control of Iraq can give way to a mix of civilian and military control, including substantial involvement by Iraqis, and then to a full-fledged government. He says United Nations involvement might be necessary to convince banks and financial markets that they can safely and legally lend money to Iraq. Asked about peacekeeping duties, he says NATO is open to the possibility of helping to provide postwar security or assisting in the search for weapons of mass destruction.

Planning for the peace has exposed differences not only between the United States and Britain, but also within the Bush administration and between the administration and Congress.

Blair chose to hold his meeting with Bush in Northern Ireland in part so that the president can lend his support to the long-running efforts by Britain and Ireland to find a peaceful solution to the strife between Catholics and Protestants in the province. The White House, however, seems not to be paying much attention to Northern Ireland diplomacy. The schedules and credentials it distributes to reporters list the site as “Belfast, Ireland.”

(From: “Bush Meets With Blair to Discuss Postwar Iraq” by Richard W. Stevenson and Warren Hoge, The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com, April 8, 2003)