ALPHA MORON:

Group of 8 Leaders Announce Pacts on Aid to Africa (RICHARD W. STEVENSON, 7/08/05, NY Times)

On the issue that he had put most emphasis on coming into the summit meeting, Mr. Blair hailed a series of agreements to alleviate poverty in Africa, including commitments to double aid by 2010, reduce trade barriers, cancel the debts of many countries and do more to fight diseases including AIDS and malaria.

"It isn't the end of poverty in Africa," Mr. Blair said after the leaders met with their counterparts from seven African countries. "But it is the hope that it can be ended. It isn't all everyone wanted, but it is progress, real and achievable progress."

He said the industrial nations had signed off on a plan to begin addressing global warming by opening talks later this year with a group of developing countries, in the hope of slowing and eventually reversing the increase in emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

But Mr. Blair acknowledged that deep differences between the United States and the other nations over the issue limited the scope of the agreement, saying it amounted to "the possibility of re-establishing a consensus."

Mr. Blair announced that the eight nations would support efforts to provide as much as $3 billion a year in aid for the Palestinian Authority in the next three years, a step intended to help the Palestinians after Israel withdraws later this summer from Gaza and sections of the West Bank. The Bush administration said last month that it would work with James D. Wolfensohn, a former president of the World Bank, to assemble the aid package by seeking contributions from countries around the world, including Arab nations.

Mr. Bush came into the summit meeting isolated from the other rich nations on how to address global warming and under pressure to do more than he has so far to assist Africa. In the end, he gave ground on a few fronts.

He agreed to language in the final communiqué on climate change that, while hedged, basically acknowledged that the burning of fossil fuels contributes to global warming, a position that his administration has at times avoided endorsing. And he signed off on the pledge by the eight industrial nations to double aid to Africa in the next five years.

But his point man for the summit meeting, Faryar Shirzad, a deputy national security adviser, said later that the aid commitment involved no new money from the United States, only adding up increases previously agreed to. Mr. Bush's opposition also helped doom calls for the rich nations to commit themselves to providing a defined proportion of their national incomes to aid to Africa, a step that would have required much larger contributions from the United States.

In the debate over the environment, Mr. Bush also blocked efforts by Mr. Blair to agree on specific targets for reducing emissions of greenhouse gases.

Mr. Bush left here without making any public comment on the outcome. Mr. Shirzad, talking to reporters aboard Air Force One as Mr. Bush headed home, called the summit meeting "a huge success."

The analyses tomorrow are going to uniformly say that W took Tony to the cleaner.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 8, 2005 6:02 PM