Agence France Presse, 20 June 2006
The White House said that it would push countries that have not followed through on aid pledges to Iraq to pay up now -- but US officials refuse to say who has fallen short, or by how much.
"Some (countries) are clearly lagging. And we will remind countries if they have forgotten about their pledges," US national security adviser Stephen Hadley said as US President George W. Bush traveled to Europe.
"I don't want to get into specific names," Hadley said.
Hadley, speaking to reporters aboard Bush's official Air Force One airplane, said the fledgling government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki needed the aid, pledged at a 2003 donors conference in Madrid, as soon as possible.
"The opportunity this government really has is to show for the Iraqi people that it can make a difference in their daily lives. That will strengthen this government in a way as few things will," said Hadley.
In recent days, Bush himself has repeatedly made the same appeal, saying that the international community has made good on just 3.5 billion dollars of the 13 billion pledged to war-torn Iraq nearly three years ago.
"This is a critical time for Iraq's young democracy," he said in a speech on Monday. "All nations that have pledged money have a responsibility to keep their pledges."
But the White House says that it can't point to which countries have failed to follow through on promises made at the October 2003 conference in Madrid, or what aid hasn't been provided, or why.
"We're still trying to track it down. It's a rather squirrelly figure and it's difficult to track down -- believe or not, it is," Bush spokesman Tony Snow said Monday. "I really can't, honestly can't, help you on that one."
The international donors conference in the Spanish capital yielded pledges of about 33 billion dollars for Iraq -- 13 billion from donors other than the United States.
Of that, at least 8.5 billion was in the form of loans -- from Japan, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
US officials say privately that publicly identifying countries that have not met their pledges would be counterproductive at this point, hurting diplomatic efforts to convince them to pay up.
Another Bush aide, asked to identify what countries or institutions had failed to make good on the promises, curtly replied "we're not getting into that" and directed a reporter to visit the Internet site of the World Bank.
The site provides a breakdown in pledges of aid, but does not identify countries that have failed to follow through.
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Citation: "US fuzzy on Iraq aid pledges," Agence France Presse, 20 June 2006.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060620/pl_afp/usiraqaidwhouse
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