WASHINGTON — President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair pledged Tuesday to continue working together to combat food shortages and disease in Africa, even as they failed to agree on how to carry out what Blair called "a real and common desire to help that troubled continent."
Although the two leaders said the United States and Britain were nearing an agreement on granting full debt relief to some of the continent's most indebted nations, Bush did not budge from his opposition to Blair's proposal that the United States and other major industrialized nations double their foreign aid to Africa to about $80 billion by 2010.
Aware of Bush's position, the British prime minister told the Financial Times a day earlier that he would not bring up the matter during their meeting.
On another Blair initiative -- to impose tough restrictions on emissions of greenhouse gases, which trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere -- Bush also parted company with his guest, saying that the United States needed to know more about global warming before it could more effectively deal with the phenomenon.
And Bush flatly rejected the allegations in the so-called Downing Street memo, written in July 2002 by a Blair foreign policy aide. The document alleged that the White House was fixing its intelligence and facts about the threat posed by then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to justify an invasion to oust him.
"There's nothing farther from the truth," Bush said during a brief news conference with Blair in the East Room of the White House. The president suggested that the memo, first reported in the Sunday Times of London and the topic of much discussion on the Internet, had been dropped into the middle of Britain's recent parliamentary elections in an effort to damage Blair and his Labor Party.
Blair refuted the memo as well. "No, the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all," he said. At the time of the memo, he said, "we were trying to look for a way of managing to resolve this without conflict."
Bush sounded defensive more than once during the session with reporters.
The president rejected the suggestion that the United States lagged behind most other industrialized nations in the percentage of gross national product that it contributes in aid to Africa -- 0.16%. Other developed countries give an average of 0.24%.
