Aides said their agenda would also include the Middle East and Northern Ireland when they meet in Belfast.

"They will talk about the status of the ongoing military operation, they will talk about the humanitarian relief efforts, they'll talk about reconstruction and they'll talk about the role of the United Nations," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said Friday.

Fleischer would not say whether the long-promised "road map" for peace between Israel and the Palestinians would finally be unveiled.

The two leaders met March 16 in the Azores just days before launching the war as the possibility of obtaining UN backing was all but exhausted, and again on March 27 at Bush's presidential retreat in Camp David, outside Washington, after hostilities had raged for a week.

"America has learned a lot about Tony Blair over the last weeks," Bush said at the time.

"We've learned that he's a man of his word. We've learned that he's a man of courage, that he's a man of vision. And we're proud to have him as a friend."

At that meeting, things looked tougher for the US, British and Australian coalition, whose troops had met not only resistance from Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's soldiers but also a lukewarm reception from civilians.

Now, while British troops are still struggling for full control of Basra in the south, US forces are at Baghdad's doorstep, and discussion of post-war reconstruction seems less out of place.

Washington appears to have decided to sideline the United Nations as much as possible from the process, instead favoring a provisional military administrator attached to the Pentagon until an interim administration trusted by the Iraqis can be established.

However, Blair will have to report back to his partners in Europe including France and Germany, which not lobbied vigorously against the war within the UN Security Council but now advocate a central UN role in post-war Iraq.

Bush's national security advisor Condoleezza Rice doused such aspirations.

"It would only be natural to expect that after having participated and having liberated Iraq with coalition forces and having given life and blood to liberate Iraq, that the coalition intends to have a leading role," she said Friday.

Iraq is not the only conflict on the Bush-Blair agenda. The so-called "road map" to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has yet to be revealed despite repeated appeals from London.

The Bush administration would like to see new Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmud Abbas, considered a counterweight to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat, formally installed before agreeing to release the road map.

The plan sets out five stages toward the creation of a Palestinian state by 2005, but faces strong opposition from US ally and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

As for Northern Ireland, the summit comes on the fifth anniversary of the so-called Good Friday agreement among the British government, the Irish Republican Army, Catholics who want the province to join Ireland and Protestants who would rather remain British.

"It is apparently a very important moment for participants in the Good Friday agreement," Rice said."There is a belief that some progress can be made and so the president is going to try to lend his efforts to that."

Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern is slated to attend, as well as other leaders who have come up against serious difficulties implementing the April 1998 agreement.

SPACE.WIRE