President Bush's aides all but ruled out a three-way meeting with Israeli and Palestinian leaders during his upcoming Mideast visit and dampened hopes that the president's high-profile travels would make tangible progress toward peace.
"Just his going there is going to advance the prospects," Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, said Thursday. "We're not looking for headline announcements."
Bush departs Tuesday on an eight-day trip that will take him to at least six Mideast nations and the Palestinian territories — his first visit as president to each locale on his itinerary except Egypt. It comes as Bush stages his most aggressive personal involvement to date in the tricky, violent and intractable Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
Middle East experts said the trip is an important signal of U.S. involvement in the region, but probably won't produce concrete results.
"People are going to be polite. They will be accommodating in some ways. But they are well aware that this is not only an election year, it is an election year from an administration that really has no heir that can really speak for the future or run for the future," said Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Jon Alterman, director of the center's Middle East program, said Bush was trying to manage Mideast peacemaking "in incremental ways by arm-twisting and jawboning leaders in intimate, private sessions."
"There will be small successes along the way," Alterman said. "But all of the Middle East's problems are far too immense, complex and diverse to be solved on this trip."
Expectations had begun to grow, mostly from Palestinian quarters, that a three-way session with Bush and Israeli and Palestinian leaders was in the offing. Hadley essentially quashed that for this trip, while dangling the notion that such intensive engagement by Bush in nitty-gritty negotiating wasn't off the table forever.
"There'll be opportunities down the road, if the parties think it's helpful, to meet trilaterally," Hadley said. "But at this point, we're looking at a series of bilateral meetings."
Those begin Wednesday in Jerusalem with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and President Shimon Peres. On Thursday, Bush travels to the West Bank, an Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory, to see Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad at their headquarters in Ramallah.
Before leaving Israel on Friday for Kuwait, Bush also hears from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, now the Mideast representative for the so-called Quartet — the United Nations, the European Union, Russia and the United States. Bush also is to lay a wreath at Yad Vashem, Israel's official Holocaust memorial.
In Kuwait, Bush was to speak with Kuwaiti women, who were excluded from political life in the conservative Muslim nation until 2005, and visit with U.S. troops at Camp Arifjan, the logistical hub for the Iraq war near Kuwait City. Bush also will receive an update on the war from Gen. David Petraeus, the top military commander in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad.
On Saturday, the president travels to Bahrain where he visits members of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet on Sunday. He goes on to the United Arab Emirates where, later Sunday in Abu Dhabi, he delivers the sole speech of his trip. He was expected to argue that achieving security in the region will pave the way for economic and political progress.
After a brief stopover in Dubai on Monday, Bush heads to Saudi Arabia for two nights. Saudi King Abdullah was expected to urge Bush to pressure Israel to halt settlements in Palestinian territories. Bush owes the king at least a close listen; Saudi participation in his U.S.-sponsored Mideast peace conference in Annapolis, Md., in November was considered a coup.
The president's last stop of the trip comes Wednesday, when he pays a brief visit to the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt, where he will meet with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak before returning to Washington.
Speculation was high among Mideast experts that Bush might go to Iraq and, perhaps, Lebanon at some point during the trip. But the White House wouldn't discuss it.
Hadley said that on the trip, the president also wants to spur broader Israeli-Arab reconciliation and urge neighboring Arab states to more enthusiastically support Abbas' government, as well as give debt relief to Iraq and push back against Syrian influence in Lebanon.
A subtext throughout the trip will be Iran. Bush wants to counter its desire for increased regional power, a concern shared in the Arab states he is visiting.
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