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Bush's Middle East Meeting "Not a Peace Conference"

[White House] White House Press Secretary Tony Snow clarified on Tuesday President Bush's call for an international meeting on the Middle East: "I think a lot of people are inclined to try to treat this as a big peace conference. It's not. This is a meeting to sit down and try to find ways of building fundamental and critical institutions for the Palestinians that are going to enable them to have self-government and democracy....It was being spun up as a major peace conference where people are going to be talking about final status issues, and that is not the case." "The first thing you've got to do is build the capability within the Palestinian areas, to have those institutions that are going to be able to not only sustain democracy, but also to sustain peace and security within the area, and to be able to fulfill the Quartet conditions, which are renouncing violence, recognizing Israel, and abiding by international treaties. I mean, all those things are still capabilities that they have to work on developing. So you do first things first." "The idea that somehow we've been disengaged is simply false. What the United States has not done is wrap its arms around those who are committed to terror and, therefore, engage in fruitless negotiations that would have led nowhere. Bill Clinton, upon leaving office, famously expressed frustration that he had trusted Yasser Arafat and, therefore, had been deceived when it came to trying to pursue peace."
2007-07-18 01:00:00
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