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Bush: U.S. Cannot Impose Its Vision of Peace

[New York Times] Steven Lee Myers - President Bush and his aides still deplore what they view as President Clinton's disastrously hands-on involvement in the peace process in 2000. They insist that Bush does not intend to negotiate personally the two-state peace he has pronounced as his vision. "The United States cannot impose our vision," Bush told Mahmoud Abbas in the Oval Office on Monday. The White House is not calling the Annapolis gathering a summit meeting or anything else suggestive of substantive progress. A view held by conservatives in the administration, and probably by Bush, is that the U.S. should not impose terms on Israel, America's closest ally in a troubled region. "They're extremely cautious," Martin S. Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel who worked in the Clinton administration, said of Bush and his aides, and of the inevitable comparisons to Clinton's final push for peace as his term neared an end. "They don't think it's a good idea to drive it to a conclusion." As a result, Bush has given every indication that once the diplomats leave Wednesday, he will again leave any talks to come to Secretary of State Rice and, more important, to the Israelis and Palestinians.
2007-11-27 01:00:00
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