THE US/MIDDLE EAST: President Bush still intends to deliver a speech outlining a framework for Middle East progress, but has postponed it to await "circumstances when all sides would be most receptive to his message," his spokesman , Mr Ari Fleischer, has told journalists. Patrick Smyth, Washington Correspondent, reports
Administration sources expect the much-awaited speech to be delivered next week.
The delays are allowing what some call fine-tuning but what others say is a dilution of its central thrust to the point where, some fear, it may not be acceptable to Palestinians.
The Bush administration is being pulled in many directions.Although Mr Bush is reported to be prepared to back the establishment of an interim Palestinian state, the State Department is said to be concerned that he give a specific commitment to a time-frame for final settlement talks. The State Department is also urging a public commitment by the US to specific borders, more or less Israel's 1967 borders.
But Mr Bush is also said to face some pressure from hawks in the administration who argue that such concessions "reward" Palestinian terrorism, a view backed by the influential Republican chairman of the House Committee on International Relations, Mr Henry Hyde.
Such concerns reflect long-standing fears that the US will get drawn into the sort of detailed, hands-on engagement which characterised the Clinton approach and which had been roundly criticised by Mr Bush in his presidential campaign.
The Democratic leader of the House, Mr Dick Gephardt, has called for precisely such engagement, including the possibility of US troops on the ground to keep the peace. "Now maybe some would call that 'nation-building'," he says, referring to a Bush taboo. "Well, maybe that's what it is. At the moment the terrorists are running the show today. They go out every day and kill people. There is no governance on the Palestinian side. Yasser Arafat has failed. It doesn't exist.
"It means trying to work with the civil authorities to build a competent police and law enforcement system. It means trying to eventually build governance that is pluralistic ... It is hard work. It is demanding work. It is complicated and frustrating. But there is no alternative," Mr Gephardt said.
Striking a balance between such interventionists and the broader Congressional view that Israel should simply be backed uncritically, means the administration's desperate search for a policy is likely to lead it to a strategy that satisfies no-one or is so bland as to be utterly ineffective in bringing the sides together.