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US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was to meet with her Middle Eastern counterparts as she seeks to rally support for President George W. Bush's last-ditch strategy to quell violence in Iraq.
After focusing on reviving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the first part of her regional tour that began at the weekend, Rice turns her attention to Iraq and the Gulf region in meetings in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
Rice met with Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah late on Monday and was set to hold a joint news conference with her Saudi counterpart Prince Saud al-Faisal on Tuesday before heading on to Kuwait.
In addition to meeting with Kuwaiti leaders, she also is due to confer with other foreign ministers of the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member states plus Egypt and Jordan in a bid to rally support for Bush's “surge” strategy to tackle violence in Iraq with the deployment of an additional 21,500 troops.
The GCC groups Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The plan revealed last week has come under fire in many Arab capitals, even among staunch allies in the Gulf, with critics saying it provides a recipe for more sectarian violence in Iraq that could spread elsewhere in the region.
But Rice on Monday picked up support from Egypt after meeting with President Hosni Mubarak in the southern Egyptian city of Luxor.
“We are supportive of the plan … We are hopeful that plan will lead to the stabilisation of, unity and cohesion of the Iraqi government,” said Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit.
While Rice began her trip stressing that she had no “plan” for reviving the moribund Middle East peace process, she announced a three-way summit with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.
The summit, expected to take place in three or four weeks, will be the first meeting between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in two years.
Stressing the meeting would only be a prelude to the resumption of final settlement negotiations, Rice said “there are a number of issues, some old, some new, that will have to be resolved if there is to be a Palestinian state.
“I am very clear about one thing we do not want to do, which is to rush the formal negotiations before things are fully prepared, before people are fully prepared,” she said.
Olmert welcomed the summit but stressed that any Palestinian government involved in peace talks should recognise Israel's right to exist.
In the West Bank town of Ramallah on Sunday, Abbas said he rejects “any temporary or transitional solutions, including a state with temporary borders, because we do not believe it to be a realistic choice that can be built upon.”
Abul Gheit said the Palestinian political crisis needed to be contained and contacts resumed between Israel and the Palestinians, in what he described as “a stabilisation phase”.
“Then you will start the second phase whereby everything is discussed in relation to the establishment of this Palestinian state,” he added.
In Rice's lightning visit to Jordan late Sunday, King Abdullah II told Washington's top diplomat that concrete progress needed to be made on the peace blueprint if the region was to be spared fresh bloodshed.
“Without tangible, specific steps to activate the implementation of the roadmap in the near future, the cycle of violence will widen,” he warned.
But Rice's diplomatic offensive suffered a blow earlier Monday when Israel invited bids for new Jewish settlement homes in the West Bank even as she was exploring solutions for the region in a meeting with Olmert in Israel.
