[White House]

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow clarified on Tuesday President Bush’s shout for an universal meeting on the Middle East: “I think a lot of humans are inclined to try to treat that as a big peace conference. It’s not. that 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 folks 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 additionally to sustain peace and protection within the area, and to be able to fulfill the Quartet conditions, which are renouncing violence, recognizing Israel, and abiding by worldly treaties. I mean, all those things are still capabilities that they have to work on developing. So you do first things first.”
“The concept 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.”

Original post by Aaron Freeman