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Clinton Reports "Some Progress" at Mideast Talks
President Clinton said on Sunday that there had been ``some progress'' in six days of Middle East peace talks between Israeli and Palestinian teams at Camp David but that he did not know if the talks would succeed.
Breaking his silence in a newspaper interview that took even his own aides by surprise, Clinton suggested that the talks to find a final peace agreement were agonizing for all parties.
``I'm more optimistic than I was when they got here,'' he told New York's Daily News, referring to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who faces political turmoil at home, and Palestinian President Yasser Arafat, whose aides said he had been reluctant to attend.
``This is really important. We might make it. I don't know. God, it's hard,'' Clinton said in the interview, conducted on Sunday afternoon. The White House released a section of it to reporters at the summit ahead of publication.
Clinton said the talks were like nothing he had ever dealt with -- not previous Middle East negotiations or the two years it took to get Northern Ireland's pact in April 1998 or even a deal signed by the warring sides in Bosnia at Dayton in 1995.
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