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Bush Officials Pronounce Clinton Mideast Plan Dead
The Bush administration formally abandoned the Middle East peace proposals of President Clinton Feb.8, saying they belonged to the former president and did not apply now that Ariel Sharon has been elected prime minister of Israel.
Making a clear break with Mr. Clinton's hands-on approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Condoleezza Rice, President Bush's national security adviser, said that more responsibility for future negotiations should be left to the Israelis and Palestinians themselves, and that the United States would be careful before intervening as a mediator.
"We shouldn't think of American involvement for the sake of American involvement," Ms. Rice said in an interview today in her West Wing corner office at the White House. Rather, she said, Mr. Bush would consider "when does American involvement make sense, when can the American president or secretary of state advance the ball."
Washington, she said, should "not consider it a slap at the United States or a disengaged American policy if the parties can progress on their own."
After Mr. Sharon's election, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell suggested that the administration would be looking at the conflict in the context of its full impact in the region, and not just focus on it as an isolated issue between the Israelis and Palestinians.
But when Palestinian officials said on Wednesday that they wanted to pick up the Clinton talks where they had left off, the Bush administration found that it had to be more specific and pronounce the Clinton proposals, which Mr. Sharon opposed, as dead.
At the daily briefing at the State Department Feb.8, the spokesman, Richard Boucher, officially did that.
He quoted General Powell as saying the "parameters" that Mr. Clinton had outlined to the Palestinians and Israelis on Dec. 21 "were no longer United States proposals" after he left office.
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