After a showy celebration of America’s close ties with Israel, President George W. Bush presented Arab leaders with a lengthy to-do list Sunday, telling them that if Middle East peace was to become a reality, they must expand their economies, offer equal opportunity to women and embracedemocracy.
"Too often in the Middle East, politics has consisted of one leader in power and the opposition in jail," Bush said in an address to the World Economic Forum here, adding, "The time has come for nations across the Middle East to abandon these practices and treat their people with the dignity and respect theydeserve."
The speech, to an audience of diplomats, world leaders, policy makers and business executives attending the forum in this Red Sea resort town, wrapped up a five-day Middle East tour that also took Bush to Israel and Saudi Arabia. It was meant as a bookend to an address he delivered last week to the Knesset, the IsraeliParliament.
The White House billed the Middle East trip as a mix of symbolism and substance and said Bush would use his time in the region to shore up the faltering Arab-Israeli peacetalks.
But his three-day stay in Jerusalem, including tours of Masada, the ancient fortress overlooking the Dead Sea; a private viewing of the Dead Sea scrolls; and a host of laudatory exchanges with Israeli leaders, drew sharp criticism in the Arab world, where he was accused of being insensitive to Palestinianconcerns.
In Sharm el-Sheikh, Bush tried to soften that impression. He held a series of back-to-back meetings with regional leaders – including those from Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Emerging from a session with the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, on Saturday afternoon, Bush said he had told Abbas that he was "absolutely committed" to a Palestinianstate.
"It breaks my heart to see the vast potential of the Palestinian people really wasted," Bush said with Abbas at his side. "They’re good, smart, capable people that when given a chance will build a thrivinghomeland."
But Bush’s speech Sunday chided as much asreassured.
"In our democracy, we would never punish a person for owning a Koran," Bush said, at one point, taking aim at those who, he asserted, claim democracy and Islam are incompatible. "And we would never issue a death sentence to someone for converting to Islam. Democracy does not threaten Islam or any other religion. Democracy is the only system of government that guarantees theirprotection."
At another point, he warned that Middle Eastern economies would not thrive unless opportunities were offered to women. "This is a matter of morality and basic math," hesaid.
And after unsuccessfully trying to persuade Saudi Arabia to increase oil production enough to cause a drop in gasoline prices in the United States, Bush had a message for oil-producing nations that as America and other countries looked to alternative forms of energy, the market for Middle East oil would diminish, forcing countries here to diversify theireconomies.
The speech stood in stark contrast to the one Bush delivered to Israeli lawmakers, although he tried to link the two. In the first speech, timed to coincide with the 60th birthday of Israel, Bush outlined his vision for the Middle East on Israel’s 120th birthday. He used some of the same language Sunday, repeating some passages word for word and telling his audience that his vision "is not a Jewish vision or a Muslim vision, not an American vision or an Arab vision – it is a universalvision."
The trip was Bush’s second to the region in five months, and his national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said that one reason for the speech was "to give some hope" that progress toward peace was possible. Many analysts said that the most Bush could hope for was to hand off a working peace process to his successor, and that they were skeptical about his pronouncements that the contours of a Palestinian state could be defined before he leftoffice.
But Hadley insisted progress, though quiet, was occurring, and hinted that Bush might return to the region before his term is over. "The president will come back here," Hadley said, "when there is work for him todo."