Wednesday November 4, 2009

Clinton in Egypt as Middle East talks drive flags

By Andrew Quinn

CAIRO, Nov 3 (Reuters) - U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton brought her flagging effort to revive Middle East peace talks to Cairo on Tuesday with little sign that her round of diplomacy has helped break the impasse.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is pictured in Moscow, in this October 13, 2009 file photo. Clinton brought her flagging effort to revive Middle East peace talks to Cairo on Tuesday with little sign that her round of diplomacy has helped break the impasse. (REUTERS/Ivan Sekretarev/Pool/Fles)

After four days of talks with Israeli, Palestinian and Arab leaders, a senior U.S. official said Washington was assessing whether its drive to persuade Israel and the Palestinians to resume negotiations had any chance of success and might consider alternatives if the answer was no.

Clinton arrived in Cairo on the last leg of a Middle East tour during which Arab anger flared over signs the Obama administration no longer backed Palestinian demands that Israel immediately stop building settlements on occupied territory in the West Bank.

Clinton has tried to allay those fears. However, a trip intended to give new momentum to the peace effort has instead caused many analysts to ask whether it had dealt it a setback.

With no sign of movement on the important issues, State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley was asked if the United States might consider setting out its own take-it-or-leave-it framework for a peace deal.

"There has been some progress but clearly at this point not enough," Crowley told reporters on Clinton's plane from Morocco, where she had been attending a development forum and had a series of meetings with Middle East leaders.

"Based on these discussions, we'll say 'is there potential in this current structure or do we need to look at alternatives?' They are available," he said.

RESTRAINT CALL

U.S. President Barack Obama has eased pressure on Israel over settlements, calling for restraint in construction where he had earlier pushed for a freeze. The change has angered Palestinians who say it has killed any hope of reviving peace talks soon.

Clinton underscored this shift in emphasis in Jerusalem on Saturday when she hailed Netanyahu's offer on settlement restraint as "unprecedented" and urged the Palestinians to drop their precondition for talks without making any similar specific demands of the Israeli side.

Clinton's visit to Egypt followed a two-day stop in Morocco where she urged Arab foreign ministers to put aside recriminations and support moves to resume the talks, suspended since December.

She held a 15-minute meeting with Libyan Foreign Minister Moussa Koussa, her first talks with him since she took office in January. The two discussed bilateral relations and events in Sudan's Darfur region.

Crowley said Clinton did not bring up the case of Lockerbie bomber Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, whose release from a Scottish prison in August and subsequent triumphant return to Libya provoked an angry reaction in the United States.

U.S. envoy George Mitchell also arrived in Cairo on Tuesday and was to brief Clinton on his latest round of talks in Israel and Jordan, which included a meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the Jordanian capital Amman, Crowley said.

She was due to meet Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit and intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, who has been monitoring Palestinian efforts to overcome their internal political divisions.

(Editing by Andrew Dobbie)

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