Jordanian Foreign Minister Marwan Muasher said yesterday his government does “not have a problem with the United States,” despite the postponement of today’s scheduled visit of King Abdullah II to the White House.
The Jordanian Embassy in Washington said the king, who returned home yesterday after spending several days in California, needed more time to assess President Bush’s endorsement of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip but preserve settlements in the West Bank.
Mr. Muasher, who kept his appointment with Secretary of State Colin L. Powell yesterday, told reporters that he was “very reassured” after the meeting about “the need not to prejudge final status issues.”
But he added that Israel must return to its borders from before the 1967 Mideast war. He referred specifically to a Saudi Arabian initiative offering peace to Israel in exchange for all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and part of Jerusalem.
“A withdrawal from Gaza should be part of a bigger effort and, indeed, an effort to resume the ’road map’ toward a two-state solution, which should be really the only acceptable outcome of this process,” Mr. Muasher said.
Mr. Bush’s endorsement of Mr. Sharon’s plan sparked furor among Palestinians and across the Arab world, where it was interpreted as acceptance of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
Official U.S. policy has been for decades that settlements are an impediment to peace, although successive administrations have tolerated them.
King Abdullah’s postponed visit was seen as a snub to Mr. Bush. Jordan is regarded as among Washington’s closest allies in the Middle East.
But Mr. Muasher denied reports that the king doubted the Bush administration’s commitment to resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and said the king will meet with Mr. Bush in a couple of weeks.
“We do not have a problem with the United States, and we continue to work with the United States very closely, not only on the issue of the peace process but on other issues as well,” Mr. Muasher said.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told the French newspaper Le Monde in an interview published yesterday that “Today, there is hatred of the Americans like never before in the region.”
Mr. Powell and Javier Solana, the European Union foreign-policy chief who met with the secretary earlier yesterday morning, said the members of the so-called “Quartet” working for peace in the Middle East — the United States, the EU, Russia and the United Nations — will confer in early May, most likely in New York.
Also yesterday, police in Amman, the Jordanian capital, shot to death three suspected terrorists who were thought to have been planning to detonate a bomb that would have flattened a large part of the city, security officials said.
Working on a tip, police stormed a hide-out in eastern Amman, where the suspects were, the police told the official Petra news agency.
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