U.S. President George W. Bush is planning on visiting the Middle East next month in an effort to advance peace negotiations in the region, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in an interview published Wednesday. Though the details of the trip are not yet confirmed, Bush is planning to visit the region to check on progress for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians—a process that was started at the one-day peace conference last month in Annapolis, Maryland. “He [Bush] very much wants to signal support for the bilateral process between the parties [the Israelis and the Palestinians] and to continue in a hands-on way to encourage them to move forward…And not in a way that says all right I'm going to go ahead and fix this for you, but just talking to the parties…he'll be able to get a strong sense of where the points of convergence are that maybe they won't see, and where the points are divergence are as well,” Rice said. Though Rice did not disclose the countries Bush plans to visit, she said that he would visit the broader region “because holding together Arab support for the Palestinian-Israeli track is just really critical.”
