LONDON - Israel and the Palestinians can pick any agenda they want for a preliminary peacemaking summit with the United States, but it is too early to tackle the toughest issues, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Thursday.
"We're not yet at the point where I think we can determine what we would do about formal negotiations, when and if" they can occur, Rice said at the close of a week's trip to the Middle East and Europe. "It's really a time to try to get the parties into more of a confidence-building phase and we'll see what comes after that."
Rice said her three-way meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas probably would take place in the Middle East in the first half of February.
Speaking to reporters traveling with her, Rice said that session will follow a gathering in Washington of the international sponsors of a dormant, step-by-step peace plan called the "road map" that was to have led to Palestinian statehood by 2005.
She acknowledged that the 2003 plan's requirements had become something of an obstacle in restarting talks between the two sides, but she said it remains the guideline.
"Everybody understands the obligations in it, but we'd gotten to a place that it was stalled," Rice said, "because if they weren't making progress on the first phase of the road map, then you couldn't talk about the end of the road map and what might lead to the establishment of a Palestinian state."
Rice said her talks with both leaders last weekend "broke through that." Olmert and Abbas agreed to the three-way meeting, a symbolic advancement both of their relationship and the involvement of traditional peace broker Washington.
Olmert and Abbas are both politically compromised: Olmert by last summer's disappointing war in Lebanon and allegations of political corruption in his ranks; Abbas by his yearlong internal power struggle with Hamas radicals.
Rice hopes the meeting will be part of a wider effort to support Abbas in that fight.
Both Abbas and Olmert inherited the 2003 plan agreed to by others. U.S. officials say it may be time to fine-tune some requirements in the plan, and that an agreement between Abbas and Olmert about how to do that could be a first step toward larger accords.
"It really should be up to them to put anything on the agenda that they'd like," Rice said, but she made clear that she hopes to discuss more than the outlines or borders of an eventual Palestinian state.
"There's always been a lot of concern about what the borders of the state would be, but there wasn't much attention given to its internal composition -- its democratic processes, its institutions," Rice said. She added that Abbas is interested in those subjects.
Assessing he prospects for progress on the Palestinian questions, the chief U.S. diplomat met in Berlin and London with European leaders who are keenly interested in an issue with wide public appeal.
In between, Rice tried to sell skeptical Arab governments on the rationale for President Bush's strategy in Iraq.
Some Arabs saw the tasks as related.
"Every time the Americans are in trouble in Iraq, they remember that Arabs have a cause named Palestine," Saudi columnist Dawoud al-Shriyan wrote in the Saudi-owned Al-Hayat newspaper. "Therefore, they float some statements to create the impression that they continue their efforts in the peace process."
Rice briefed Arab leaders and diplomats about the Bush plan at stops in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, arguing in part that Western-leaning or secular Arab states have much to lose if Iraq fails. A large part of that appeal involves the growing fears among Sunni Arab states that Shiite Iran is already gaining influence in Iraq and beyond.
In Kuwait, Rice sat down with foreign ministers from eight Arab states, including the three U.S.-allied heavyweights Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The grouping encouraged by the United States excludes Iran and fellow U.S. outcast Syria, but Rice has avoided comment on the perception that she is forging an anti-Iranian alliance.
Rice's second in command planned another round of diplomatic calls in the region next week.
Some Arab media depicted Rice's visit as a failure. "The whole jet-setting trip turned out to be yet another stage-managed, futile diplomatic exercise. ... In effect, Rice returns to Washington empty-handed with a lot of false promises rather than optimism," the Doha, Qatar-based Peninsula newspaper wrote in editorial.
Jordanian analyst Labib Kamhawi said that besides their doubts over the plan itself, Arab leaders had a difficult time throwing support behind it "when there has been a total failure in Iraq and the Palestinian territories with no attempt to soften the anger that is seething in the Arab and Muslim countries."
