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U.S. Drops "Peace Process" From Mideast Lexicon
WASHINGTON, Feb 7 (News Agencies) - After nearly a decade of referring to efforts to end hostilities between Israel and its Arab neighbors as a "peace process," the United States has dropped the term from its lexicon, State Department officials said Tuesday.
Secretary of State Colin Powell has instructed U.S. diplomats to abandon the phrase, which had grown to encompass the whole range of Middle East peacemaking from attempts to forge deals between Israel and Jordan, to those between Israel and Syria and Israel and the Palestinians, the officials said.
Instead, Washington's diplomats are to refer to their efforts as Middle East "peace negotiations" or "movements toward peace," said the officials who have read written instructions from Powell to make the change.
The officials insisted that the shift did not reflect any change in U.S. policy but rather a recognition of "the facts on the ground" - notably that with the exception of Jordan, with which Israel signed a deal in 1994, the Palestinian and Syrian peace tracks are now in tatters.
"It's only appropriate to talk about a 'peace process' when you have a process under way," said one senior department official. "At this moment ... it's time to focus on peace and look at how in the coming months we are going to have peace."
"We're trying to capture a better flavor of where we are now because for all intents and purposes there is not a process right now," a second department official said.
"The parties aren't talking, there is not any active mediation."
Powell himself has not talked about the change but alluded directly to it at a news conference on Tuesday with visiting British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook.
"We are not going to be standoffish, but at the same time we want to make sure that the search for peace, the quest for peace, is seen in a broad regional context so that quest doesn't stand alone in and of itself," he said.
The previous U.S. administration of president Bill Clinton had clung to the phrase even through the most dire breakdowns in talks, including the collapse of last year's Camp David summit in July and the beginning of a new Palestinian uprising just over a month later.
But with peace-inclined Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak losing to hawkish opposition leader Ariel Sharon in Tuesday's election and the clashes continuing, Powell and others in President George W. Bush's new administration believed it was time for a change, the officials said.
"Maybe we were being disingenuous about talking about a process," said the second official. "That's not what we're trying to achieve.
"We're not trying to achieve summits, we're trying to achieve peace," the official said, adding that the change in vocabulary better reflected the goals the new administration.
While maintaining that Washington will remain engaged in the Middle East, the Bush administration has indicated it will be keeping a distance, at least at the highest levels, from the Israeli-Palestinian situation.
Administration officials have also said there will be much less presidential involvement in peacemaking attempts than in Clinton's tenure.
Powell has decided that day-to-day developments in the region should be followed by ambassadors and not by a special envoy - a post he has eliminated.
Clinton's special Middle East envoy, Dennis Ross, had been a champion of the "peace process" concept.
Despite his directive, Powell himself has slipped and used the phrase "peace process" at least once.
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