BEIRUT, July 5 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) – Lebanon called Thursday, July 4, U.S. President George W. Bush to make a personal effort to achieve Middle East peace and end the region’s ordeal that could threaten “world stability”.

“We look with great hope to the efforts that you can make personally so that the countries in the Middle East region, including Lebanon, can enjoy a just, comprehensive and lasting peace based on international resolutions,” said Lebanese President Emile Lahoud.

“The United States had a leading role in the adoption and the international consensus for those international resolutions,” he said.

According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), Lahoud said the U.N. land-for-peace resolutions “guarantee the rights of the peoples of the region to live in safety, peace and tranquility, and put an end to an ordeal which, if prolonged, could affect negatively world stability.”

The Lebanese president’s call came in a letter to Bush to congratulate him on the July 4 Independence Day.

The Lebanese government has rejected Bush’s Middle East peace vision, as laid out in a June 24 speech, saying Beirut backed international resolutions and the Arab peace initiative, AFP reported.

Bush told the Palestinians in a strategy speech that they should vote out their veteran leader Yasser Arafat and others “compromised by terrorism” as a condition for U.S. support for the creation of a Palestinian state.

Bush urged Israel to eventually withdraw from occupied Palestinian territories and dismantle Jewish settlements, but put most of the burden for Middle East peace on the Palestinians.

Beirut hosted a summit of Arab leaders in March 2002 that endorsed a Saudi initiative for normal ties with Israel in return for its full withdrawal from Arab lands seized in the 1967 Middle East.

Meanwhile, Syria’s foreign minister said Thursday that U.S. President George W. Bush’s strategy speech on Middle East peace contained “positive points” which needed to be elaborated.

“The Bush speech contains positive points which need to be condensed and reformulated to become a [peace] plan,” Faruq Al-Shara told reporters, in the first positive comment from a Syrian official on the June 24 speech.

But Shara, who was receiving Egypt’s Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher, said Bush’s policy address also contained “many negative points” and that the “road is long and difficult” to peace in the Middle East, AFP said.

Maher told reporters that he was visiting Damascus to inform President Bashar Al-Assad of the position of Egypt.

Syria’s official press last week denounced the speech, saying it was “aimed to guarantee Israeli security” and eliminate “Palestinian resistance”.

“Bush’s vision is contrary to the objective of a just and comprehensive peace in the region because it is based on Israeli security and places the aggressor and victim on the same level,” the government daily newspaper Tishrin said.

It described the speech as “a slap in the face of peace and international legality represented by the United Nations” and its land-for-peace resolutions, AFP reported.

The paper argued that any peace deal should be based on the U.N. resolutions, and the Saudi peace initiative adopted by Arab leaders at their summit in Beirut in March.