US:A day after Israeli and Palestinian leaders agreed to start comprehensive peace talks, President George Bush inaugurated the negotiations at a series of meetings in the White House, writes Denis Stauntonin Washington.
Mr Bush met separately with Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas before all three met together in the Oval Office.
Flanked by the two leaders in the Rose Garden, the US president hailed Tuesday's agreement in Annapolis to start continuous negotiations as a hopeful beginning.
"One thing I have assured both gentlemen is that the United States will be actively engaged in the process. We will use our power to help you as you come up with the necessary decisions to lay out a Palestinian state that will live side by side in peace with Israel," Mr Bush said.
The president has made clear that he will not become personally involved in the negotiations, insisting that it is for the Israelis and Palestinians themselves to work out a deal.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said yesterday, however, that Mr Bush would be willing to intervene to help break a logjam in the talks, and that secretary of state Condoleezza Rice would continue to play an active role in encouraging the negotiations.
"So we will be there to be able to help them. We are not going to make decisions for them, they're going to have to make them together. But I think that up to now, with these two leaders, and at this point in time, we've been able to show that we can help them come to an agreement.
"And now they'll have to launch their negotiations. And both of the leaders have said they'd like to finish this agreement before the end of the president's term, which we all know is about a little more than a year from now," Ms Perino said.
Dr Rice was last night expected to name retired marine general Jim Jones as a special envoy to deal with Palestinian security issues. A former Nato supreme allied commander in Europe, Gen Jones would play a key role in helping to develop Palestinian security forces.
Over the next few weeks, the US hopes that Israelis and Palestinians will move towards implementing the first phase of the 2003 "road map" for peace agreed under the auspices of an international quartet of the US, the EU, the UN and Russia.
This demands that Israel must freeze all illegal settlements in the West Bank and that the Palestinians must dismantle terrorist infrastructure.
Under the plan outlined on Tuesday, the US will monitor the implementation of the road map and determine if the two sides are keeping their promises.
Israeli and Palestinian negotiators agreed a joint statement on the talks only eight minutes before Mr Bush addressed the Annapolis conference on Tuesday but Dr Rice yesterday expressed delight that they had agreed a text at all.
"It's going to be hard, but you had support in that room that you had not had from Arab states in the past," she said.
Ms Perino said that the president told the leaders that Dr Rice, who has declared that a negotiated settlement is "in the US national interest", speaks for him in the region.
"There's no daylight between President Bush and Secretary Rice on this matter," Ms Perino said.
Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov has proposed a follow-up conference in Moscow in the spring of 2008. Arab League secretary Gen Amr Moussa supported this idea, and said that negotiations should be expanded to include Syria and Lebanon as well.
The Saudi foreign minister also urged that negotiations begin on the Syrian and Lebanese tracks. He added that much is riding on the success of the Annapolis initiative.