Word: abdullah
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Ambassador Barbara Bodine opposed the FBI's decision to pull out last June, arguing that embassy security measures were sufficient to protect the agents. Bureau officials refused to bend, insisting the ambassador only wanted the agents in country to preserve the fiction that Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh was backing the investigation. In fact, Bodine and FBI on-the-ground supervisor John O'Neill clashed so heatedly whenever O'Neill wanted Bodine to press Saleh for help that Bodine refused to allow O'Neill to return to Yemen after he left the country around December 2000. O'Neill retired from...
...disengagement from an active peace-brokering role. They fear that the deteriorating situation in the West Bank and Gaza imperils their own ability to support American initiatives, no small matter in a year in which the U.S. will need Saudi support for any intervention in Iraq. Crown Prince Abdullah's intervention appears to signal that the price of such support will be renewed efforts to achieve peace between Israel and the Palestinians...
...Like the Europeans and even Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres, the Saudis believe that a ceasefire won't take hold in the absence of a clearly visible peaceful path to Palestinian statehood. Instead of waiting for the Bush administration to restart political negotiations, Crown Prince Abdullah has stepped into the vacuum by restating the simple proposition that there'll be no long-term peace while Israeli soldiers and settlers continue to occupy the bulk of the Palestinian territory captured...
...Nobody's expecting Ariel Sharon to sign on to the plan. A champion of Israeli settlement outside the 1967 borders who fiercely rejected the Oslo agreements from the very outset, there's little for Sharon to like in Abdullah's proposal. But by pitching it directly to the Israeli people, he managed to generate significant domestic pressure on Sharon to take it seriously. (And it's worth remembering that the peace plan being touted by Peres is based on the same principle as Abdullah...
...week's end, of course, automatic rifles were speaking more forcefully than diplomats, and skeptics rushed to interpret the fierce battles in two West Bank refugee camps on Thursday as having eclipsed the ray of hope sent by Abdullah's proposal. Supporters, however, will see the latest escalation of violence in the territories occupied by Israel since 1967 as underscoring the prince's basic argument. Israelis and Palestinians may be fighting more fiercely than ever, but to the extent that they're talking about a long-term peace, the discussion has been dominated this week by Prince Abdullah's proposal...