Wallace: Bush prepares for Sharon meeting

CNN's Kelly Wallace

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush is scheduled to meet Tuesday with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, to discuss the situation in the Middle East, and try to pave the way for an international conference aimed at restarting the peace process.

White House Correspondent Kelly Wallace told CNN's Miles O'Brien what was on the president's agenda.

CNN: President Bush has a lot of important meetings in store. Tell us what's going on.

WALLACE: President Bush has a lot of challenges for his planned Tuesday meeting in the Oval Office with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, because Mr. Bush is facing pressure from European leaders and Arab leaders to try and get to political discussions between the Israelis and the Palestinians as quickly as possible.

Mr. Sharon is expected to be bringing his own long-term peace proposal to Washington. The president is also expected to really put pressure on Mr. Sharon to end the standoff outside the Church of the Nativity and withdraw all Israeli forces from the Palestinian territories they recently reoccupied.

Complicating that, though, as we've been saying, House and Senate lawmakers voting just days ago in these overwhelming nonbinding resolutions, fully backing what Israel is doing in the West Bank.

CNN: Tell us about this planned Middle East peace conference. It's a much larger type of meeting than we've seen in the past where breakthroughs have occurred in the region.

I'm curious, what's at work here? Is the administration trying to remove itself somewhat from the stage here and try to get further participation from other parties? Is that what's going on?

WALLACE: Well, I think two things are going on. Number one, the White House definitely was facing some pressure from European leaders and Arab leaders who definitely wanted to see an international conference very, very soon. Secretary Powell's announcement really did come as a bit of a surprise, because the message we were getting really publicly and even privately from U.S. officials was that this was really still an idea, that it really had not been solidified just yet.

So again, there was some pressure from Europeans and Arab leaders, but also just as you said, an opportunity to bring the European leaders, the Arab leaders, the Israelis, the Palestinians, all together.

U.S. officials are really downplaying expectations, saying, "Don't expect a major peace agreement to come out of this." They are saying it's going to be at the ministerial level, meaning foreign ministers, meaning President Bush won't be there, likely Mr. Sharon and Yasser Arafat won't be there as well.

So they're downplaying expectations, but it does appear a way to try and get Arab leaders, European leaders, the parties themselves all together to really pave the way for security and political discussion soon.

CNN: Won't it be difficult for such a large group to accomplish anything?

There are lots of discussions going on right now about who should be there, and a very good point, how many people should be there. As you know, the more people you get in a room, the more difficult it is to get a decision to be made, what the format should be, when it should take place.

And really this conference, U.S. officials say, won't happen until they're confident that there could be some progress achieved, because if something happened and there was no success, simply failure, everyone here believes that would really be dismal for the Middle East peace process.