CRAWFORD, Texas'After nearly five hours of talks Thursday, President Bush and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah agreed that they both seek Mideast peace based on side-by-side Israeli and Palestinian states, but they appeared to have made little progress in determining how to achieve it.
Bush told reporters that he and Abdullah forged a \strong personal bond"" and discussed how to implement the crown prince's peace plan for the Middle East, which calls for all Arab states to normalize relations with Israel once the Jewish state withdraws from land it captured in the 1967 war.
""This meeting was very warm; this meeting was quite personal, and there were no threats expressed,"" a senior White House official said.
But while the Saudis agreed there had been no threats, they said Abdullah had pulled no punches in a stark warning to Bush that the region is rapidly spinning out of control and that U.S. interests in the Arab world are in grave danger.
The meeting at Bush's ranch, which went two hours over schedule, amounted to a basic restatement of their divergent views on the most important first steps toward a long-term resolution of the Mideast conflict.
Abdullah's main mission, said Adel al-Jubeir, the crown prince's senior foreign policy adviser, was to ""make sure that President Bush is aware"" of the level of anger in the Middle East and Arab world over what it sees as U.S. unwillingness or inability to control Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
""What we can do is to point out how dangerous it is if this issue is left unattended'if Sharon is left to his own devices, he will drag the region over a cliff,"" said al Jubeir, who emerged to comment halfway through the meeting. ""That does not serve American interests, it does not serve Saudi interests, it does not serve the region's interests.""
In more definitive wording than he has used in recent weeks, Bush told reporters late Thursday afternoon he had assured Abdullah that he was pushing Israel to complete its withdrawal from the West Bank, and to quickly resolve the month-long standoffs at Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah and at the Church of Nativity in Bethlehem without violence.
Bush said he had also emphasized that ""the Palestinian Authority must do more to stop terror,"" and that Arab states must condemn it and accept Israel ""as a nation and a neighbor.\
