WASHINGTON, June 13: US President George W. Bush took a step closer to publicly laying out the next step towards his vision for Middle East peace on Thursday by meeting Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal.

Bush, who has twinned support for Israel’s hard line against Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority with backing for the creation of a Palestinian state, was expected to map the way forward in a public statement as early as next week.

The Saudi official was the latest in a parade of leaders from the region who have come here in the last month in hopes of shaping US policy, including Jordan’s king, Egypt’s president, and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told reporters that Bush “enjoyed” his 20-minute meeting with the prince but emphasized that the president’s consultations on the volatile region were not over.

“The president will be discussing various ideas about Middle East peace with members of his administration and members of the administration will continue their outreach to other nations in a multilateral fashion,” said Fleischer.

Secretary of State Colin Powell was to meet Palestinian international cooperation minister Nabil Shaath, a senior Arafat aide, here this week, a US official said.

The foreign minister had been expected to underscore Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz’s concerns about Bush’s “recent negative stands vis-a-vis the Palestinian Authority and its leader”, a Saudi official said.

“I was very pleased with what I heard from the president,” the visiting minister told reporters after the meeting, revealing that he had delivered a letter to Bush from the crown prince.

After meeting Israeli premier Sharon on Monday, Bush declared that the time was not ripe for a proposed ministerial-level conference on the region in the coming months because “no-one has confidence in the emerging Palestinian government”.

Asked what Bush and his guest discussed, Fleischer replied: “They exchanged a variety of ideas about how to move forward, and the president enjoyed the visit.”

Bush “believes that Saudi Arabia is committed to a meaningful, lasting peace process in the Middle East that includes a providing security for Israel as well as a hopeful and helpful future for the Palestinian people”, he said.

But according to a diplomatic source in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia deems Bush’s latest stands to have “provided strong support for Sharon’s intransigent policy, which does not help restart peace talks along the lines agreed by Riyadh and Washington” during a late-April summit at Bush’s Texas ranch.

In recent days, the administration’s policy has looked adrift, with confusion over whether Bush supports holding the ministerial conference and whether he is considering proposing a “temporary” Palestinian state as an inducement to reforms in the Palestinian Authority (PA).

The White House distanced itself from Powell’s comments in an Arabic-language newspaper that Bush believes that such an entity “may be necessary” to eventually creating a permanent state.

Bush “knows that it may be necessary to have a provisional state, an interim step; it may take several steps to get there”, the London-based al-Hayat daily quoted Powell as saying.

Fleischer dismissed Powell’s comments as merely “reflecting” advice from world leaders on the Middle East, and made clear that the US leader had not signed on to the proposal.—AFP