TEHRAN - U.S. President George W. Bush in a long-awaited speech on Monday announced his blueprint for Middle East peace.

Bush called on the Palestinians to oust their leader Yasser Arafat as a condition for reaching an interim peace deal with Israel.

He said that the United States would not support the creation of a Palestinian state until a new leadership "not compromised by terror" is elected! It is very surprising that while the Zionist regime is committing the worst atrocities and crimes against defenseless Palestinian people, the U.S. president is describing the Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation as terrorism! Israel recently prevented a UN fact-finding team from travelling to Jenin for fear that its massacre of refugees there might be exposed to the world.

Indeed, the Intifada of Palestinians is not only a reaction to the occupation of their homeland by Zionist aggressors but also a result of the blind U.S. support for the Zionist entity, such as using its veto power in the UN Security Council in favor of Tel Aviv. Consequently, all the UN resolutions issued in support of Palestinians have been ignored by Israel and remained in limbo for over half a century.

The U.S. president's demand for the ouster of Arafat drew objections from Palestinians as well as European leaders like Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindh, who slammed Bush's plan for the Middle East, saying that the call for the ouster of Arafat was unacceptable.

Even the U.S. president's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, while supporting the generalities of Bush's plan, said, "It is for the Palestinian people to choose their own leader." Bush also called for creating a "provisional" Palestinian state with "temporary" borders only after Palestinians have enacted the political and security reforms demanded by Washington! This so-called independent Palestinian state envisioned by Bush has no specific borders, and it might take years for the two sides to determine where its borders are supposed to be! Above all, the U.S. president took no definite position on the status of Bait-ul-Moqaddas or the issue of the return of Palestinian refugees to their homeland. Therefore, it seems that the new U.S. strategy for Middle East peace is just a new version of the Israeli plan to dissolve the Palestinian leadership and bring about total submission of the Palestinian people!