Blair backs Sharon's unilateral plan

US President George W. Bush, center, receives a congratulatory kiss from British Prime Minister Tony Blair's wife, Cherie Blair, as Tony Blair, right, looks on at the White House in Washington on Friday. PHOTO: EPA

US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair called on Palestinians and their supporters on Friday to use Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's West Bank plan as an opportunity for creating a Palestinian state.

Sharon's proposal to withdraw Jewish settlements from Gaza while retaining some settlements on the West Bank has drawn outrage from Palestinians who see the West Bank as their land. The Arab world is opposed to it and many in Europe are skeptical.

Blair disagreed with those who feel the plan is a departure from the US-backed "road map" envisioning a Palestinian state by 2005.

Blair said if Israel followed through on its proposal, "The concept of a viable Palestinian state becomes a real possibility; not something that's put in a document and talked about or discussed in resolutions or speeches, but actually is a real, live possibility."

He called on the international "Quartet" sponsoring the "road map" -- the US, the EU, Russia and the UN -- to discuss how it could support the Palestinian Authority economically and politically. A meeting is scheduled for April 28 in Berlin.

In a major US policy shift, Bush endorsed the Sharon plan on Wednesday. Blair told a Rose Garden news conference with Bush on Friday that "we welcome the Israeli proposal to disengage from Gaza and parts of the West Bank."

The Palestinians, like London and Washington, had long viewed the settlements as an obstacle to peace, backed by a line of UN Security Council resolutions calling on Israel to abandon them. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has said he feared the plan could escalate violence.

Meeting against a backdrop of renewed violence in Iraq nearly a year after major combat operations were declared over by Bush, the two strong war allies reaffirmed their vow to stand together in Iraq and stick to a June 30 deadline for handing power to an interim government.

"We stand firm. We will do what it takes to win this struggle. We will not yield. We will not back down in the face of attacks, either on us or on defenseless civilians," Blair said.

Like Bush, Blair said that he had not given up hope of finding the weapons of mass destruction cited in a bid to justify last year's invasion of Iraq.

"I think we will know better if something went wrong, and what it was if it went wrong, once the Iraq survey group complete their inquiries," Blair told NBC news.

"I still find it very hard to believe that he voluntarily destroyed those weapons in circumstances where for years he'd hidden them from UN inspectors, he deceived us, he lied about it. And he'd actually had plans to develop and create more of those weapons," he said.

Bush and Blair have been staunch allies in the Iraq war, joining forces last year to try to persuade the world that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which have not been found, and now struggling to bring stability to the country after weeks of renewed bloodshed.

Both men have suffered politically because of the problems in Iraq. A new poll by the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey said 57 percent of Americans agreed with Bush that US troops should be kept in Iraq until a stable government is established, but 58 percent did not think he had a clear plan for success.