It may seem innocent enough to US President George W. Bush, the notion of training 100,000 teachers across the Middle East to improve the quality of education and perhaps also cut down on possible extremism.
Yet Arabs and Europeans at the Group of Eight summit here are bristling over this and other aspects of Bush's proposed Middle East democracy initiative. They consider it a heavy-handed effort to foist American ideas on the region.
Both Arab and European leaders say Bush must deal first with what many consider the Middle East's most pressing problem, the ongoing violence between Israelis and Palestinians. King Abdullah II of Jordan, for one, came here focused on the plight of Palestinians "because no reform could be achieved away from finding a solution to this issue," said Jordan's official news agency, Petra.
Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi cast the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as "a problem that infects the entire Middle East and which brings an increase, let us say, in hatred."
The sentiment was much the same from Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
"As long as we don't solve these problems, as long as we don't achieve these, it won't be easy to implement the project," Erdogan said of the Palestinian-Israeli crisis, as he boarded a flight to the summit.
In deference to such concerns, American officials said the document presented to G-8 summit partners will include a paragraph that talks about the need to achieve peace on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On top of everything else, the Europeans and Japanese want to know how much such proposed reforms might cost. A senior Bush administration official, who spoke anonymously on Tuesday because talks on the subject were still ongoing, said Bush hopes to reach a political agreement with his G8 counterparts this year without committing money, under the logic that they will ante up for it in later years.
Bush did extract a general pledge of support from Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi on Tuesday. According to a second US official who briefed reporters about the meeting, Bush told the Japanese prime minister that his proposal gives leading economies a chance to encourage change from within Middle Eastern nations.
But their conversation was brief, the official said, and Bush planned to discuss the proposal with other leaders the next few days.
Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, put it frankly this week: Repression, lack of hope -- and lack of education and jobs -- create conditions where growing numbers of young Arab men turn toward extremism.
The working draft of Bush's plan advocates reforms such as free elections, independent media and improved legal systems. It also suggests creating, by 2008, a "literacy corps" of 100,000 female teachers who would focus on reading and other basic skills for women.
It was unclear whether the teacher plan would survive in the final G8 agreement because of leaders' objections about cost.
Bush's instincts are in the right place, said Brookings Institution academic Susan Rice, who is researching the implications of poverty and inequality.
"It's less politically charged than going in and telling Arab governments how to democratize on our schedule," Rice said. "But it's a little awkward for the administration to throw this out there without a price tag, and without them making a specific commitment to what the US share of this is going to be."
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