WASHINGTON (AFP) — President George W. Bush leaves Tuesday for a Middle East trip already laced with history and now tinged by new tensions with Iran following a naval dust-up in the Gulf's strategic waters.
A fresh drive for regional peace informs Bush's first presidential visit to Israel and the Palestinian West Bank, as he seeks a foreign-policy triumph in his last year in office.
But Bush will also stress to Arab allies such as Saudi Arabia, which he is also visiting for the first time, that the United States will not abandon them to what he calls the Iranian nuclear "threat."
The US portrayal of Iran as regional provocateur was reinforced by news that over the weekend, according to the Pentagon, Iranian speedboats swarmed around three US navy ships in the Strait of Hormuz, radioing a threat to blow them up.
Iran's government played down the incident as an "ordinary occurrence" in the strait, a crucial choke point for world energy supplies with about 20-25 percent of the world's crude oil supplies passing through from Gulf states.
But a White House spokesman on Monday sternly warned Iran against "provocative actions that could lead to a dangerous incident in the future."
Bush was scheduled to spend Wednesday to Friday in talks with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, before heading on to Kuwait, where he was expected to meet the US military and diplomatic chiefs in Iraq.
His tour will also take in Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia before ending in Egypt on January 16.
"I am there to reassure and to look people in the eye and say, I believe Iran is a threat; we have a strategy to deal with it; and we want to work with you," Bush told the Arabic television station al-Arabiya.
"I believe we can solve this diplomatically," he said. "On the other hand ... all options must be on the table in order to make sure diplomacy is effective."
Bush's focus on Iran has been undimmed by a National Intelligence Estimate last month that said Iran halted a nuclear weapons program in 2003, and that US allegations about its atomic goals had been overblown for at least two years.
Interviewed by the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot, Bush said "the NIE in no way lessens that (Iranian) threat, but in fact clarifies the threat."
Security surrounding Bush will be as smothering as ever as he heads to a region where the war in Iraq has sustained violent anti-US sentiment.
In a message posted online on Sunday, an American member of Al-Qaeda urged Islamic militants to welcome Bush "not with flowers and applause, but with bombs and car bombs."
Dismissing the threat from Al-Qaeda operative Adam Gadahn, a US convert to Islam, the White House said the radical Islamist group offers "nothing but death and violence."
Bush is aiming to build on the momentum of a Middle East peace conference held in the US city of Annapolis in November, when Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert agreed to strive for a comprehensive agreement by the end of 2008.
The Palestinians on Monday called on Bush to press Israel to freeze settlement activity when he visits the region, while violence simmered ahead of the trip with Israeli troops killing three armed Palestinians.
Israeli settlements on Arab land captured in the 1967 Six Day War -- all considered illegal by the international community -- are one of the most contentious issues of the decades-old Middle East conflict.
Abbas has repeatedly said that negotiations cannot succeed unless Israel halts settlement activity, and Bush described them as a "problem" in another interview given ahead of his trip.
But the president's confidence that peace is at hand is undiminished. "Now I think we've got the stars lined up," he told al-Arabiya.
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