WASHINGTON (Islamweb & News Agencies) - Arab ministers said they doubted the wisdom of President Bush's reluctance to meet Palestinian President Yasser Arafat while the two leaders are in New York over the weekend.``Any sober and rational calculation would reveal that this (a meeting) would not only be helpful to the Palestinians and Israelis. This would definitely be helpful in the total global quest for a more secure and more just world,'' Palestinian Planning Minister Nabil Shaath said on Friday.
Secretary of State Colin Powell said later on Friday that Bush and Arafat would ultimately meet, even if it wasn't over the weekend. ``I think in due course, when the time is right, Mr. Arafat will have a chance to meet with the president,'' he told Fox News.
Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, in an interview published in Friday's New York Times, said Bush's failure to commit his personal prestige to seeking a peace settlement ``makes a sane man go mad.''
Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said on Thursday that Arafat had not done enough to distance himself from groups which Washington calls terrorist, and that there were no plans for Bush and Arafat to meet.
Asked to respond to Rice's remarks, Shaath told the Brookings Institution in Washington that the American and Israeli approach was misguided.
``I think that again shows the folly of the preconditional sequential approach as opposed to the parallel and reciprocal approach,'' he said.
The United States and Israel say that Arafat has to take the first steps toward restoring peace talks by cracking down on Palestinians who attack Israel.