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Obama rips down Bush security, foreign policies

Picks seasoned, high-powered envoys to ME, Afghanistan and Pakistan

AFP, Washington
US President Barack Obama on Thursday picked two seasoned and high-powered envoys to the Middle East and Afghanistan and Pakistan, making another swift break with Bush administration policy.
In an aggressive push for peace in the world's most intractable hot spots, Obama named Northern Ireland peacemaker George Mitchell for the Middle East and Balkans mediator Richard Holbrooke for both Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Flanked by the two envoys and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Obama told diplomats at the State Department that he was summoning the pair to "convey our seriousness of purpose" in light of "the urgency and complexity of the challenges we face."
Hillary Clinton added that "anything short of relentless diplomatic efforts will fail to produce a lasting, sustainable peace in either
place."
Obama's choice of two such respected and high-profile envoys signaled a new engagement in global affairs by his administration --and a break with the policy of former president George W.Bush who resisted such a step.
However, there was little sign Obama would drop the Bush administration's hard line toward the Hamas Islamist movement when he backed Israel's offensive in the Gaza Strip as a defense against Hamas rocket fire.
The new president also called on Israel to open Gaza border crossings to aid and commerce to help ease the plight of Palestinians.
Obama said he was sending Mitchell to the region as soon as possible to help shore up a fragile ceasefire that took hold last weekend after a thfee-week Israeli offensive left more than 1,330 Palestinians and 13Israelisdead;
"It will be the policy of my administration to actively and aggressively seek a lasting peace
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FROM PAGE 16 between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as Israel and its Arab neighbors," Obama said.
Mitchell said he did not "underestimate the difficulty" of his assignment."The situation in the Middle East is volatile, complex and dangerous," he said.
Mitchell, a Maronite Catholic whose mother was Lebanese, managed to bring together the leaders of Northern Ireland's religious communities with a mixture of compromise and talks to sign the historic Good Friday agreementin 1998.
At the time Mitchell, a Democrat, was considered one of the only actors in the peace process enjoying the yust of all parties, earning a reputation in Belfast as a safe pair of hands and a shrewd, level-headed operator.
His peace efforts in the Middle East were less successful. In 2000 he was charged with presiding over the committee bearing his name and finding ways of ending violence between Israelis and Palestinians.
In his report submitted in 2001 he called on both sides to take immediate measures to unconditionally end the violence but his calls went unheeded.
Bush oversaw the relaunch of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in
November 2007 but little progress has been made since and the violence in Gaza has thrown a dark shadow over iL
Holbrooke, the architect ol the Dayton Accords which ended the Bosnian war, will take on responsibility for implementing an integrated strategy to US policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan.
He acknowledged that Afghanistan and Pakistan were two "distinct" countries entwined by history and ethnicties.
"This is a very difficult assignment as we all know," said Holbrooke, once dubbed the Kissinger of the Balkans.
Obama calls the war in Afghanistan, which also spills into Pakistan, as the "central front in the war against tenor-ism” where the Taliban has come back from its ouster by the Bush administration in 2001 to wage a deadly insurgency.
He accused his predecessor of taking his "eye off the ball" by invading Iraq.
"I think this is a time of such potential and possibility. 1 don't get up in the morning just thinking about the threats and the dangers, as real as they are. 1 also think what we can do," said the former US first lady.