Mideast envoy sees'desiretoact'

George J. Mitchell likes to remind people that he labored for 700 days before reaching the Good Friday accord that brought peace to Northern Ireland. So the fact that Mitchell has shuttled back and forth to the Middle East for the past 190 days without any breakthroughs, he said, does not mean that President Barack Obama's push for peace is stalled.

But while the negotiating has continued - mostly in closed-door sessions with few comments for reporters, in keeping with Mitchell's close-to-the-vest style - reports in Israel, in particular, have focused on the claim that the Obama administration's pressure is alienating Israelis and failing to sway Arabs.

"One of the public misimpressions is that it's all been about settlements," Mitchell, the administration's special envoy to the Middle East, said in a rare interview Friday. "It is completely inaccurate to portray this as, 'We're only asking the Israelis to do things.' We are asking everybody to do things."

Another misperception, he said, was that Arab countries had rebuffed Obama's request to make moves toward a more normal relationship with Israel - a perception fueled by a Saudi official's blunt public rejection of such incremental steps in Washington on Friday.

"We've gotten, overall, a very good response, a desire to act, some public statements to that effect from the crown prince of Bahrain, the president of Egypt," said Mitchell, who returned last week from his fifth trip to the region, including stops in Israel, Egypt and Syria. Saudi Arabia's negative public comments, other officials said, bear little relation to what it is saying in private.

Even the Saudis, Mitchell said, "want to be helpful. They, like everyone we're talking to, want a peace agreement that will lay the foundation for the end of this conflict."

The United States and Israel, officials said, are narrowing the gap on a deal to freeze construction of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian West Bank for a period of time, possibly six months.