White House Downplays Bush Mideast Trip.

President Bush's aides all but ruled out a three-way meeting with Israeli and Palestinian leaders during his upcoming Mideast visit and dampened hopes that the president's high-profile travels would make tangible progress toward peace.

"Just his going there is going to advance the prospects," Stephen Hadley, Bush's national security adviser, said Thursday. "We're not looking for headline announcements."

Bush departs Tuesday on an eight-day trip that will take him to at least six Mideast nations and the Palestinian territories _ his first visit as president to each locale on his itinerary except Egypt. It comes as Bush stages his most aggressive personal involvement to date in the tricky, violent and intractable Israeli-Palestinian dispute. [...]

"People are going to be polite. They will be accommodating in some ways. But they are well aware that this is not only an election year, it is an election year from an administration that really has no heir that can really speak for the future or run for the future," said Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. [...]

"There will be small successes along the way," Alterman said. "But all of the Middle East's problems are far too immense, complex and diverse to be solved on this trip."

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