Obama encouraged by Mideast steps

WASHINGTON -- President Obama and his Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak, expressed guarded optimism Tuesday about the prospects for renewed Middle East peace talks.

It was their first meeting since Obama traveled to Cairo in June to speak to the Muslim world, and Mubarak's first White House visit in five years.

"I'm encouraged by some of the things I'm seeing on the ground," said Obama, referring to news reports that some West Bank security checkpoints have been removed by Israel and that there is increased economic activity.

Mubarak cautioned that 60 years of conflict in the Middle East will not be resolved easily. But "we are moving in the right direction," he said, pledging that Arab states are poised to do all they can to help get the long-stalled peace process moving again.

Mubarak praised Obama for his efforts to improve relations with Muslims, strained during the Bush administration by the 9/11 attacks, the war in Iraq and the U.S. treatment of terror suspects.

"The importance of the Cairo visit was very appreciated by the Muslim and Islamic world," he said through a translator, "because the Islamic world had thought that the U.S. was against Islam, but his great, fantastic address there has removed all those doubts."

Scholars say it will take time to ease tensions and erase misunderstandings between the West and the Muslim world.

"Mending America's ties, enhancing its credibility with the Arab and Muslim worlds, is a very long movie," said Aaron David Miller, a former State Department Mideast peace negotiator now with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Obama's speech, fulfilling a campaign promise to reset relations with Muslims, was "a brilliant speech, but it's a speech," Miller said. "Words are important but deeds are more important."

Shortly before his Cairo trip, Obama created an office of global engagement within his National Security Council to reach out to Muslims. In late June, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton created a new office at the State Department, headed by Farah Pandith, an Indian-born Muslim, to engage Muslims.