Powell: Attacks must not affect Mideast road map to peace.(Chicago Tribune)

Byline: Howard Witt

MADRID _ Hastening to shore up the Bush administration's "road map" plan for Middle East peace just one day after it was formally released, Secretary of State Colin Powell said Thursday that neither Palestinian terrorist attacks nor Israeli retaliation can be permitted to derail the plan before it starts.

"We have got to get beyond this period of suicide bombings and retaliatory actions or other defensive actions that are taken to end the violence and to protect one society," Powell said at a news briefing after a meeting with Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio.

"We can't let these sorts of incidents immediately contaminate the road map or contaminate the process that we are now involved in," Powell said.

Powell was responding to the latest round of Mideast violence, in which a Palestinian suicide bomber killed three people in Tel Aviv on Wednesday and Israeli military forces raided Gaza early Thursday, killing 12 Palestinians.

Powell stopped in Madrid on Thursday on the first leg of a Mideast tour to kick-start the road map process that will take him to Syria and Lebanon on Saturday and then, on a second trip later in the month, to Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Israel and the West Bank.

The Bush administration's road map, co-sponsored by Russia, the European Union and the United Nations, sets out a series of reciprocal confidence-building steps both Palestinians and Israelis must take to lead to the creation of an independent Palestinian state by 2005.