Obama to commemorate 65th anniversary of D-Day

In Germany, the president said the U.S. will not try to force peace in the Mideast.

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

DRESDEN, Germany — President Barack Obama will pay homage to the roots of the post-World War II world and to the early days of his own family as he visits France on Saturday to take part in the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landing at Normandy.

Obama will commemorate the 1944 invasion as he overlooks 9,387 graves of Americans, and will be joined at the ceremony by his great-uncle, Charles Payne of Chicago, who fought during the war.

The appearance will cap a four-day presidential trip to the Middle East and Europe where Obama has addressed both historic and present-day themes of war, death and freedom. He traveled to France after touring the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany on Friday and visiting Dresden, the German city bombed heavily by Allied forces.

The president emphasized Friday that “the moment is now” to settle 60 years of conflict in the Middle East as he sought to stoke momentum for negotiations a day after his address to Muslims in Cairo both inspired hopes and rattled nerves across the region and around the world.

Taking one new step, Obama announced he is sending George Mitchell, his special Mideast envoy, on a mission to the area beginning Sunday. One of Mitchell’s stops could be in Syria, which would mark a significant step forward in the U.S. effort to seek a comprehensive peace to the Arab-Israeli dispute.

But Obama acknowledged while in Germany that the United States can’t and won’t try to force peace on the region, although it would try to make difficult steps more likely.

“You’ve probably seen more sustained activity on this issue in the first five months than you would have seen in most previous administrations,” Obama said. “And I think, given what we’ve done so far, we’ve at least created the space, the atmosphere, in which talks can restart.”

Obama also sought Friday to adjust perceptions that his speech a day earlier was unusually tough on Israelis while remarkably sympathetic to Palestinians.

“Less attention has been focused on the insistence on my part that the Palestinians and the Arab states have to take very concrete actions,” he said.

But in a new sign of U.S.-Israeli tension on the volatile question of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in Washington that, contrary to Israeli contentions, there is no record that the Bush administration secretly agreed to permit some growth in the enclaves. Israelis have cited such an agreement in trying to ease Obama’s demand that settlement activity be frozen.

Obama’s remarks came on a day when he visited Buchenwald, the Nazi concentration camp in Germany, where he praised the human spirit and honored Israel which, he said, rose from the Holocaust.

Before that, Obama and German Prime Minister Angela Merkel spoke at a castle in Dresden. The president also visited wounded U.S. soldiers at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a U.S. military hospital in Germany.

, on Friday, awarding six Purple Heart medals to soldiers and Marines.