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WASHINGTON – President George W. Bush on Friday branded the Hamas rocket attacks on Israel an "act of terror" and outlined his own condition for a cease-fire in Gaza, saying no peace deal would be acceptable without monitoring to halt the flow of smuggled weapons to terrorist groups.

Bush chose his weekly taped radio address to speak for the first time about one of the bloodiest Mideast clashes in decades. It began a week ago. Israeli warplanes have rained bombs on Gaza, targeting the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which has traumatized southern Israel with intensifying rocket attacks.

"The United States is leading diplomatic efforts to achieve a meaningful cease-fire that is fully respected," Bush said. "Another one-way cease-fire that leads to rocket attacks on Israel is not acceptable. And promises from Hamas will not suffice — there must be monitoring mechanisms in place to help ensure that smuggling of weapons to terrorist groups in Gaza comes to an end."

The White House released Bush's radio address a day early. It airs on Saturday morning.

Despite Bush's account of a U.S. leadership role, with time running out on his presidency, the administration seemed increasingly ready Friday to let the crisis in Gaza shift to President-elect Barack Obama. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice briefed Bush on developments in Gaza, and she continued furious telephone diplomacy to arrange a truce. Yet, she said she had no plans to make an emergency visit to the region.

More than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis have been killed in the latest offensive. The U.N. estimated Friday that a quarter of the Palestinians killed were civilians. In their waning days in power, Bush and Rice have been working the phones with world allies.

Bush offered no criticism of Israel, depicting the country's air assaults as a response to the attacks on its people. The White House will not comment on whether it views the Israeli response as proportionate or not to the scope of rockets attacks on Israel.

"This recent outburst of violence was instigated by Hamas — a Palestinian terrorist group supported by Iran and Syria that calls for Israel's destruction," Bush said.

The president said Hamas ultimately ended the latest cease-fire on Dec. 19 and "soon unleashed a barrage of rockets and mortars that deliberately targeted innocent Israelis — an act of terror that is opposed by the legitimate leader of the Palestinian people, President (Mahmoud) Abbas."

Hamas-run Gaza has been largely isolated from the rest of the world since the Islamic militants won parliamentary elections in 2006. Then Hamas violently seized control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007, expelling forces loyal to the moderate Abbas.

Bush expressed deep concern about the humanitarian suffering of the Palestinian people in Gaza. U.N. officials say Gaza's 1.5 million residents face an alarming situation under constant Israeli bombardment, with hospitals overcrowded and both fuel and food supplies growing scarce.

"By spending its resources on rocket launchers instead of roads and schools, Hamas has demonstrated that it has no intention of serving the Palestinian people," Bush said. "America has helped by providing tens of millions of dollars in humanitarian aid, and this week we contributed an additional $85 million through the United Nations. We have consistently called on all in the region to ensure that assistance reaches those in need."

The White House has cautiously said Israel must be mindful of the toll its military strikes will have on civilians. Here, too, Bush blamed Hamas for hiding within the civilian population. "Regrettably, Palestinian civilians have been killed in recent days," he said.

International calls for a cease-fire have been growing. Bush promised to stay engaged with U.S. partners in the Middle East and Europe and keep Obama updated. Obama is receiving the same intelligence reports on Gaza that Bush is.

Rice has spoken to both Obama and his choice for secretary of state, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, about the situation at least once in the last week. Obama and Clinton have remained mum out of deference to Bush, who still has 18 days in office.

There have been growing calls for Rice to intervene with Israel in person amid rising international concern about the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza. Her decision to stay away will likely disappoint those calling for a more robust U.S. role, particularly as French President Nicolas Sarkozy intends visit the region next week.

In recent days, U.S. officials had said that a Rice trip to the Middle East, as a first stop on a long-planned visit to China next week, was under consideration. But those officials said Friday that Rice would stay in Washington. They spoke on condition of anonymity because an announcement is not expected before the weekend.

WASHINGTON -- Not since Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's famous footwear pounded into a table at an October 1960 United Nations session have we seen a shoe create such a global political firestorm.

Alas, we now havArsalan Iftikhar says the journalist who threw his shoes at Bush wasn't doing his job.e an Iraqi journalist entering into the annals of political history with his contribution to the ongoing historical saga entitled "Shoes Heard Around the World."

Some regional TV channels in the Mideast have aired the footage from the "shoe" press conference "more than a dozen times in several hours," according to The Associated Press. The infamous scene has now bounced around Internet networking sites like YouTube and Facebook, showing Iraqi journalist Muntadhar Al-Zaidi standing, hurling both his shoes at President George W. Bush and shouting in Arabic: "This is a farewell kiss, you dog....This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."

Mr. Al-Zaidi, 29, a journalist for private Iraqi television channel Al-Baghdadia, was swiftly overpowered by Iraqi security forces after he threw the shoes at Bush in a gesture described by Agence France Presse as "the supreme mark of disrespect in the Muslim world."

Let it be made clear that no shoes should have been thrown at President Bush. Aside from being patently childish (and simply bad manners), notwithstanding the global public's distaste for President Bush's policies, the job of a journalist is to be a purveyor of truth and information to his or her audience.

Mr. Al-Zaidi's job as a journalist is to report the news to his citizens, who otherwise would have little or no access to information. Thus, as a journalist, Al-Zaidi failed miserably in his profession by not keeping his shoes firmly on his feet. Although many people are applauding the "15 minutes of fame" achieved by the shoe incident, there is simply little excuse for such childish and silly behavior by Mr. Al-Zaidi.

Throwing a shoe at someone in the Muslim world is a patently insulting gesture. The context of the incident would have been completely different had it been a cream-filled pie (a la Bill Gates or Ann Coulter) as the projectile in question. Within its cultural context, simply showing the soles of your shoes to someone, let alone tossing your shoes at them, is a sign of brazen contempt.

For example, when Saddam Hussein's statue was toppled in April 2003, Iraqi protesters in Baghdad pelted the toppled statue with shoes and sandals. A CNN report on the April 2003 statue toppling called the throwing of shoes "a grave insult in the Arab world".

For these reasons, this latest Iraqi shoe incident is taking away focus from the actual plight of the Iraqi people and is being wrongfully applauded by many people in certain parts of the world.

According to ABC News, a wealthy Saudi citizen named Hasan Muhammad Makhafa has apparently offered $10 million for one of the shoes thrown by the Iraqi TV journalist. Mr. Makhafa, described as a landowner and retired teacher, told Dubai-based Arabic satellite TV station Al-Arabiya that Al-Zaidi's shoes were "a symbol of freedom, not just footwear."

"They represent a victory for those who have disgraced the Arabs by occupying their lands and killing innocent people," he said.

Hey, Mr. Makhafa. Why don't you take your $10 million and donate it directly to the Iraqi people to help build more water wells, educate Iraqi women or help resettle Iraqi refugees in Syria and Jordan?

How does it help the plight of an impoverished nation when you are willing to spend millions on eBay for these infamous shoes rather than figuring out a way to help the nation of Iraq rebuild into a functional and prosperous society?

The answer is that the shoe story does not help the plight of the Iraqi people in any way. Instead of perpetuating the stereotype that Arabs and Muslims are less-than-civilized shoe-throwers, perhaps we need to propagate the more accurate stereotype of Muslim and Arab hospitality around the world.

A well-known Islamic parable deals with the Prophet Mohammed and the story of his interaction with a female neighbor who used to throw garbage on him every day from her window whenever he walked by her house.

One day, when the woman was not present to throw garbage out her window, the Prophet inquired about her whereabouts and visited her inside her home when he found that she had fallen sick.

This genteel act of kindness toward unfriendly neighbors is the Muslim Ubuntu standard that should be used in our collective lives; not the silly example of an overzealous Iraqi journalist with "size 10" shoe missiles.

As our global community transitions from the ill-fated presidency of George W. Bush to the much-anticipated presidency of Barack Obama, we can take comfort knowing the gigantic imprint of history's "shoe" will leave a much more humiliating mark on the Bush legacy than a pair of misguided size 10 Iraqi shoes thrown in his general direction.

KABUL, Afghanistan – On a whirlwind trip shrouded in secrecy and marred by dissent, President George W. Bush on Sunday hailed progress in the wars that define his presidency and got a size-10 reminder of his unpopularity when a man hurled two shoes at him during a news conference in Iraq.

AP – In this image from APTN video, a man throws a shoe at President George W. Bush during a news conference

"This is your farewell kiss, you dog!" shouted the protester in Arabic, later identified as Muntadar al-Zeidi, a correspondent for Al-Baghdadia television, an Iraqi-owned station based in Cairo, Egypt. "This is from the widows, the orphans and those who were killed in Iraq."

Bush ducked both shoes as they whizzed past his head and landed with a thud against the wall behind him.

"It was a size 10," Bush joked later.

The U.S. president visited the Iraqi capital just 37 days before he hands the war off to his successor, Barack Obama, who has pledged to end it. The president wanted to highlight a drop in violence and to celebrate a recent U.S.-Iraq security agreement, which calls for U.S. troops to withdraw from Iraq by the end of 2011.

"The war is not over," Bush said, but "it is decisively on it's way to being won."

Bush then flew overnight to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan for a rally early Monday with more than 1,000 U.S. and foreign troops. "Afghanistan is a dramatically different country than it was eight years ago," he said. "We are making hopeful gains."

Play Video AP – Raw video: Iraqi journalist throws shoe at Bush

He then took a helicopter ride to Kabul to meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

After their meeting, Bush said he told Karzai: "You can count on the United States. Just like you've been able to count on this administration, you'll be able to count on the next administration as well."

In many ways, the unannounced trip was a victory lap without a clear victory.

In Iraq, nearly 150,000 U.S. troops remain in Iraq, protecting the fragile democracy. More than 4,209 members of the U.S. military have died and $576 billion has been spent since the war began five years and nine months ago.

In Afghanistan, there are about 31,000 U.S. troops and commanders have called for up to 20,000 more. The fight is especially difficult in southern Afghanistan, a stronghold of the Taliban where violence has risen sharply this year.

Polls show most Americans believe the U.S. erred in invading Iraq in 2003. Bush ordered the nation into war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq while citing intelligence claiming the Mideast nation harbored weapons of mass destruction. The weapons were never found, the intelligence was discredited, and Bush's credibility with U.S. voters plummeted.

"There is still more work to be done," Bush said after his meeting with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

It was at that point the journalist stood up and threw a shoe from about 20 feet away. Bush ducked, and it narrowly missed his head. The second shoe came quickly, and Bush ducked again while several Iraqis grabbed the man and dragged him to the floor.

In Iraqi culture, throwing shoes at someone is a sign of contempt. Iraqis whacked a statue of Saddam with their shoes after U.S. marines toppled it to the ground following the 2003 invasion.

White House press secretary Dana Perino suffered an eye injury when she was hit in the face with a microphone during the melee. Bush brushed off the incident. "So what if a guy threw his shoe at me?" he said.

After the news conference, the president took a 15-minute helicopter ride through dark skies over Baghdad to Camp Victory. Telling hundreds of troops he was "heading into retirement," Bush blamed Saddam for the 2003 invasion and said, "America is safer and more secure" than it was before the war.

Air Force One, the president's jetliner, landed at Baghdad International Airport in the afternoon local time after a secretive Saturday night departure from Washington. In a sign of security gains in this war zone, Bush received a formal arrival ceremony — a flourish absent in his three earlier trips.

Bush soon began a rapid-fire series of meetings with top Iraqi leaders.

He met first with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani and the country's two vice presidents, Tariq al-Hashemi and Adel Abdul-Mahdi, at the ornate, marble-floored Salam Palace along the shores of the Tigris River.

Later, Bush's motorcade pulled out the heavily fortified Green Zone and crossed over the Tigris so he could meet al-Maliki at the prime minister's palace. The two leaders signed a ceremonial copy of the security agreement.

The Bush administration and even White House critics credit last year's military buildup with the security gains in Iraq. Last month, attacks fell to the lowest monthly level since the war began in 2003.

Still, it's unclear what will happen when the U.S. troops leave. While violence has slowed in Iraq, attacks continue, especially in the north.

It was Bush's last trip to the war zones before Obama takes office Jan. 20. Obama, a Democrat, has promised he will bring all U.S. combat troops back home from Iraq a little over a year into his term, as long as commanders agree a withdrawal would not endanger American personnel or Iraq's security. Obama has said the drawdown in Iraq would allow him to shift troops and bolster the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

The new U.S.-Iraqi security pact calls for all American troops to be withdrawn by the end of 2011, in two stages. The first stage begins next year, when U.S. troops pull back from Baghdad and other Iraqi cities by the end of June.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – White House and congressional negotiators sought on Sunday to resolve remaining differences over an emergency rescue for the struggling auto industry, a stark symbol of the deepening U.S. economic crisis.

Reuters – General Motors Chairman and CEO Richard Wagoner (L-R), Chrysler CEO Robert Nardelli, and Ford Motor Company

Prodded by shock unemployment figures that showed the country shed more than half a million jobs last month alone, negotiators tried to turn into legislation an agreement in principle to provide "The Big Three" U.S. automakers with at least $15 billion in short-term loans.

"The expectation is that White House will see our draft (bill) tonight," a Democratic aide said, adding several unspecified modifications were being incorporated into it.

Play Video ABC News – Steering the Auto Industry Bailout

In addition to reorganizing automakers and protecting taxpayer investment, possible conditions include creating a government "car czar" to oversee the bailout and additional concessions by the United Auto Workers (UAW) union as well as the corporate leadership.

The Senate is due back in session on Monday and negotiators hope to have a package ready that can be quickly approved and sent to President George W. Bush as one of the last measures he signs into law before Democrat Barack Obama succeeds him as president on January 20.

The amounts under discussion are less than half the $34 billion that the automakers asked Congress for last week. Some economists believe they may need $75 billion to $125 billion to survive in the longer term.

Nevertheless, lawmakers fear a recession will deepen if any of the three giants -- GM, Ford and Chrysler -- collapses soon. But some from Bush's Republican party don't want another rescue plan after a $700 billion Wall Street rescue package that triggered voter backlash in the November 4 congressional elections.

Critics also say market forces, not state intervention, ought to determine the fate of the auto industry.

Bailout backers say that since the government helped Wall Street, it must also help hundreds of thousands of blue-collar auto workers who have the support of Democrats.

Obama added his weight to the drive, saying while the car companies had made mistakes, letting them collapse was not an option -- although they must be forced to radically revamp their operations.

"I think that Congress is doing the exact right thing by asking for a conditions-based assistance package that holds the auto industry's feet to the fire," he said in Chicago, adding that new management could also be an option.

CONDITIONS AND CONCESSIONS

A UAW official, speaking after a Detroit church service dedicated to prayers for the auto industry, said on Sunday the union was open to moves by Chrysler to seek an alliance with a rival automaker as long as it saves as many jobs as possible.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd said on Sunday that GM chairman Rick Wagoner should resign to allow new leadership to restructure the faltering company.

"He has to move on," Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat who is leading efforts to craft bailout legislation, told CBS.

Faced with plummeting sales they blame largely on the credit crunch and recession, GM, Chrysler and Ford sought $34 billion from Congress last week to avoid possible collapse. A deal negotiated by the White House and Congress would provide no more than $17 billion to last into March.

Critics have said any loans would be a waste of money unless U.S. automakers were able to cut costs and better compete with more fuel-efficient, foreign-made cars.

Democratic Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, home to the major automakers, said he was confident there would be a deal in the next 24 hours. But he was less certain if backers would garner the 60 votes needed in the 100-seat Senate to avoid a Republican procedural hurdle known as a filibuster.

"That's a much more complicated question," Levin said on "Fox News Sunday."

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell earlier indicated he might support a bailout if it had adequate safeguards. But Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican who has spoken out against the proposed "bridge loan" emergency package, indicated he was ready for battle.

"This is a bridge loan to nowhere," said Shelby, appearing with Levin on "Fox News Sunday."

UNKNOWN FUTURE

Despite the progress in Washington, America's auto industry is headed into an unknown future.

GM and Chrysler, along with Ford once bywords for U.S. industrial power, are both headed for wrenching restructuring under federal oversight that will hit their investors, creditors, dealers and workers almost as hard as if they had filed for bankruptcy protection.

Ford is in slightly better financial shape, but all three are expected to continue to mothball plants and dismiss tens of thousands of employees.

A breakthrough in the auto crisis emerged on Friday after government statistics showed that employers slashed more than 533,000 jobs in November, the highest monthly decline in 34 years. This underscored lawmakers' feared that hundreds of thousands more would be thrown out of work if any of the major automakers went down.