clipped from: www.iht.com WASHINGTON: President George W. Bush and two top cabinet members urged lawmakers on Wednesday to reject a resolution describing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Armenians early in the last century as genocide - a highly sensitive issue at a time of rising U.S.-Turkish tensions over northern Iraq.
"We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915," Bush said in a brief statement from the White House. "But this resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings, and its passage would do great harm to relations with a key ally in NATO, and to the war on terror."