Bush repeats demands to Mideast leaders

President Bush is the first sitting president to visit VMI since 1964.

LEXINGTON, Virginia (CNN) -- President Bush included the conflict in the Middle East in a speech about the U.S. war on terrorism Wednesday at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia.

"All parties have a choice to make," Bush said. "Every leader, every state, must choose between two paths: the path of peace or the path of terror." Bush called on the Palestinian Authority to renounce terrorism and on Israel to pull out of Palestinian territory in the West Bank. "All parties must say clearly that a murderer is not a martyr; he or she is just a murderer," he said.

Some conservative Republicans and Democrats with close ties to Israel have criticized Bush for refusing to subject Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat -- whom Israel considers a terrorist -- to his anti-terror doctrine.

After the September 11 terrorist attacks, Bush has said repeatedly that any nation or group that harbors terrorists or aids terrorism will be labeled as a terrorist group and subjected to possible U.S. military, economic and diplomatic sanctions. But the White House has said that it will not apply that doctrine to Arafat.

Senior aides said Wednesday's speech was subject to numerous drafts, a by-product of intense internal deliberations on how to address the Middle East in a way that reinforces the president's anti-terror goals and methods.

VMI is a state supported military-style college founded in 1839.

Bush is the first sitting president to visit VMI since 1964, when Lyndon B. Johnson dedicated a library there, according to the school's Web site. The only other president to speak at VMI was Millard Fillmore 1851, the site said.

After the speech, Bush was scheduled to return to the White House to meet with Lebanon's prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, on ways to keep skirmishes along Lebanon's southern border with Israel from merging with the West Bank bloodshed into a wider Arab-Israeli conflict.