✍Rice: "the birth pangs of a new Middle East"

On 21 July 2006, at a press conference in Washington before leaving for the region, Condoleezza Rice rejected the calls for an immediate ceasefire, saying any truce that restored "the status quo" would be meaningless, and that what was happening was "the birth pangs of a new Middle East… and whatever we do, we have to be certain that we are pushing forward to the new Middle East, not going back to the old one"; in Lebanon and the Arab world the phrase became the label for American cover for the war's continuation, and Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah answered in his speeches that the project "has fallen in Lebanon".