Cheney Says Middle East Tour Yields Pledges of Support

By William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, May 14, 2007 4:12 PM

Vice President Cheney, returning to Washington from a Middle East tour, said today he received pledges of support from Arab countries to help stabilize Iraq but that it was also important to make progress "simultaneously" on Arab-Israeli peace.

In a brief question-and-answer session with pool reporters on his plane after leaving Jordan, Cheney also dismissed the notion that there was any contradiction between his tough talk about Iran during the trip and White House plans for the U.S. ambassador to Iraq to meet with Iranian officials in Baghdad.

"They're separate issues," Cheney said. "The president made clear the conversations in Baghdad are between ambassadors, focused on the situation in Iraq and what we believe is Iran's interference in the internal affairs of Iraq. A separate proposition is the fact that the international community, including the United States, is deeply concerned about Iran's pursuit of enrichment technology for building nuclear weapons and that the Iranians are, in fact, in violation now of two unanimously-approved U.N. security council resolutions calling for them to stop what they're doing."

During a visit Friday to a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf about 150 miles off the Iranian coast, Cheney vowed that the United States would prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and "dominating" the region, and he said U.S. forces would keep open the sea lanes that carry about 20 percent of the world's oil trade.

Addressing sailors and Marines aboard the USS John C. Stennis about 20 miles off Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, Cheney said Washington will "stand with others to prevent Iran from gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region."

In a visit to Abu Dhabi today, Iran's hard-line president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, defiantly threatened strong retaliation for any U.S. attack and pledged to continue pursuing a nuclear energy program, Reuters news agency reported.

"They realize that if they make such a mistake, the retaliation of Iran would be severe and they will repent," Ahmadinejad said, referring to the prospect of a U.S. attack on his country. "All people know they cannot strike us," he told a news conference. "Iran is capable of defending itself. It is a strong country."

Vowing not to abandon its nuclear program, Ahmadinejad said, "Superpowers cannot prevent us from owning this energy."

The Bush administration has said it does not dispute Iran's right to build nuclear power plants but has demanded that Tehran give up its programs to enrich uranium and reprocess spent nuclear fuel -- activities that can yield material for nuclear weapons as well as fuel for electricity-generating nuclear reactors. The U.N. Security Council has backed the U.S. position, imposing sanctions on Iran for failing to suspend its enrichment program.

In his news conference in Abu Dhabi three days after Cheney's visit, Ahmadinejad said Iran had agreed to talk to the United States about Iraq to help the Iraqi people, but he kept up his criticism of the U.S. role in that country, Reuters reported.

"They know that their plans have failed in Iraq; their vision is wrong," he said. "As long as you are plotting against the Iraqi people, failure will be there day after day."

Ahmadinejad's comments came a day after the White House confirmed that the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan C. Crocker, would meet with Iranian counterparts in Baghdad in the next several weeks to talk about stabilizing Iraq and curtailing Iranian aid to Iraqi militias.

In Washington, White House spokesman Tony Snow rejected the Iranian leader's remarks, saying Cheney "did not threaten to attack another country" in his speech aboard the Stennis. "So what you're doing is you're getting a reaction to a threat that was not made. . . ."

Asked to explain the "contradictory, if not schizophrenic," U.S. diplomacy toward Iran, Snow said President Bush "has authorized a Baghdad channel at the ambassadorial level" for talks on U.S. concerns about Iranian activities that destabilize the Iraqi government.

"This not only is not schizophrenic, it's perfectly consistent with American policy over recent months," Snow said.

In his talk with reporters during his return flight to the United States, Cheney said that in his visits to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, he had "discussed a wide range of topics, including Iraq, Iran, the peace process, the general situation in the Middle East."

Asked if he received a commitment from those Arab countries to do more to help stabilize Iraq, Cheney replied, "I did." He did not elaborate.

Cheney was also asked about an Egyptian statement indicating that there could not be progress on issues of interest to the United States, such as Iraq and Iran, until there is progress on the Middle East peace process.

"I think these are all important issues, and we need to work on all of them," the vice president said. While it is not a matter of moving forward on "everything or nothing," he said, "I do believe there are a number of issues that need to be worked on simultaneously. We don't get to pick and choose."

In the Jordanian capital, Amman, King Abdullah said he warned Cheney that time was running out to use an Arab peace plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Associated Press reported.

"Time is not on anyone's side," Abdullah said, according to a palace statement following the king's meeting with Cheney at the Red Sea resort of Aqaba. He said the five-year-old Arab initiative still represents "an opportunity to advance peace and end the Arab-Israeli conflict." Palestinians have embraced the plan, but Israel has balked at many of its provisions.

Cheney also told reporters today that he had discussed the security situation in Iraq with U.S. commanders and senior Iraqi political leaders during his unannounced stop in Baghdad last week at the start of his Middle East tour.

In addition, he said he had talked over breakfast with "a bunch of our enlisted personnel, with no generals present," and found them to be "amazingly positive." He added, "They really believed in what they were doing."

The Pentagon's decision to extend deployments in Iraq to 15 months "places a burden on the troops and their families, although there appeared to be pretty widespread understanding why that was necessary," Cheney said. "I didn't receive a lot of complaints about it."

He said his talks with Iraqi leaders focused on such issues as national reconciliation, enactment of a law on the sharing of oil revenues, de-Baathification and "constitutional modifications" to promote reconciliation.

"There seemed to be something of a consensus on the agenda," he said. "There's not agreement on all of the issues, obviously, but there wasn't a lot of dispute with respect to the issues that needed to be addressed."

Cheney said his message to the Iraqis was "that they need to be actively and aggressively getting after solutions to these problems. There's not a lot of time to be wasted here, and it's important to move aggressively on the business of the day." He said he could not predict what would happen but that "I thought there was a greater sense of urgency on their part than I had seen previously."

He said he would not provide details of his conversations with foreign leaders. "That's why they talk to me," he said.

He also said there were limitations on what he could say because he was talking to reporters on the record. "The last time we did one of these, I tried to do it on background but I took a lot of crap for it, frankly," he said.