Cheney Retains Credibility As Envoy to Middle East

AQABA, Jordan _ Monday morning, King Abdullah II drove his Range Rover to the guest villa where Dick Cheney had spent the night and gave him a lift to the royal office, prodding the vice president to do more to end the “stagnation” in the Middle East peace process and to work harder to fix the dangerous mess next door in Iraq.

It was a friendly visit between old friends. Cheney has a lot of friends in the region, and he visited several in the past week _ kings and presidents and sheiks. He came to round up help securing Iraq and staring down Iran, and left with an earful about the peace process, and American mistakes and neglect.

Even so, he said a few hours later as he headed home, “I enjoy coming back out here. … I know all of these people. We always reminisce a bit as well as work.”

At home, his popularity and credibility may be at all-time lows, thanks to the Iraq invasion that he pushed and continues to vigorously defend. But in a region where trust springs both from mutual interest and longevity, Cheney stands out as a go-to guy when President Bush needs to sound out friends or shore up alliances. At one stop after another, he met with leaders he’d dealt with for two decades who may not like his policies but take it as a given that he has the ear of the president.

“He’s had veto power over every foreign policy and defense issue since the inception, and he’s been a principal formulator of Iraq policy,” said Chas Freeman, president of the Middle East Policy Council, and ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, when Cheney was defense secretary under President Bush’s father. “He’s a credible envoy precisely because he’s seen as the heart of the problem.”

Cheney told reporters aboard Air Force Two that he’d accomplished at least part of what he’d set out to do on his six-day Middle East trip _ cementing ongoing support for the U.S. policy in Iraq among key Arab states. The kings of Jordan and Saudi Arabia and the president of Egypt all urged putting heightened pressure on the shaky government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki _ something Cheney had already done when he flew unannounced into Baghdad last Wednesday for a day of talks with leaders of Iraq’s major factions.

Cheney has played both good cop and bad cop. In Baghdad, he issued a stern warning to all factions, which he reiterated Monday.

“Part of the message, obviously, 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,” he said.

And he took an especially hard line on Iran. On Friday, he flew to the U.S.S. John C. Stennis, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier steaming in the Persian Gulf about 150 miles from Iran. With a backdrop of fighter jets, he warned that the U.S. would keep the sea lanes open and would not tolerate regional domination by Iran, or any attempt by that country to obtain nuclear weapons.

He found easy justification for the U.S. agreement, revealed Sunday, to hold talks with Iran _ ambassador-to-ambassador _ so long as they remain solely focused on the situation in Iraq “and what we believe is Iran’s interference” there.

Cheney’s itinerary took him from Iraq, where he spent two days meeting with a parade of leaders from the major factions, on to a tour of the so-called Arab Quartet _ the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and, finally, Jordan, all countries with strong U.S. ties.

The Saudis in particular expect high-level contacts. Dallas energy executive James Oberwetter, whose 3 {-year stint as ambassador to Saudi Arabia ended recently, said Cheney is especially well-suited to such missions. “He has a deep understanding of how the Saudis think. He’s had direct talks with the king and with senior leaders of that country, recently and over an extended period, so I think he understands the people and the issues,” he said.

The depth of Cheney’s contacts in the region should not be underestimated. With four years as defense secretary before and during the Gulf War, then five years running Halliburton, the Texas-based energy services firm that works throughout the region, he’s no stranger to the palaces of the Middle East.

Among vice presidents, experts say, there’s probably only one who came to the job with more foreign policy experience _ President Bush’s father, who had served as CIA director and envoy to China. And Cheney has driven the White House agenda to a degree no predecessor ever had.

“He’s had an enormous amount of influence _ with Iraq, with the war against terror, with Middle East policy,” said Joel Goldstein, a law professor at St. Louis University and author of “The Modern American Vice Presidency.”

“But it’s not just Cheney versus Mondale, Bush and Gore,” he said. Cheney’s primacy in key aspects of foreign policy is largely due to the fact that President Bush, coming to office with so little experience in this area, gave Cheney far more responsibility than those other No. 2s.

The fact that Cheney had ruled himself out as a future candidate for president greatly enhanced his clout. It meant Bush never had to worry about any personal motive behind his advice, and Bush delegated an unusual degree of authority to him.

“He’s so close to the president,” said George Edwards, director of the Bush school at Texas A&M University. “He can pick up the phone and call other officials in other counties and they know perfectly well he speaks for the president. He has done that many times.”

But it also has meant that Cheney is insulated from political pressure in a way most vice presidents cannot be as they bide their time and angle for a shot at the top job. Analysts say that has let him shrug off disenchantment with the Iraq war in a way most presidential understudies never could.

“I think ambition is a good thing in a vice president. It helps keep them grounded,” said Goldstein.

Cheney said he’d brief Bush on his talks Tuesday.

“He’s a master of gathering facts and then presenting a well-stated argument to the president,” said one scholar of the vice presidency, Shirley Anne Warshaw, a professor at Gettysburg College in Gettysburg, Pa. “He goes to Baghdad to gather information, to assess what the information is in Baghdad. … Knowledge gives you power.”

It’s not entirely clear how effective even the most persuasive envoy could be at a moment when the U.S. is seen to be flailing in Iraq, four years after an invasion that was strongly opposed by the countries Cheney visited.

King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has pointedly been putting distance between himself and the Bush administration, brokering a power-sharing deal between Palestinian factions _ which undermined an American effort to marginalize one of those players _ and publicly and without warning using an Arab summit a few weeks ago to denounce the U.S. occupation of Iraq as “illegitimate.”

In March 2002, when Abdullah was still the crown prince, he warned Cheney during the vice president’s pre-invasion, 11-country tour that striking Iraq would inflame anti-Americanism, unleash dangerous divisions in Iraq and stir up chaos that could threaten the Saudis and other neighbors _ in short, the mess the White House has struggled to tidy up. There was no way to know if the king gave Cheney an I-told-you-so.

“If he were there trying to convince them of a case regarding intelligence, they might find him less convincing because that would be a prudent thing to do,” said Edwards of Texas A&M. “But if he’s saying, `the president is asking me to ask you to do this or that,’ there’s no doubt they think he speaks for the president. And that’s what matters to them.”

The entire Quartet has grown impatient with Washington’s policies in Iraq, and they’re unhappy that the invasion _ which, by removing the region’s traditional counterweight to Iran, inadvertently gave that Shiite country an opening to spread its influence.

Iraq’s precarious government, and its ongoing security problems, topped Cheney’s agenda for the trip, along with Iran and its regional and nuclear ambitions. Talk about the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process did not.

But the Egyptian government said that President Hosni Mubarak insisted at their meeting that work on Iraq and Iran would be fruitless unless the U.S. worked to revive the peace process.

Jordan’s king delivered a similar message Monday at Beit Al-Bahar, his retreat on the Red Sea.

Cheney, diplomatically, wouldn’t characterize what he’d heard in any of his private meetings.

“I won’t talk about my conversations with the folks I visited with,” he said. “That’s why they talk to me.”

Expectations for the trip were modest. No one promised or predicted diplomatic breakthroughs or major initiatives, but the stakes are high. Jordan alone has absorbed 500,000 to 700,000 refugees from the Iraq conflict.

“The king has a personal relationship with the vice president,” Jordan’s ambassador to the United States, Prince Zeid Raad, said before Cheney left for the Middle East a week ago. “The king always makes a point of seeing him when he comes into Washington. … We’ll listen very carefully to what he has to say and I’m quite sure he’ll do the same for us.”

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