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ANKARA, March 20: US Vice President Dick Cheney leaves the Middle East on Wednesday, lacking a mandate for action against Iraqi President Saddam Hussein but playing a gambit aimed at winning an Israeli-Palestinian ceasefire.
Cheney returns to Washington after a 12-country, 10-day trip to Britain and the Middle East.
The trip sought support for further steps in the US-led war on terrorism and Washington’s campaign to deprive Iraq of weapons of mass destruction.
But at stop after stop, Cheney met Arab leaders who he acknowledged were preoccupied with the surging Middle East conflict, and who said Iraq was a far less pressing priority.
The message he received was there would be no support for tough action against Iraq while Middle East violence raged.
An early warning came last week from Jordan’s King Abdullah, the first Arab leader he met on the trip and a key US ally.
“I have told him (Cheney) that the Middle East cannot support two wars at the same time — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and an American intervention against Iraq,” Abdullah told Le Figaro newspaper in Paris. “To attack Baghdad now would be a disaster. The security and stability of our region would not be able to cope with it.”
Cheney said he was not in the region to organize military action on Iraq. In Turkey on Tuesday night, Prime Minister Bulent Ecevit said Cheney had told him there would be no strike in “the forseeable future”. But Washington is committed by law to ousting Saddam, and Cheney has said the issue of Iraq’s weapons goals must be addressed.
ARAFAT MEETING: Several Arab leaders urged the United States to become more involved in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, and to urge Israel to let Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat attend an Arab summit in Beirut next week at which a new Saudi peace proposal for the Middle East will be discussed.
Cheney responded in Israel on Tuesday with an offer to meet Arafat as early as early as next week if he reins in the violence and implements a plan brokered by CIA Director George Tenet to enforce a truce.
Such a meeting could help pave the way for US President George W. Bush to end his boycott on meeting Arafat. It could also help ease what Arabs leaders complained was an image of favouritism in US Middle East policy.
Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told a news conference with Cheney Israel would let Arafat travel to the summit, adding that the Palestinian must deliver a peaceful message.
Cheney’s goal of rallying Arab support against Iraq was harder now than in the runup to the 1991 Gulf War.
This time, Washington is portraying the threat posed by Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programmes as ominous, but it is also more abstract.
“What Washington wants the Arab world to endorse is an attempt to overthrow a sovereign nation’s legitimate government in the name of terrorism,” the Qatar English-language newspaper The Peninsula said in an editorial on Monday, the day after Cheney met the country’s leaders.
Tim McCarthy, senior analyst for the Monterey Institute of International Studies, said the lack of a public Arab mandate for action on Iraq is not necessarily an obstacle.
Characterizing the administration’s position, he said, “We’re not looking for a mandate. We’re looking for them to be quiet or to be muted in their criticism — don’t stir the pot.”
A clear accomplishment of Cheney’s trip was that he simply paid attention to Arab leaders, who had been disappointed with what some viewed as disinterest by Bush.
Cheney, a former defence secretary in the Gulf War and oil industry executive, renewed personal relationships with Arab leaders in royal palaces and in presidential homes.
“The schmooze factor is very important,” said analyst Judith Kipper of the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“He’s obviously coming away with a clear picture of what’s necessary,” she said. “They need high level visits, they need to be informed, they need to be consulted. They’ve been complaining about this for 30 years.”—Reuters
