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| Fdubya247 |
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Cheney: Iraq remains a dangerous place:
By TOM RAUM, Associated Press Writer 25 minutes ago
BAGHDAD - Vice President
Dick Cheney said Wednesday that
Iraq remains a dangerous place, a point underscored by a thunderous explosion that rattled windows in the U.S. Embassy where he spent most of the day.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070509...urynzAbK6wb.3QA
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Cheney in Iraq, bomb in Arbil kills 14:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070509/pl_nm/iraq_dc_95
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http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/09/w...r=1&oref=slogin
May 9, 2007
Cheney Makes Surprise Visit to Baghdad
By GRAHAM BOWLEY and JON ELSEN
Vice President Dick Cheney made an unannounced visit to Baghdad today, meeting with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki and other Iraqi leaders to pressure them to show more progress in quelling violence in Iraq, and to do so quickly.
According to a senior administration official traveling with Mr. Cheney, the message the vice president took to Iraq was: “We’ve all got challenges together. We’ve got to pull together. We’ve got to get this work done. It’s game time.”
After his meetings today, Mr. Cheney told reporters he was pleased with what he had heard. “I do believe there’s a greater sense of urgency than I’ve seen previously,” he said in a news conference.
Sectarian violence has continued unabated since the new Baghdad security plan began earlier this year. On Tuesday, the Pentagon said that it had notified 35,000 more American soldiers that they were likely to be heading to Iraq by December.
The violence continued today in the northern, predominantly Kurdish city of Erbil, where a suicide bomber blew up a truck in front of an Interior Ministry building, killing at least 14 people and wounding 70 others, Iraqi officials said.
And in a clear reminder to Mr. Cheney today of the violence in Iraq, an explosion rattled windows in the building where he and reporters were working. Reporters were hustled down two flights of stairs to a basement shelter, where they remained for about five minutes before returning to work.
But Lea Anne McBride, Mr. Cheney’s spokeswoman, said the vice president’s “business was not disrupted. — he was not moved.”
The Bush administration is pushing Iraqi leaders to develop greater political cohesion among the country’s factions to help the security plan succeed. And the administration wants the Iraqis to move ahead with legislation meant to reconcile Sunni and Shiite Arabs.
On Tuesday the threat of a walkout by Iraq’s leading Sunni bloc in Parliament and the cabinet seemed to diminish after Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, met with Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni.
On his trip, Mr. Cheney plans to host a dinner at the American embassy with top Iraqi leaders and leaders of the major Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish parties — “the people who will have to do the hard work of political reconciliation,” said a senior administration official.
In meetings with Iraqi leaders, Mr. Cheney planned to emphasize the urgency of the situation, said the administration official traveling with him. “Everybody’s got to sit down, raise their game, redouble their efforts,” the official said.
Mr. Cheney planned to spend time with senior Iraqi and American officials. It was his second trip to Iraq as vice president. His first was in December 2005.
Mr. Cheney was expected to urge Iraqi legislators to cancel plans for a two month recess this summer, plans that have annoyed American officials because of the urgency of the situation in Iraq.
“That’s clearly part of the message,” said Ryan Crocker, the new American ambassador to Iraq, who traveled with the vice president from the United States. “It’s been part of the message now for some time. I’ve said it. Secretary Rice has said it. I’m confident the vice president is going to say it.
“The reality is, with the major effort we’re making, the major effort the Iraqi security forces and military are making themselves, for the Iraqi parliament to take a two-month vacation in the middle of summer is impossible to understand.”
Mr. Cheney planned to meet with Mr. Maliki’s key ministers, of Interior, Defense, Finance, Oil and Foreign, to meet with President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and to hold one-on-one meetings with each vice president.
In a joint press conference after a meeting with Mr. Maliki today, Mr. Cheney said that the two spoke about “the Baghdad security plan, ongoing operations against terrorists, as well as the political and economic issues that are before the Iraqi government.”
According to a transcript provided by the White House, Mr. Maliki said: “The meeting with the Vice President put the foundation for practical steps in order to support our efforts working on both the security front as well as the domestic political issues. We also have talked about regional issues and neighboring states.”
Early in the day, Mr. Cheney met with Gen. David H. Petraeus, the American commander in Iraq, and with Mr. Crocker, who both gave him a lengthy briefing on the situation in the country. Mr. Cheney’s stop in Baghdad is the first on a broader trip to the Middle East. Later this week, he is due to visit the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. The Iraq stop was not announced in advance.
Reporters traveling with the vice president were only told of the Iraqi visit after their plane had left the United States. They were given the option of skipping the Iraq trip, but all chose to stay with Mr. Cheney. Some aides to the vice president, and his daughter, Liz Cheney, left the plane in England, and flew separately to the United Arab Emirates.
Four of those killed in the explosion in Erbil today were security guards, an Iraqi official said, adding that another 14 police officers from the Interior ministry were injured.
The truck was loaded with TNT, and when it went off, it damaged part of the Interior Ministry building as well as many houses nearby, the official said, calling it the largest terror explosion seen in the Kurdish area of the country so far. He added that officials had stepped up security in recent weeks because they had information about possible attacks in the area. |
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| Fdubya247 |
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...opinion/columns
Cheney And the Saudis
By David Ignatius
Wednesday, May 9, 2007; A17
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice may make the headlines with her high-profile diplomatic missions to the Middle East. But for a glimpse at the hidden power plays, follow Vice President Cheney's trip this week to Saudi Arabia.
Saudi King Abdullah has emerged over the past nine months as the Bush administration's most important and strong-willed Arab ally. He launched an aggressive campaign last fall to contain Iranian influence in the Arab world and, in the process, buttress American interests in the region despite U.S. setbacks in Iraq. It's Cheney, whose blunt, unsmiling demeanor matches Saudi notions of American gravitas, who manages the Abdullah account.
The Cheney visit is aimed partly at mutual reassurance. Both sides want to reaffirm the alliance, despite disagreements over Iraq policy and the Palestinian issue. The Saudis also want to establish an additional channel for communication so they can avoid misunderstandings that have sometimes arisen when the primary intermediary is Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the freewheeling former Saudi ambassador to Washington who is now national security adviser.
Abdullah had seemed to be distancing himself from Washington in some recent comments. In February, he broke with U.S. efforts to isolate the radical Palestinian group Hamas by sponsoring the Mecca Agreement that created a Palestinian "unity government" fusing Hamas with the more moderate Fatah. In March, he surprised U.S. officials by calling the military occupation of Iraq "illegitimate" in a speech to an Arab League summit in Riyadh. He also nixed plans for a White House dinner in April.
Abdullah's criticism of the "illegitimate" American presence in Iraq reflects the Saudi leader's deep misgivings about U.S. strategy there. Saudi sources say the king has given up on the ability of Iraq's Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, to overcome sectarian divisions and unite the country. The Saudi leadership is also said to believe that the U.S. troop surge is likely to fail, deepening the danger of all-out civil war in Iraq.
The Saudis appear to favor replacing the Maliki government, which they see as dominated by Iranian-backed Shiite religious parties, and are quietly backing former interim prime minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite and ex-Baathist who has support among Iraqi Sunnis. Allawi's advisers say that his strategy is to exploit tensions within the Shiite religious alliance and form a new ruling coalition that would be made up of Sunnis, Kurds and secular Shiites. Allawi's camp believes he is close to having enough votes, thanks in part to Saudi political and financial support.
The Bush administration appears to have little enthusiasm for an Allawi putsch, despite its frustration with Maliki. U.S. officials fear that a change of government in Baghdad would only deepen the political disarray there and encourage new calls for the withdrawal of troops.
The ferment in the region is driven partly by the perception that U.S. troops are on the way out, no matter what the Bush administration says. To dampen such speculation, Bush is said to have told the Saudis that America will not withdraw from Iraq during his presidency. "That gives us 18 months to plan," said one Saudi source.
The heart of the U.S.-Saudi alliance is a new effort to combat Iran and its proxies in the Arab world. This began after last summer's war in Lebanon between Israel and the Iranian-backed Shiite militia, Hezbollah. Working closely with the United States, the Saudis began pumping money to Lebanese Sunni, Christian and Druze political groups that could counter Hezbollah's influence. The Saudis and Americans also cooperated in aiding Lebanon's Internal Security Force, the national police that effectively reports to the Sunni prime minister, Fouad Siniora.
Saudi-American cooperation against Iran has also extended to Yemen, where they have jointly assisted the Yemeni government in cracking down on an Iranian-funded group linked to followers of Shiite cleric Hussein al-Houthi, who was killed in 2004.
A final topic likely to be on Cheney's agenda is Syria. The Saudis support the administration's new effort, launched last week by Rice, to seek Syrian help in stabilizing Iraq. Indeed, the Saudis began moving to ease tensions with Syria at the March Arab League summit, after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad privately apologized to King Abdullah for calling him and other Sunni Arab leaders "half men" because they didn't assist Hezbollah during the Lebanon war. U.S. officials believe, however, that the Saudis are continuing their contacts with Syrian opposition groups.
Saudi Arabia once conducted its political machinations behind a veil, quietly doling out cash in an effort to buy peace. Perhaps the worst mistake made by Iran's firebrand president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is that he frightened the Saudis into abandoning their traditional reticence -- and into secret strategy councils with the hard-nosed Cheney. |
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| Ass Boil |
| Iraq is so safe that 4 years after the start of this bullshit war, all the BushCo tough guys still have to SNEAK in and out of the country like the collosal pussies we know they are. |
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| fatboy |
| "They will greet us as liberators!" OK, Dick, walk down the main street in Baghdad and shake the hands of the surviving Iraqis you've "liberated" -- I know that they'll be happy and excited to meet you. Go get 'em, tiger. |
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| Fdubya247 |
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11 GOP Congressmen met with the Bush Admin. today. They told Bush that the WH no longer has any credibility left on Iraq.
...except of course for idiots and scum like NCDike and VaCuntTheTurd... |
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| Glenda Yenta |
| Those Congressmen are only looking out for their own hides. They're shameless whores who rode the wave of "Bush can do no wrong" as long as they can and now they are stabbing him in the back. If Bush no longer has any credibility then neither did they since they supported him unconditionally with no effective oversight. |
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