Everyone enjoying that $4 a gallon gas and living in homes 50 miles away from work? Good. So is oilman Cheney. And he's only got 20 months left to finish his grand plan.
In Gulf, Cheney warns Iran of U.S. resolve
Vice President Dick Cheney used the deck of an American aircraft carrier just 240 kilometers off Iran's coast as the backdrop Friday to warn the country that the United States was prepared to use its naval power to keep Tehran from disrupting oil routes or "gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region."
Vice President Dick Cheney used the deck of an American aircraft carrier just 240 kilometers off Iran's coast as the backdrop Friday to warn the country that the United States was prepared to use its naval power to keep Tehran from disrupting oil routes or "gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region."
Little of what Cheney said in the cavernous hangar bay of the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis, one of two carriers whose strike groups are now in the Gulf, was new. Each individual line had, in some form, been said before, at various points in the four-year-long nuclear standoff with Iran, and during the increasingly tense arguments over whether Iran is aiding the insurgents in Iraq.
But Cheney stitched all of those warnings together, and the symbolism of sending the administration's most famous hawk to deliver the speech so close to Iran's coast was unmistakable.
Cheney's sharp warnings appeared to be part of a two-track administration campaign to push back at Iran, while leaving the door open to negotiations. It was almost exactly a year ago that the United States offered to negotiate with Iran as long as it first agreed to halt enriching uranium, a decision in which Cheney, participants said, was not a major player.
Similarly, the speech Friday was not circulated broadly in the government before it was delivered, a senior American diplomat said.
"He kind of runs by his own rules," the official said.
