Cheney Outlines Mission to Troops

With a blue pennant that bore the straightforward message “September 11” flying overhead, Vice President Dick Cheney watched from the flight deck Friday as this aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea launched F/A-18 Hornets for duty over Afghanistan, 700 miles away.

Then, in a speech looking ahead to the wider reach of the war on terrorism, the vice president told several thousand sailors: “The United States will not permit the forces of terror to gain the tools of genocide.”

The vice president spent about four hours aboard the Stennis, joining a parade of morale-boosting visitors who have included, said sailor Bobbie Brown of Greenville, S.C., the chief of naval operations and the actress Pamela Anderson.

Cheney is on a high-stakes diplomatic mission intended to gain support for a wider war against terrorism and, in particular, for the administration’s campaign to counter Iraq’s efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction.

On the Muslim Sabbath observed throughout the region, Cheney turned to the Americans aboard the 6-year-old nuclear-powered carrier. The ship was about 70 miles off the coast of Oman. It has been on station since mid-December after leaving its home port, San Diego, a month earlier.

On a carrier deck, the crews wear bright jerseys of red, green, yellow and purple to designate their jobs as they conduct the ballet of man and machine crucial to every launch and landing of aircraft.

Even the normally sartorially reserved Cheney added a touch of color: He wore a bright pink button-down shirt, its sleeves a beacon under his white life vest with “VP” stenciled on the back.

As he crosses the Middle East, the vice president has been using speeches to troops to send a public reminder to the region that the United States won’t relent in its war on terrorism.

On Wednesday, he was on the Sinai Peninsula, speaking at the intersection of Gunslinger Alley and Bowie Boulevard to members of the Arkansas National Guard on peacekeeping duty there.

Declaring the mission of U.S. military personnel “vital and historic,” Cheney has been telling the troops that the United States is fighting “for the defense of the civilized world.”

Speaking on the Stennis, from which the air wing delivered many of the strikes on terrorist caves and camps in Afghanistan, Cheney listed the countries now receiving U.S. assistance on the anti-terrorism campaign: the Philippines, Georgia, Yemen.

“Wherever threats are forming against the civilized world, we will respond, and respond decisively,” he said, in an unmistakable message to the Middle Eastern countries on his itinerary.

“Our next objective is to prevent terrorists, and regimes that sponsor terror, from threatening America or our friends with weapons of mass destruction,” he said.

Nearby on the massive hangar deck, members of Cheney’s entourage used a black felt-tip pen to scrawl angry messages to Al Qaeda on a missile waiting to be loaded beneath an airplane.

The trip is taking Cheney through a broad swath of the Middle East but not Iraq, Iran, Syria and Lebanon.

The ship, which carries an American flag recovered from the wreckage of the World Trade Center, barely slowed its tempo for Cheney’s visit. As he toured the Combat Direction Center, the darkened space lighted by the glow of multiple computer screens shuddered each time a fighter jet was launched--at times about every minute.

Capt. Jim McDonnell said that 7,000 sorties have been flown from the vessel in support of the Afghanistan campaign and that 86 missions were expected to be launched Friday--some of them for training and others over Afghanistan.

The flight to the war zone takes about 1 1/2 hours, and aircraft are generally away from the ship for about five hours. They refuel over Pakistan or Afghanistan.

With the vice president standing less than 50 yards from the catapult that flings the planes off the deck, operations appeared to go flawlessly. But a week ago, a F-14 fighter jet was lost as it tried to land. The crew was rescued.