The World - News from March 17, 2002

On a day that began with a personal display of respect for Islam and ended at a palace, Vice President Dick Cheney delved into the thicket of Middle Eastern history and hatreds Saturday, conferring with Crown Prince Abdullah here about the Saudi’s proposal to restrain the latest Israeli-Palestinian violence.

But as to the centerpiece of his Persian Gulf tour--the future of efforts the United States wants to lead to restrain Iraq--he has been thwarted at each stop, and the only public signals from the Saudis were of outright opposition.

Traveling from Oman to the United Arab Emirates to Jidda on Saturday, the vice president arrived at the difficult diplomatic junction where the tragedies of the Middle East encounter the new pressures brought to the region by the U.S.-led war on terrorism.

Cheney had dinner with the crown prince, one of the most powerful figures in the region, and then met with him at mid-evening.

The crown prince has proposed that if Israel returned to its pre-1967 borders, Saudi Arabia would open normal diplomatic relations with it.

Regarding a campaign against Iraq, Abdullah has sent a message of adamant opposition, one reflected by other nations on Cheney’s tour, most notably Egypt and Jordan.

Using American television to convey this opposition publicly even before the vice president had made his case, Abdullah said the United States cannot overthrow Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, and in interviews with CNN and ABC, he said Iraq must remain unified.

The concern is reflected throughout the region and goes to the heart of a question the Bush administration has had to confront as it contemplates a military campaign against Iraq: What would happen after Hussein?

The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al Faisal, said in an interview with ABC’s Barbara Walters that the United States could not use Saudi bases for an attack against Iraq, as it had during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

At one of Cheney’s earlier stops--Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, the vice president paused to discuss the Saudi plan with the country’s president, Sheik Zayed ibn Sultan al Nuhayyan. A Cheney aide said that the two men, who met in a palace, agreed that the plan had “provided a path” worth exploring.

Cheney began the day in Muscat, Oman, at the Sultan Kaboos Grand Mosque.

The mosque was a reminder--if the vice president needed one--of some of the many crossroads of the Middle East: The massive rug that covers much of its 60,000-square-foot worship area was made in Iran; the ornately carved marble arches are of Iraqi design.

Cheney’s every stop on his 11-country, 12-day trip has been carefully planned. So, when he scheduled a stop at the mosque at the last minute, it took on the cast of something more than tourism. Rather, it served as a visual message to counter critics’ complaints that the United States is waging war against Islam.

The vice president’s trip, which began last Sunday, was built around the next step in the administration’s anti-terrorism campaign, specifically the state of efforts to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction--and to determine whether the United States could expect a positive response if it sought military basing rights and other support for what could be a very large operation.

Cheney’s mission was originally to report to Middle East and Persian Gulf leaders on the administration’s thinking on expanding the war beyond Afghanistan, to gauge their reaction, court their support and report back to President Bush and the rest of the national security team. But the intensity of the violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories has forced that conflict onto his agenda at each stop.

Abdullah is taking his peace proposal, a variant of the “land-for-peace” offerings that have been debated and negotiated for at least two decades, to a summit of the Arab League at the end of the month. Normalization would be a new wrinkle. But whether he is offering full diplomatic relations or something else has been unclear.

Bush has expressed interest in the plan, and it is likely to be on the agenda when Cheney meets with Israeli leaders later. The vice president’s aides said he would not comment on it until today, at a news conference after leaving the country.

The Jidda stop was particularly important and sensitive. Saudi Arabia, as an economic and political counterweight to Iraq and as custodian of Islam’s two holiest sites, Mecca and Medina, has a reach that goes beyond its borders.

But the Saudi royal family is exceedingly skittish about maintaining stability throughout the region. At the heart of its concern is the potential division between popular support for Saddam Hussein and radical Islamists, among them Osama bin Laden, and the more conservative bent of the elite and the authoritarian leadership.

The Saudi royals are also sensitive to the fact that 15 of the 19 men accused of hijacking four airliners on Sept. 11, in a plot that Washington blames on Bin Laden, were Saudis.

Among the concerns throughout the region is the energy the United States would put into a military operation: Leaders want assurances that if the United States took on Hussein, it wouldn’t leave him a wounded tiger able to recover--as he did after the Gulf War.

Wherever Cheney has gone, he has encountered such anxieties as those prevailing in Saudi Arabia regarding Iraq and an aggressive U.S. presence that could rile the populace.

In Oman, for example, officials try to keep under wraps their military cooperation with the United States, and White House officials showed great sensitivity in confirming that the vice president visited the island of Masirah, a small U.S. military facility.

The region also disagrees with the United States about which problem should be tackled first: the Middle East violence or Iraq and the expansion of the anti-terrorism war.

With the Taliban subdued and Al Qaeda’s operations seemingly seriously disrupted, leaders there “don’t see the immediate threat,” said Edward S. Walker, president of the Middle East Institute in Washington and a former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and Israel.

But the administration’s preference, Walker said, would be to get Hussein out of the way. This, officials argue, would leave the region free to wrestle with the Israeli-Palestinian issues.