Cheney seeks to allay Saudi unease on Iraq

Vice President Dick Cheney worked Saturday to overcome Saudi skepticism over the leadership capabilities of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and the U.S. military strategy to secure Baghdad.

Cheney met with King Abdullah at a royal palace in this northern city. The king is considered an important U.S. ally in the Arab world but increasingly has indicated that he doubts the effectiveness of President Bush’s troop buildup in Iraq.

Abdullah also has signaled that he sees Maliki as a weak leader with too many ties to pro-Iranian Shiite Muslim parties to be effective in reaching out to Iraq’s Sunni Arab minority. Saudi Arabia has a predominantly Sunni Muslim population.

Cheney was given a red-carpet arrival ceremony at the airport. At the palace, as he and the king exchanged pleasantries, Abdullah asked about President Bush’s father. The elder Bush, as president, assembled a broad international coalition, including Saudi Arabia, to confront Saddam Hussein in the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

Cheney, who was the former president’s Defense secretary, said he was doing well. “He’s still willing to jump out of airplanes,” the vice president said. For his 80th birthday in 2004, Bush made a 13,000-foot tandem parachute jump over his presidential library in Texas.

“I did not want to do it when I was 60, and he’s done it twice now,” Cheney, 66, said.

Cheney is touring Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states in an attempt to win wider support for ethnic and sectarian reconciliation efforts in Iraq and to counter Iran’s influence in the region.

After a four-hour meeting with the king that included dinner, Cheney headed for Aqaba, Jordan, to spend the evening before meetings today. He was expected to visit Egypt later on a weeklong trip that began in Iraq.