It’s Cheney's Turn to Make Things Worse in the Middle East

Posted by Trish , Pensito Review at 11:13 AM on March 17, 2008.

People who know about this stuff don't expect much from Dick Cheney's trip to the Middle East.

Cheney will reinforce the message from visits by President George W. Bush in January and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice earlier this month, in a stepped-up diplomatic push for Israelis and Palestinians to move forward on peace efforts dealt a blow by violence in Gaza and Israel.

"The mood has deteriorated incredibly in the last six weeks since the president was there," Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said.

"From the outside it's very hard to see that Secretary Rice was able to even arrest the slide let alone get things moving forward. My guess is the vice president will be able to arrest the slide if not necessarily put things on track," he said.

Let's be honest. Our interest in the Middle East isn't about justice in Israel, for either the Israelis or the Palestinians. It is, and always has been, about one thing.

"I'm not sure he'll seek anything more than a good and thorough discussion about the current situation in the global energy markets," a senior administration official said.

That's right, the big O: oil. After all, what else besides the subject of his past, current, and future business interests does Cheney have to talk about?

"I don't think that he's going to be able to bring back anything meaningful because he's got nothing to offer," Steven Simon, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said.

"He represents a lame duck president, a floundering economy, a situation in which the U.S. for all its efforts in Iraq has no leverage on the government in Baghdad,” Simon said.

Trish is a regular blogger for the Pensito Review.