Cheney's trip

Vice President Dick Cheney is reaching out to moderate Arab leaders for help in bringing stability to Iraq, a mission that will include pleas for postwar support for minority party Sunnis.

Cheney departs Tuesday on a weeklong mission to the Middle East, right after a visit to the region by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

While Rice's trip had a wide-ranging agenda that included other tensions in the region, administration officials said Cheney would focus largely on the next steps in Iraq.

Cheney's first stop will be Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. Other announced stops include Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan. Cheney also will visit the aircraft carrier John C. Stennis in the Persian Gulf.

What can Cheney bring to the region that Rice couldn't?

President Bush asked Cheney to go because of his close ties with leaders in each of the four countries.

But Cheney's visit also might be an attempt to try to clear up what might be viewed as mixed messages from Rice by some leaders in the region.

Rice was in the neighborhood attending an international conference on Iraq in Sharm el-Sheik, Egypt, attended by representatives of both Syria and Iran. She met on the sidelines for 30 minutes with Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem, but had no face-to-face contact with the Iranian foreign secretary.

In particular Cheney will appeal to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah II of Jordan and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to use their influence to help rein in Sunni violence against Shiites in Iraq as well as charting ways to better protect Sunnis from violence at the hands of militant Shiites.

With less than two years left in the Bush-Cheney administration, the vice president has retained close ties to the region.

He got to know many leaders as defense secretary to the elder President Bush in the first Gulf War, then nurtured those relationships as chief executive officer of Halliburton, the oil-services company now in the process of moving many of its operations from Houston to Dubai in the UAE. Halliburton has many oil-related ties to the region, then and now.

In part, Bush is retracing some of the steps of a March 2002 tour of the Middle East aimed at giving Arab states a heads up on possible U.S. military action against Iraq.

Cheney's trip will build on Rice's visit to the region. But Cheney's influence there is waning. No longer is the United States seen as "tough, powerful and credible"

On Cheney's 2002 tour — which also included stops in Israel, Oman, Yemen, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain and Turkey — he found little support for an invasion of Iraq and considerable concern among Arab leaders that the U.S. wasn't doing more to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

Cheney went to Saudi Arabia in November 2006 for private talks with King Abdullah.