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Cheney visits Egyptian, Saudi Arabian leaders

US Vice President Dick Cheney made a lightning visit to Egypt yesterday for talks with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak expected to focus on helping Iraq and curbing Iran's rising influence.

Cheney, who spent the night at this Jordanian resort after a quick stop in Saudi Arabia, was to travel to Cairo for the meetings, which include a one-on-one with Mubarak and talks with Egypt's defense minister, aides said.

The US vice president is in the tail-end of a week-long visit to the Middle East that included a surprise two-day trip to Iraq, a visit to the United Arab Emirates and a stop in the Saudi town of Tabuk.

His spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride, said the meeting with Saudi leaders on Saturday, where he sought their help in Iraq, "served to reaffirm and strengthen old friendships."

The talks came two months after Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah, a close ally, denounced the "illegitimate foreign occupation" of Iraq.

In Saudi Arabia, Cheney met with King Abdullah at a royal palace in Tabuk on Saturday.

Cheney was given a red-carpet arrival ceremony at the airport. At the palace, as he and the king exchanged pleasantries, Abdullah asked about former US president George Bush.

The elder Bush assembled a broad international coalition, including Saudi Arabia, in the 1991 Gulf War.

Cheney, who was Bush's defense secretary, said the former president was doing well.

"He's still willing to jump out of airplanes," Cheney said.

For his 80th birthday, Bush made a nearly 4,000m tandem parachute jump over his presidential library in Texas in 2004.

After a four-hour meeting with the king that included dinner, Cheney headed for Aqaba, Jordan, to spend the evening before meetings yesterday.

The vice president's week-long Middle East visit is aimed at encouraging Washington's allies to help pull Iraq's minority Sunni Muslims into the country's fragile political process.

He is also hoping to win help in curbing the influence of a rising Iran, amid talk that the Islamic republic and Saudi Arabia are in the early skirmishes of a proxy war in Iraq.

Cheney's talks in Abu Dhabi came on the eve of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's arrival in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) yesterday, in the first visit since Iran's 1979 Islamic revolution by an Iranian head of state to the close US Gulf ally.

An aide said Cheney and UAE leaders had discussed Ahmadinejad's visit on Saturday, and suggested that Washington bore its Gulf ally no ill will for hosting him.

The US vice president also hoped to use his influence in Saudi Arabia -- forged during the 1991 Gulf War and his oil industry dealings -- to smooth over relations badly strained by sectarian violence in Iraq.

King Abdullah refused to meet Iraq's Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki at the Riyadh summit, and an Arab diplomat said it was because the monarch believed Maliki had deepened the sectarian divide in his country.

Earlier on Saturday, Cheney urged greater support for US policies in Iraq when he held meetings in Abu Dhabi with leaders of the UAE.

A senior Bush administration official traveling with Cheney said afterward that the Emirates' president, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, pledged to do as much as possible to support the struggling Iraqi government.

Cheney went to Saudi Arabia last November for meetings, requested by the king, that are still shrouded in secrecy.

Reports at the time suggested the two discussed what role Saudi Arabia might play in reaching out to Iraq's Sunni minority as conditions in that country deteriorate.

The White House sees Saudi Arabia as a cornerstone ally in its campaign to isolate Iran and curtail Tehran's nuclear program, which Washington says is a cover for efforts to build an atomic arsenal. Iran denies the charge.

Cheney is also set to hold talks with Jordanian King Abdullah II before heading back to the US.
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