Former Vice President Dick Cheney praised embattled Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak last night, but his support was measured and conditional. Cheney, whose opinions carry great weight within the Republican foreign policy world, declined to guess whether Mubarak could hold onto power until the presidential election now scheduled for September.
“There comes a time for everybody to hang it up and move on,” he told a group of conservative activists gathered here to celebrate Ronald Reagan’s 100th birthday. “You get to the point where years add up, the burdens become tougher to deal with. … That’s a decision that only the Egyptians can make.”
Cheney recalled how, during a meeting the first weekend after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, Mubarak granted flyover rights for U.S. aircraft and access to the Suez Canal. Eventually, Egypt sent two army divisions to fight alongside American troops.
“So he’s been a good man and a good friend and ally of the United States, and we need to remember that,” said Cheney, who lead the Pentagon during the first Persian Gulf war. “You’re looking for balance here, but I do hope that there is a channel of communication.”
Without criticizing President Barack Obama explicitly, he stressed that the United States must maintain an open and private channel of communications with Mubarak.
“It is very hard for some foreign leader to act on U.S. advice in a visible way,” Cheney said. “You tell me as president of the United States that I’ve got to do X, and publicly then if I do X, my people think I’m not my own man. … There’s a reason why a lot of diplomacy is conducted in secret.”
At the dinner, sponsored by the conservative Young America’s Foundation, someone in the audience asked how much George W. Bush’s push for democracy promotion doctrine influenced the instability in Egypt.
“We think it’s the best system devised by man, and our hearts are gladdened when somebody else operates in similar fashion, but there are also other issues that are important at the same time,” he said.
Cheney sat in a chair for an hour-long, interview-style discussion with Republican power broker Frank Donatelli.
He started by reading from a brief opening statement lauding Reagan, candidly acknowledging that he initially did battle with him as Gerald Ford’s chief of staff during the internecine 1976 GOP primaries and agreeing that he was skeptical of Reagan’s negotiations with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev in the mid-1980s.
For the second time in the last three weeks, Cheney showed only glimmers of the attack-dog persona that was so prominent through 2009 and early 2010. When it came to the Obama administration, Cheney offered measured comments at several points when he could easily have thrown redder meat to a crowd that would have lapped it up.
Cheney, who has struggled with heart problems over the last six months, appeared healthy Saturday night. Thinner than his vice presidential days, he said he’d just come from a quail hunting trip to Texas with his old buddy James Baker, the former Secretary of State.
He told the crowd that, “with luck,” his memoir will come out this fall.
“I’ve got a deadline creeping up on me,” he said. “Right now, I’m deep into my years as vice president. And let’s just say that I’m not having writer’s block.”
More than 30 anti-war protesters gathered outside of the Reagan Ranch Center, a testament to how polarizing and controversial Cheney remains even two years out of office.
Cheney expressed pleasure that Obama has not pursued as liberal a national security agenda as he expected and that the administration has given up on most of its efforts to undo the counterterrorism apparatus created during George W. Bush’s presidency.
“The good news is I sense that they’ve backed off on some of their more outrageous propositions,” he said. “I notice Guantanamo’s still open.”
“I’m hopeful that what we’ll see is a solid, steady hand at the tiller, that we will not have the kind of decisions about counterterrorism policy that were talked about during the last campaign or that the administration or the president said they were going to pursue when they first got into office,” he added.
Cheney warned against the administration’s timeline for withdrawal in Afghanistan, but he did so in less dire terms than he has in the past, and he effusively praised Gen. David Petraeus and the general’s Afghanistan plan.
“This is not a place we can just wash our hands of and say, ‘There, it’s over with. It’s done,'” he said. “We don’t have that option.”
He received loud cheers when Donatelli credited the policies Cheney pushed as vice president for preventing another attack on American soil after Sept. 11, 2001.
Cheney’s speech capped an afternoon with two panels that discussed Reagan’s lasting accomplishments.
The Young America’s Foundation, which manages the ranch Reagan owned during his presidency, primarily focuses on inculcating young people with conservative ideals. After Cheney’s speech, the group screened a new movie for the assembled donors called, “Still Point in a Turning World: Ronald Reagan and His Ranch.”
Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin spoke the night before in the same cozy dining room. While Palin did not eat dinner with the larger group, Cheney did and seemed to enjoy himself. Palin attracted a hoard of national reporters and TV crews, but Cheney’s speech attracted much less national attention and only a handful of photographers.
One of the questioners expressed frustration that the Bush administration added to the deficit and created the costly Medicare prescription drug benefit. Cheney sidestepped in his response, blaming the deficit spending on the September 11th attacks.
“I think we could have done a better job on spending,” he said. “There was a lot of stuff we had to do, a lot of stuff we had to do fast, and it was expensive.”
{Capitol News Company, LLC/Matzav.com}
