Petrelis Files

(Elizabeth, in green, with Mary at her side)






Times (UK): Liz Cheney Aids Dick's Iranian Saber-rattling

Dick Cheney rattled his war-mongering saber on Monday against the Islamic Republic of Iran over its nuclear program, but the U.S. press has thus far failed to note his daughter Elizabeth's role in laying the groundwork for regime change in Iran.

If you want to know Elizabeth Cheney, a top analyst at the U.S. State Department, is helping her father in this effort, you've got to cross the Atlantic Ocean to learn more:

Sunday Times, March 5

THE war in Iraq is her father’s business but Elizabeth Cheney, the American vice-president’s daughter, has been given responsibility for bringing about a different type of regime change in Iran.

Cheney, a 39-year-old mother of four, is a senior official in the State Department, which has often been regarded as hostile territory by Dick Cheney’s White House team. Nonetheless father and daughter agree it would be better for the mullahs’ regime to collapse from within than to be ousted by force.

The question is whether democratic reform can be achieved before Iran becomes a nuclear power. That is the younger Cheney’s job. In the State Department she is referred to as the “freedom agenda co-ordinator” and the “democracy czar” for the broader Middle East. “She’s fantastic and dynamic,” said a colleague.

Her official title is deputy assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern affairs and she is in charge of spending the $85m (£48m) — up from $10m last year — recently allocated to promote democracy in Iran. Much of it will be spent on broadcasting the views of exiles, dissidents and reformers inside Iran.

Cheney is better known to Iranian listeners of Voice of America’s Persian service than she is to Americans, although she publicly backed her sister Mary’s right to privacy when Democrats made an issue of her lesbianism in the 2004 election.

She rarely gives interviews but set out her agenda in a speech to the Foreign Policy Association’s annual dinner last June. Cheney said there was a “direct parallel” between reform movements in the Arab world and Poland’s Solidarity in the 1980s, which lit the “spark of freedom” in the Soviet bloc. [...]

Click here to read Elizabeth Cheney's six-page speech at the association's dinner last year.

She paints such a rosy picture of democracy supposedly on the march in the Middle East and the advances of women in that part of the world I wonder if she gets her intelligence from the same people who assured us WMDs existed in Iraq.