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On Carrier in Gulf, Cheney Warns Iran

Vice President Dick Cheney used the deck of an American aircraft carrier just 150 miles off Iran’s coast as the backdrop today to warn the country that the United States was prepared to use its naval power to keep Tehran from disrupting off oil routes or “gaining nuclear weapons and dominating this region.”
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Gerald Herbert/Associated Press

Vice President Dick Cheney on board the USS John C. Stennis aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf today.
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Little of what Mr. Cheney said in the cavernous hangar bay of the aircraft carrier U.S.S. John C. Stennis, one of two carriers whose strike groups are now in the Persian Gulf, was new. Each individual line had, in some form, been said before, at various points in the four-year-long nuclear standoff with Iran, and during the increasingly tense arguments over whether Iran is aiding the insurgents in Iraq.

But Mr. Cheney stitched all of those warnings together, and the symbolism of sending the administration’s most famous hawk to deliver the speech so close to Iran’s coast was unmistakable.