Thursday, January 15, 2004

Full Text:Speech by Dick Cheney in LA yesterday. "The United States needs to be foward-deployed. We don't want to end that practice at all. It's going to be vital for us to maintain our relationships and our alliances around the world to do that. But what we're finding increasingly is we need forces that can move on relatively short notice. We need warm bases, bases we can fall in on, on a crisis and have present the capabilities we need to operate from. But today, we've got forces deployed in places like Uzbekistan, as a result of operations in Afghanistan over the last couple of years." And: "The Israelis are never going to sign up, nor should they sign up to a peace unless, in fact, they've got confidence that there's someone there on the Palestinian side prepared to keep those commitments. "