And an excerpt from Al Ahram:
At her office at the State Department, US Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs, Liz Cheney, is busy hanging up front pages of newspapers which mark the fall of Baghdad to US forces on 9 April. "Hussein's Baghdad falls", reads one headline above the famous picture of the statue of former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein being pulled down by a US tank surrounded by several hundred Iraqis. Like other members of the US administration, 36-year-old Cheney believes that the fall of the former Iraqi regime and "establishing Iraq as a stable, democratic and prosperous nation" are crucial for the rest of the region.
Liz, daughter of US Vice-President Dick Cheney who is known as a key hard-liner in the Bush administration together with Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, has been supervising the implementation of the Middle East Partnership Initiative (MEPI), officially announced by Secretary of State Colin Powell in December. The aims of the initiative, which received an initial funding of $29 million in 2002 and $100 million for 2003, are to provide support for "economic, political, and educational reform efforts in the Middle East and champion opportunity for all people of the region, especially women and youth".