Godfather IV

OTTUMWA, Iowa, Sept. 13 - Mr. Cheney said Monday that last week's massacre at a school in the southern Russian town of Beslan had caused some foreign leaders who have been skeptical of America's aggressive foreign policy to reconsider.

"Some of our European friends have been somewhat ambivalent," Mr. Cheney told a town hall meeting inside an airport hangar on the outskirts of this small town in southeast Iowa. He mentioned no nations by name.

Some foreign countries have probably been thinking that "if they kept their heads down," their citizens would not suffer terrorist attacks, the vice president said. "Well, Russia got his anyway," he said.

As a result, Mr. Cheney said, "people are reassessing now" whether they should shed their ambivalence and openly support Mr. Bush's policies.NY Times