Rallying troops after an overnight stay at an air base, US Vice President Dick Cheney said yesterday that as long as freedom is suppressed in the Middle East, the region will remain a place of "stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export."
"You and I know what it means to be free," Cheney told the troops at an outdoor rally.
"We wouldn't give such freedoms away and neither would the people of Iraq or Afghanistan, but in both of those countries, they're facing attack from violent extremists who want to end all democratic progress and pull them once again in the direction of tyranny," he said.
"We're helping them fight back because it's the right thing to do and because it's important to our own long-term security," Cheney said. "As [US] President [George W.] Bush has said, the war on terror is an ideological struggle and as long as this part of the world remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export," he said.
The vice president, the highest ranking US official to sleepover in Iraq, plans to meet with Iraqi leaders before heading to Oman, Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Palestinian territory and Turkey, the next stops on his 10-day trip through the region.
Among the officials on his schedule was Massoud Barzani, head of the regional administration in the semiautonomous Kurdish area.
Cheney and his wife, Lynne, slept in a trailer set up for VIPs at Balad Air Base about 64km northwest of Baghdad, then had breakfast with some of the 20,000 US troops on the base, which supplies food, fuel, bullets and other items -- from toilet paper to military hardware -- to all operations in Iraq. It was Cheney's second overnight in Iraq. He spent a night last May at Camp Speicher, a base near former leader Saddam Hussein's hometown and about 160km north of Baghdad.
Noise from mortar and artillery shells fired from the base interrupted sleep during the pre-dawn hours on Monday, but base officials said later the shelling was routine -- used to keep pressure on ground kilometers off base where insurgents have been active before.
Cheney said he was already up when he heard the explosions. "Nobody came running in to wake me up," he said as he loaded his plate with sausage, bacon and eggs, and hash browns. He and his wife and daughter, Liz, who also spent the night at the base, had breakfast with a dozen or more troops, and Cheney presented two bronze stars awarded for valor.
Hundreds of troops greeted Cheney at the rally where he reaffirmed the US' commitment to Iraq and credited recent reductions in violence to Bush's decision last year to send 30,000 more troops to the fight.
"We made a surge in operations and the results are now clear: more effective raids to root out enemies, better and more accurate intelligence information from the locals and higher hopes for the future among the Iraqi people," Cheney said.
The vice president expressed hope that anti-US sentiment generated by the US-led invasion five years ago this week, was waning -- at least in Iraq where the US death toll is nearing 4,000.
"Across this country, the more that Iraqis have gotten to know the Americans -- the nature of our intentions and the character of our soldiers -- the better they have felt about the United States of America," he said.
Meanwhile, a conference to reconcile Iraq's warring political groups began to unravel even before it got under way yesterday, with the main Sunni Muslim Arab bloc pulling out and protesting it had not been properly invited.
The gathering, billed as the biggest of its kind in Iraq, aimed to bring leaders of rival factions together around much-delayed so-called laws meant to promote common cause between majority Shiites and minority Sunni Arabs.
The Accordance Front, the main Sunni Arab bloc, had said it would attend but pulled out as dozens of political leaders gathered at a hotel in Baghdad's heavily fortified Green Zone.
"The Front will not attend the conference, not because it does not believe in reconciliation ... but because the invitations were sent to members of the Front and not formally to the Accordance Front," spokesman Salim al-Jubouri said.
Jubouri said decisions from previous meetings had never been implemented.
"How can we now arrange new proposals?" he said.
Washington has urged Iraq's leaders to take advantage of security gains and make political progress.
The ability of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Shiite-led government to pass laws was badly hampered last year by the withdrawal of key factions, including the Accordance Front and politicians loyal to anti-US Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
The head of the Sadrist political bloc, Nassar al-Rubaie, arrived at the conference but refused to say whether he would take an active role.
"Such conferences are just government propaganda," Rubaie said.
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