U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney said Tuesday that as long as freedom is suppressed in the Mideast, 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 American troops in Iraq.
"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.
"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, according to the AP. "As President 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."
Hundreds of troops greeted Cheney at the rally where he reaffirmed America's commitment to Iraq and credited recent cuts in violence to President Bush's decision last year to dispatch 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-American sentiment generated by the U.S.-led invasion five years ago this week, was waning - at least in Iraq. "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.
