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Balad Air Base: The United States intends to complete its mission in Iraq and will not allow the country to become a staging ground for further terrorist attacks on Americans, Vice President Dick Cheney said on Tuesday.
"All Americans can be certain that we intend to complete the mission so that another generation of Americans does not have to come back here and do it again," Cheney told about 3,000 US troops at Balad Air Base 70 km north of Baghdad.
"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."
"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 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."
Cheney, on a visit to Iraq to assess the success of a US troop build-up promised Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki the unwavering support of the United States.
"We have no intention of abandoning our friends or allowing this country ... to become a staging ground for further attacks against Americans," Cheney, an architect of the 2003 invasion, told the soldiers at Balad.
The vice president expressed hope that anti-American 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.
The vice president spent the night with his wife Lynne in a trailer at Balad, one of the largest US air bases in Iraq. In the early hours there was a barrage of mortar and artillery fire lasting for several hours.
Megan Mitchell, a spokeswoman for Cheney, told reporters traveling with him that US troops on the base had launched pre-emptive fire against areas where they believed "the enemy is located".
Cheney told reporters that no one had told him what the noise was. "Nobody came running in to wake me up," he said.
The war in Iraq, which enters its sixth year this week, is deeply unpopular in the United States and has contributed to President George W. Bush's low popularity ratings.
Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are campaigning to bring US troops home while Republican candidate John McCain, supports keeping high numbers of troops in Iraq until it is more stable.
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