By Xinhua
Baghdad : Visiting U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday asked the Iraqi Kurdish leader to play an active role in the country’s reconciliation effort and in the negotiations of forging a long-term U.S.-Iraqi relationship.
Before wrapping up his two-day visit to Iraq, Cheney traveled north to meet Massoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish autonomous region.
“We are certainly counting on President Barzani’s leadership to help us conclude a new strategic relationship between the United States and Iraq as well as crucial pieces of national legislation in the days ahead,” Cheney said.
Cheney said his first trip to the region was “long overdue.”
Barzani reiterated the commitment that the Kurds “will continue to play a positive role in order to build a new Iraq — an Iraq with great federation, democracy and pluralistic freedom.”
He said the Kurds “will continue to be playing a positive role to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.”
The Kurds have been supported by the United States since the1990s and largely spared the unrest which was rampant in other parts of Iraq in the aftermath of the U.S.-led invasion.
The Kurdish government has been at odds with Baghdad regarding the oil legislation which will distribute Iraq’s oil wealth. The Kurds are also chafed at Turkey’s striking rebels within the Kurdish region.
Washington does not want to see a tense relationship between its two allies. Cheney said the United States and Iraq’s Kurds had built up a “special friendship” during an operation that created no-fly zones over Kurdish areas after the 1991 Gulf war to protect them from ousted dictator Saddam Hussein’s brutal campaigns of repression and gas attacks.
“It is important to lay the foundation of the kind of relationship that will bind our people together for the future as we build on the experience and shared sacrifices” of the past, he said.
Earlier on the day, Cheney told U.S. troops at an airport outside Baghdad that the United States will stay the course in Iraq.
“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 said at Balad Air Base north of Baghdad.
Cheney arrived in Baghdad on Monday, paying a surprise visit before his trip to Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Turkey and Oman.