| Spinboy |
From his website:
Bringing Our Troops Home
Obama will immediately begin to remove our troops from Iraq. He will remove one to two combat brigades each month, and have all of our combat brigades out of Iraq within 16 months. Obama will make it clear that we will not build any permanent bases in Iraq. He will keep some troops in Iraq to protect our embassy and diplomats; if al Qaeda attempts to build a base within Iraq, he will keep troops in Iraq or elsewhere in the region to carry out targeted strikes on al Qaeda.
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/iraq/
From the April 16 Obama/Clinton debate:
GIBSON: And, Senator Obama, your campaign manager, David Plouffe, said, "When he is" -- this is talking about you -- "When he is elected president, we will be out of Iraq in 16 months at the most. There should be no confusion about that."
So you'd give the same rock-hard pledge, that no matter what the military commanders said , you would give the order to bring them home?
OBAMA: Because the commander-in-chief sets the mission, Charlie.
That's not the role of the generals.
And one of the things that's been interesting about the president's approach lately has been to say, "Well, I'm just taking cues from General Petraeus."
Well, the president sets the mission. The general and our troops carry out that mission. And, unfortunately, we have had a bad mission set by our civilian leadership, which our military has performed brilliantly. But it is time for us to set a strategy that is going to make the American people safer.
Now, I will always listen to our commanders on the ground with respect to tactics, once I've given them a new mission, that we are going to proceed deliberately, in an orderly fashion, out of Iraq, and we are going to have our combat troops out. We will not have permanent bases there.
Once I have provided that mission, if they come to me and want to adjust tactics, then I will certainly take their recommendations into consideration. But, ultimately, the buck stops with me as the commander-in-chief.
And what I have to look at is not just the situation in Iraq, but the fact that we continue to see Al Qaida getting stronger in Afghanistan and in Pakistan. We continue to see anti-American sentiment fanned all across the Middle East.
We are overstretched in a way -- we do not have a strategic reserve at this point. If there was another crisis that was taking place, we would not have a brigade that we could send to deal with that crisis that isn't already scheduled to be deployed in Iraq.
That is not sustainable; that's not smart. National security policy is going to change when I'm president.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Demo...=4670271&page=3
Obama is asked if he would stand by his pledge to have troops out of Iraq within 16 months of becoming president, regardless of what U.S. generals advised. He asserts that yes, that is his call, "because the commander in chief sets the mission." And, he adds, the U.S. involvement in Iraq is a "bad mission."
He does throw in a caveat that he will "always" listen to the military about "tactics" -- meaning, presumably, that he would follow their lead in terms of implementing a safe withdrawal.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/was...ry-clint-8.html
"WhenI say we are going to pull out," Obama said, "we can take one to two brigades out every month responsibly and safely. At that pace, it would take 16 months to get our combat troops back home."
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/arch.../15/519023.aspx |
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| VacateTheWord |
| Time to the convention-goers to break out the flip-flops that have been in storage since 2004. :) |
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| Stonewall |
Quote: Originally posted by VacateTheWord
Time to the convention-goers to break out the flip-flops that have been in storage since 2004. :) |
Can you say "Obama's War"? |
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