Obama says he will set timetable for Baghdad 8 hours ago
WASHINGTON (AFP) — Democratic Senator Barack Obama warned Sunday that if he is elected president he would set a performance timetable for the Iraqi government and not sit aside "while they dither."
Asked in an interview on Fox News how he would handle the US mission in Iraq if he wins the presidency in the November election, he left open the possibility that he would would continue to work with the war's current architects, including General David Petraeus, who was named last week to lead US forces in the entire Middle East, pending Senate confirmation.
"I will listen to General Petraeus, given the experience that he's accumulated over the last several years. It would be stupid of me to ignore what he has to say," Obama said.
"What I will do is say, we have a new mission. It's my strategic assessment that we have to provide a timetable to the Iraqi government," he added.
Obama said that while he would welcome tactical advice from the current US commanders, "What I will not do is to continue to let the Iraqi government off the hook and allow them to put our foreign policy on ice, while they dither about making decisions about how they're going to cooperate with each other."
Obama reiterated his view that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have overly stretched the US military to the point that it does not have adequate capacity to respond to another fight.
"We've got a whole host of tasks and I have also got to worry about the fact that the military has no strategic reserve right now.
"If we have an emergency in the Korean peninsula, if we have an emergency elsewhere in the world, we don't have the troops to deal with it," he said.