Obama Says Surge in Iraq Successful 'Beyond Our Wildest Dreams'
By Kim Chipman and Julianna Goldman
Sept. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Barack Obama said that the surge of American forces in Iraq has ``succeeded beyond our wildest dreams,'' though the Iraqis still haven't done enough to take responsibility for their country.
``The surge has succeed in ways that nobody anticipated,'' Obama, Democratic presidential nominee, said in a recorded interview scheduled for broadcast tonight on Fox News's ``The O'Reilly Factor'' program. Fox published portions of Obama's comments on it's Web site.
Obama has come under repeated criticism from Republican rival John McCain for opposing President George W. Bush's decision last year to send 20,000 extra combat troops to Iraq. While he's said before that the additional forces have damped insurgent violence, his comments on the program were some the strongest he's made on the issue.
The Illinois senator, who's promised to pull most U.S. combat troops out of Iraq within 16 months if he's elected president, repeated today his call for Iraqis to take more control of their own nation.
``Understand this, the argument was and continues to be when are we going to turn over responsibility to the Iraqis for their own country,'' Obama said during a campaign stop in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Obama's interview will air on the same night Arizona senator McCain gives his nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Although Obama has appeared nine times this year on the News Corp.-owned cable station's interview shows, it was his first appearance on ``The O'Reilly Factor,'' the network's highest-rated program.
Reaching an Audience
Obama adviser Robert Gibbs said the candidate agreed to it because many swing voters tune into the Fox News Channel and the network was likely to have high viewership during the Republican convention.
``It makes sense to talk to all of your audience,'' Gibbs said. While some Democratic candidates complained of unfair coverage by the Fox network during the primaries, Gibbs said ``we think we can get a fair shake.''
The interview was one of the results of a meeting earlier this summer between Obama and News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, who built Fox into a top-rated news channel in less than a decade, and Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, Gibbs said.
Murdoch initiated a ``truce'' between Obama and Fox, according to a report in Vanity Fair magazine by Michael Wolff, Murdoch's biographer. Obama had accused Fox News of abusing him and his wife and portraying him as ``just short of a terrorist,'' according to the magazine. |
