Obama: troops out in two to three years
Posted: Saturday, December 15, 2007 2:41 PM by Domenico Montanaro
From NBC/NJ's Aswini Anburajan
Guttenberg, Iowa -- Obama said the
withdrawal of all troops from Iraq could take two and half to three years.
"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."
The remarks are a more optimistic estimate
than what he and the two other leading candidates for the Democratic
nomination, Clinton and Edwards provided at the
Democratic debate at Dartmouth in late September. At that debate, none
of the three candidates would commit to having troops withdrawn from
Iraq by the end of their first term.
The answer at that debate
led voters to pepper Obama with questions about his commitment to
immediately bringing the war to an end, and Obama responded by
criticizing the media for misconstruing his answer. In the weeks
following the debate, he qualified his stance on troop withdrawal
assaying that he would keep troops in Iraq for diplomatic, humanitarian
and counter-terrorism purposes.
"So this isn't like we're going to be home tomorrow. So let's
say that George Bush still has a 100,000 troops or more there when I
take office in January 2009. You take on another sixteen months off of
that, that's two and a half three years away before we have all our
troops out."
The question Obama
received on the war and troop withdrawal was just one of two questions
he received on Iraq and foreign policy over the course of five campaign
events across Iowa. The issue appears to have taken a backseat to
immigration and the economy, topics that in the past four to six weeks
have dominated town halls in Iowa.
