Barack Obama meets Bill O'Reilly. Photo courtesy of FOX News
by Mark Silva
ST. PAUL - Barack Obama, who opposed President Bush's deployment of additional military forces in Iraq and pledges to bring American troops home, says the president's "surge'' of forces "succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.''
"I think that the surge has succeeded in ways that nobody anticipated,'' Obama says in an interview with FOX News Channel's Bill O'Reilly, which airs on The O'Reilly Factor at 8 pm EDT this evening. "It's succeeded beyond our wildest dreams."
Obama's reported admission about the surge's success arrives on the evening that Republican John McCain is ready to accept his party's presidential nomination. McCain, a supporter of Bush's war strategy, has insisted that any impartial observer must acknowledge the surge's success.
Yet, the surge also was intended to give the Iraqi government breathing room to achieve the political reconciliation necessary for a stable government there. And in the interview with O'Reilly, according to FOX, Obama says: "The Iraqi still haven't taken responsibility. And we still don't have that kind of political reconciliation."
Is the U.S. fighting "a war on terror,'' as Bush likes to call it?
"Absolutely,'' Obama tells O'Reilly.
Who are the enemies of the U.S.?
"Al Qaeda, the Taliban, a whole host of networks that are bent on attacking America who have a distorted ideology who have perverted the faith of Islam,'' Obama replies, "and so we have to go after them."
On the question of military action against Iran: "It is unacceptable for Iran to possess a nuclear weapon; it would be a game changer...
"I would never take military action off the table."
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