The interview was done from London by Tom Brokaw. Read the entire transcript:
MR. BROKAW: Do you believe that President Maliki would be in a position to more or less endorse your timetable of getting troops out within 16 months if it had not been for the surge?- See a 9 minute video excerpt from the interview.
SEN. OBAMA: You know, we don't know, because in my earlier statements--I mean, I know that there's that little snippet that you ran, but there were also statements made during the course of this debate in which I said there's no doubt that additional U.S. troops could temporarily quell the violence. But unless we saw an underlying change in the politics of the country, unless Sunni, Shia, Kurd made different decisions, then we were going to have a civil war and we could not stop a civil war simply with more troops. Now, I, I...
MR. BROKAW: But couldn't they make that political decision because troops were there to help them make it.
SEN. OBAMA: Well, the--well, the--look, there's no doubt, and I've said this repeatedly, that our troops make a difference. If--you know, they do extraordinary work. The troops that I met, they were proud of their work, they had made enormous sacrifices, they had fought, they had helped to construct schools and, and rebuilt the countryside. But, for example, in Anbar Province, where we went to visit, the Sunni awakening took place before the surge started, and tribal leaders made a decision that, instead of fighting the Americans, we're going to work with the Americans against al-Qaeda. That was a political decision that was made that has made a huge difference in this entire process.
So the, the point I want to make is this, Tom, I mean, you know, if we want to look at the question of judgment which is the one that John McCain raised, John McCain's essential focus has been on the tactical issue of sending more troops, and he's, he's made his entire approach to foreign policy rest on that support of Bush's decision to send more troops in. But we can have a whole range of arguments about past decisions--the decision to go into Iraq in the first place, and whether that was a good strategic decision, where we've spent a trillion dollars at least by the time this thing is over, lost thousands of lives in pursuit of goals John McCain supported that turned out to be false. We can make decisions about does it make sense for us to set a time frame for withdrawal to encourage the kind of political reconciliation that needs to take place to stabilize Iraq. We can talk about the distractions from hunting down al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, where there is no doubt that we would be further along had we not engaged in some of these actions, and...
MR. BROKAW: But we have to talk about the reality of what's going on in Iraq right now.
SEN. OBAMA: Well, but, but, but, let me...
MR. BROKAW: And the Anbar awakening, most people believe, was successful in large part because the American troops did come in and make it possible for them to have the kind of political reconciliation...
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Obama sticks to his guns on 'Meet the Press'
SEN. OBAMA: Tom, look--Tom, I'm, I'm--the fact that--the...
MR. BROKAW: Do you disagree with that?
SEN. OBAMA: As I said before, our troops made an enormous contribution, but to try to single out one factor in a very messy situation is just not accurate, and it doesn't, it doesn't take into account the larger strategic issues that have been at stake throughout this process. Look, we've got a finite amount of resources. We've got a finite number of troops. Our military is stretched extraordinarily because of trying to fight two wars at the same time. And so my job as the next commander in chief is going to be to make a decision what is the right war to fight, and, and how do we fight it? And I think that we should have been focused on Afghanistan from the start. We should have finished that job. We have not, but we now have the opportunity, moving forward, to begin a phased redeployment and to make sure that we're finishing the job in Afghanistan.
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