Complete transcript. Excerpt below:
Fox News: The president's decision on Afghanistan is still a few weeks away. Will the country know before Thanksgiving?
Axelrod: I'm not going to, Major, give you a precise deadline. The president is working through the options focusing on the objective that he began with and will continue to focus on which is how do you best disrupt, dismantle, and destroy Al Qaeda and how do you embrace a strategy in Afghanistan that best facilitates that and he'll make a decision soon based on a thoughtful review of all the options.
Fox News: Based on the deployment schedules communicated to the president will he have sufficient time to be prepared for the spring?
Axelrod: Absolutely I think that, you know, the troops that he ordered in March are just now completing their arrival and the next troops would not be due there until the spring and summer and he has time to make this decision and do it in a thoughtful way.
Fox News: To those who ask me via Twitter and other mechanisms why it's taking so long, what's the answer?
Axelrod: The answer is that whenever you deploy troops and make decisions relative to war you ought to make them based on the best information and get the strategy right, make sure that the strategy serves your goals and that you're making the right decisions and he owes that to the service men and women who are going, he owes that to their families, and he owes it to the American people.
Fox News: Health care - the goal is Christmas. Is it a realistic goal soft preference or hard demand for this White House?
Axelrod: We want to get this done. It's been a long process. A lot of good work has been done. We're very close to finishing and a lot of the delay right now has to do with the Congressional Budget Office reviewing the Senate proposal and scoring it for cost and impact and so on. And that's delayed the process. You've got holidays in the way and so on. But we hope that the Senate will work through and get it done. The House seems to be on a more expedited schedule so we have the ability to get this done and we'd like to get it done.
No comments:
Post a Comment