Obama scoffs at idea of future Bush role in Iraq David Edwards and Nick Juliano

Published: Thursday June 12, 2008



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Print This Email This Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was taking questions at a town hall meeting in Wisconsin when he fielded a rather unexpected question about who he might have helping implement his Iraq policy. A questioner asked if Obama would send George W. Bush to Iraq, as ambassador, after the president leaves office. Obama, who was sipping from a bottle of water, seemed to almost do a spit-take at the absurdity of the suggestion. "Honestly, we need someone really good in that job," Obama said, indicating that letting Bush anywhere near the country he willfully invaded would be out of the question in an Obama administration. Obama continued to hammer his Republican opponent John McCain Thursday over the latter's recent statement that deciding when US troops would be coming home from Iraq was "not too important." Obama noted McCain's insistence that the duration of troop deployments was less important than reducing casualties and combat deaths, but even there, he said the Republican nominee was missing the point. "The notion that if they're not getting killed that we can leave them there in perpetuity -- a hundred years, John McCain says -- first of all that means he's not thinking about the extraordinary burden that families are under, on two or three or four tours of duty," Obama told the crowd in Kaukauna, Wisc. "But he's also not thinking about taxpayers who are spending 10 to 12 billion dollars a month in Iraq. And that's money that can go ... to putting people back to work right here in the United States of America." This video is from CNN.com, broadcast June 12, 2008.

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