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Audio: McCain Campaign Conference Call

By Robert Stacy McCain on 7.21.08 @ 12:21PM

Now online, the full audio of this morning's conference call featuring John McCain's senior foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann. A quote:

Senator Obama's judgment on Iraq has been universally wrong. He opposed the surge. He predicted it would fail. He said not only would it not decrease sectarian violence, it would likely increase it. Had we followed his course of action there would have been no surge, funding for troops would have been cut off last year. He proposed a withdrawal plan in January 2007 that would have all our troops out of Iraq by March 2008. He rewrote his website on the surge and now he is trying to rewrite history saying he always knew the surge could reduce sectarian violence.
Had we followed Senator Obama's advice in fact he would not be in Iraq today because Iraq would be in chaos. He couldn't visit Basra as he's doing today because Basra would be under the control of Iranian backed killers rather than under the control of the Iraqi government and coalition forces. So what we're seeing today is a real watershed moment for Senator Obama. Is he going to listen to our commanders in the field and talk about and listen to them when they say any withdrawal must be based on conditions or is he stubbornly adhere to his politically motivated plan to have an unconditional withdrawal driven only by dates, arbitrary dates, rather than conditions on the ground?

Later, Scheunemann accuses Obama of "selectively misinterpreting" developments and advocating "unilateral cowboy summitry" with Iran.

topics:
Foreign Policy, John McCain, Iraq, Iran, NATO