Obama calls on Iraq to take reign
Washington D.C., 2008 Aug 9, IRIB
US Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Saturday reiterated his call for ending the Iraq war and urged the Iraqi government to take responsibility for the country's security.
"It's time to end the war in Iraq responsibly by asking the Iraqis to take responsibility for their future and to invest in their own country," Obama said in his weekly radio address.
Obama said that Americans had learned this week that the Iraqi government now had a 79-billion-dollar budget surplus thanks to their oil profits. While this Iraqi money sits in American banks, American taxpayers continue to spend 10 billion dollars a mon th to defend and rebuild Iraq, the Illinois senator pointed out.
"Our country has spent nearly a trillion dollars in Iraq, even as our schools are underfunded, our roads and bridges are crumbling, and the cost of everything from groceries to a gallon of gas is soaring," Obama noted.
"Now think for a moment about what we could have done with the hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars that we've spent in Iraq," he continued.
"We could have rebuilt American schools and roads and bridges. We could have made historic investments in alternative energy to create millions of American jobs."
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