Q: What has been the biggest success in Iraq?

A: The initial military was extraordinarily successful in moving into Iraq, and it exceeded all expectations, even those of us who expected the military to be successful were stunned and impressed by how efficient our military and our brave fighting forces were in executing it. But missing 380 tons of explosives being used on roadside bombs is an enormous error, particularly when the Bush administration had been warned by the Atomic Energy Commission. Keyes has suggested that somehow I'm na‹ve to question how we've gone about this war in Iraq. It strikes me that the Bush administration has been na‹ve throughout. It was na‹ve to think that we'd be greeted as liberators in Iraq. It's been na‹ve in thinking that somehow this would actually diminish recruitment for terrorism. In fact, it's accelerated it. It's been na‹ve with respect to how difficult it's gonna be to secure the peace, and our troops and our taxpayers are suffering from those errors.

Q: You're in favor of keeping troops in Iraq. How long?

A: The War on Terror has to be vigorously fought. Where we part company is how to fight it, because Afghanistan in fact was not a preemptive war, it was a war launched directly against those who were responsible for 9/11. Iraq was a preemptive war based on faulty evidence-and I say that not in hindsight, or Monday-morning quarterbacking. Six months before the war was launched, I questioned the evidence that would lead to us being there. Now, us having gone in there, we have a deep national security interest in making certain that Iraq is stable. If not, not only are we going to have a humanitarian crisis, we are also going to have a huge national security problem on our hands-because, ironically, it has become a hotbed of terrorists as a consequence, in part, of our incursion there. In terms of timetable, I'm not somebody who can say with certainty that a year from now or six months from now we're going to be able to pull down troops.

# We have to do three things in Iraq. We have to advance the speed with which we are training Iraqi troops and security forces so that they can stabilize the country, and that's going to require our help.
# But it's also going to require the help of the international community, which is why we have to internationalize this process. I'm under no illusions that the Germans and the French are going to be sending troops in any time soon, but we can get them to put more resources into the training and infrastructure required to secure the Iraqi borders and the Iraqi streets.
# Finally, it's important that we get our reconstruction moving. The reconstruction process that has taken place has been completely inept. And that's not simply my estimation, that's the estimation of the two ranking Republican Senators on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who issued a blistering attack on the Bush administration. Highly unusual and it indicates how badly botched this job has been.

Speculation in the US media over a potential Obama presidential campaign intensified last week as Time magazine published the senator's photo on its cover beside the headline, "Why Barack Obama Could Be the Next President." All the major newspapers are meanwhile running reviews of Obama's new book, The Audacity of Hope, which the author is touting in a series of interviews on American television.

The 45-year-old has done nothing to squelch the growing frenzy. Obama no longer denies interest in joining the race for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Obama indicated that he will weigh the outcome of the Nov. 7 US congressional elections. A Democratic takeover of both the House & Senate would increase the likelihood of Obama vying with Hillary Clinton for the party's 2008 nomination. "When the election is over and my book tour is done, I will think about how I can be most useful to the country and how I can reconcile that with being a good dad and a good husband," Obama told Time.