MR. RUSSERT: ...of, of the Shiites vs. militia of the Sunnis. You could have complete chaos, a haven for terrorism all around the world, and the country will fall apart.

SEN. KERRY: Tim, that’s not what I’ve suggested. And it’s really important to look at what I’ve proposed. The first step is you’ve got to have a government. Our troops are trapped in the middle of a civil war and our troops can’t do anything about a civil war, so you have to sit here intelligently and analytically and say, “OK, if we’re in a civil war, what are we going to do?” Well, part of the reason we’re in a civil war is we don’t have a government five months after an election. And if they can’t put a government together under the threat that the United States is going to withdraw, they’re not going to do it. Then they want the civil war, then they have to fight their civil war. And as General Casey has said, nothing our troops can do will change—this can’t be won militarily, it has to be resolved politically, and there’s no significant effort on the political side to resolve it.

MR. RUSSERT: So if they don’t put it together in five weeks, let them have...

SEN. KERRY: Well, you—it’s...

MR. RUSSERT: ...let them have their civil war.

SEN. KERRY: But, but stop for a minute. It’s going to take you at least five or six months to go through the process of withdrawal, it just does. Jack Murtha is correct about that.

Secondly—let me put this to you, our goal is to train 272,000 security forces. The president’s policy, supposedly, is to stand down as they stand up. Well, the administration has been bragging that we’ve trained 242,000, we’re only 30,000 away from the goal we supposedly have as our final goal. If it’s true that we’ve trained 242,000, where are the troops that are standing down? The president’s policy is to stand down as they stand up; they’ve stood up, supposedly, 242,000, we’re not standing down.

Secondly, the fact is that I have recommended, as Jack Murtha has, and others, that you have an over-the-horizon capacity. You don’t withdraw completely from the region, you don’t leave it exposed to the Iranians and others. And all of this has to happen with this date and accordslike summit taking place at the same time. The absence of diplomacy in this effort is, is, is negligence. I mean, it’s stunning, and you cannot begin to resolve Iraq unless you have that kind of diplomatic effort. That’s—you get the stakeholders—if, if in—if, if the Jordanians, if the Saudis, if others, are truly concerned about the region, and they are, if they’re concerned about chaos, and they ought to be, then the threat of our withdrawal is what is going to finally get them to step up and be involved. But the United States has to lead that effort, and we’re not leading it.

MR. RUSSERT: But by setting a specific date for withdrawal—and you say immediate withdrawal—it is a, a change in your thinking. Now, if you go back to March of ‘04...

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SEN. KERRY: Absolutely.

MR. RUSSERT: ...’04, this is what you said. “Kerry says, he is committed to finishing the mission. ‘My exit strategy is success,’ he says, ‘a viable, stable Iraq that can contribute to the stability and peace in the Middle East.’” And then a month later, you offered this.

(Videotape, April 14, 2004):

SEN. KERRY: I think the vast majority of the American people understand that it is important not just to cut and run. And I don’t believe in, in a cut-and-run philosophy. I think that would be very damaging to the war on terror, it would be very damaging to the Middle East, it would be very damaging to the longer term interests of the United States.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: And last January of, of last year, I asked you specifically about...

SEN. KERRY: Yeah, I remember.

MR. RUSSERT: ...what you are now proposing. Let’s watch.

(Videotape, January 30, 2005):

MR. RUSSERT: Do you believe there should be a specific timetable of a withdrawal of American troops?

SEN. KERRY: No.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT: No. Now you’re saying yes.

SEN. KERRY: There’s no change. Yes, I am saying yes. And what I said back then was based on the fact that the presumption of everybody, Tim, was that we were fighting al-Qaeda principally and that we were looking at the, at the, at the war on terror. The fact is that 98 percent of the insurgency has now been transformed into Iraqis, into indigenous population of Iraq. There are probably less than 1,000 foreign jihadists there. And in my most recent trip to Iraq, it became very, very clear to me, as it has to others, that the Iraqis themselves will not tolerate the jihadists staying on their land.

So the key here is you now have a civil war. This is the third war in Iraq. The first war was the war against Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. The second war was the war against the jihadists with the president’s statement, “It’s better to fight them over there than here.” We accepted that. And under those premises, we didn’t want to be automatically moving. Now we have no choice, because the administration did none of the other things that I also recommended at that point in time, including, may I add, this concept of bringing together the parties in the region and having a major diplomatic resolution.

If you talk to, to leaders in the region and others here in the United States, who look at this issue carefully—experts—they will tell you that Iran is delighted that we’re in Iraq. They love it. And we’re going to strengthen our hand with Iran when we get out of there. We’re going to strengthen our hand with Russia, we’re going to strengthen our hand with China, we’re going to strengthen our hand in the Middle East. And I think it is now imperative to be clear about forcing the Iraqis to stand up on their own. And General Casey, incidentally, has said the large number of American forces there is reducing the willingness of Iraqis to do that.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me go back to October of 2002, when you stood up on the floor of the Senate and said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, biological, chemical, the means to deliver them perhaps to the U.S., potentially nuclear weapons, and then voted to authorize the president to go to war. Your running mate, the man you selected to be the next president of the United States, John Edwards, was on this program. He wrote an op-ed piece first in The Washington Post, and he wrote this: “I was wrong. Almost three years ago we went into Iraq to remove what we were told - and what many of us believed and argued - was a threat to America. But in fact we now know that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction when our forces invaded Iraq in 2003. The intelligence was deeply flawed and, in some cases, manipulated to fit a political agenda. It was a mistake to vote for this war in 2002. I take responsibility for that mistake.” Was it a mistake for you to vote for the war in 2002?

SEN. KERRY: Absolutely. I’ve said so many times, many times since then.

MR. RUSSERT: And you take responsibility for it?

SEN. KERRY: You better believe I take responsibility for it. And that’s one of the reasons why I’m here today, Tim. You know, last night, late at night, I went down to the Wall, the Vietnam Wall. I was amazed by the numbers of people there, 10:30, 11:00 at night, it’s incredible. You walk down that ramp, and as you go down it gets deeper and deeper, and the wall gets higher and higher, and you see these names after names after names; thousands, tens of thousands. They were added to that wall. They died after our leaders knew the policy wasn’t working. And I believe I have a moral responsibility, as we all do in America, to get this right for our soldiers.

Our soldiers have done their jobs. They can’t resolve this issue. This is not to be resolved militarily, it can’t be done from a Humvee or a helicopter. It has to be done politically, diplomatically. You’ve got to resolve the difference between Shia and Sunni. You’ve got to give the Sunni enough power to be safe. You’ve got to give them a source of revenue. You’ve got to reconcile these differences. And Ambassador Khalilzad, who’s a good man, and struggling to do this, cannot do it alone. The absence of the president, the absence of real leadership, the absence of this diplomatic effort is the key, and I refuse to be a member of the United States Senate and add people to the next wall for Iraq because we didn’t do what was necessary to protect our troops.

MR. RUSSERT: Of all the votes you’ve cast in the Senate, is the vote in favor of the war in Iraq in October 2002 the one you would most like to take back?

CONTINUED

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