Yesterday afternoon Senator Kerry made a powerful speech in which he challenged his colleagues on both sides of the aisle to take prompt action and bring the war in Iraq to a close. The full text of his remarks is part of the Congressional Record for July 12, but here are some key excerpts from that speech as delivered on the floor of the Senate:

Unless and until Iraqis resolve their fundamental political differences, any security gains will be temporary at best, particularly given the numbers of troops that are committed to that security, and given the difficulties that we already understand in terms of deployment schedules.

That is a fundamental underlying reality that colleagues in the Senate need to focus on. Any tactical gain in the short term, whether it is in Anbar Province, Diyala, or elsewhere, is welcome now, but the fact is, it is fundamentally temporary absent the political resolution that is critical to ultimately ending the violence.

So moving the goalposts, dressing up the failure to meet strict benchmarks as progress, those are, frankly, rationalizations for failure over the long term. They are not plans for success. It is hard when you measure the absence of political progress over the course of the last months against these temporary tactical gains. It is very difficult to suggest that we are doing anything except sort of committing American forces, troops, to a kind of holding action for hope, hope that there is some turn and some kind of outcome.

I think most of us would rather have the U.S. military committed to what we all consider to be a winning strategy, not a hopeful strategy.

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I think most of our colleagues understand this war in Iraq was a disastrous mistake and the policy being pursued today which doesn’t resolve the fundamental differences that are propelling Iraqis to kill Iraqis is itself a mistake. So we are seeing a war prolonged and prosecuted not for a winning strategy. No general has come to us, no administration official has come to us where we meet for our secret briefings, or in any committee and said: “This is a winning strategy. What we have is a hope, a wing, and a prayer that somehow these Iraqis are going to come together and make some decisions.”

But we don’t even have the kind of leverage diplomacy that war deserves to maximize the ability of those people to come together. We are seeing a war prolonged to prosecute it not for a winning strategy but for a refusal to accept reality.

What is that reality? We have heard it from General Casey, General Abizaid, General Petraeus, from the Secretary of State, from the President, and the Vice President—there is no military solution.

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The only question on this Senate floor now is whether we are going to have the courage to change the policy and get it right. The only question is whether we are going to stop this administration from adding to the thousands of mistakes compounded one upon the other or whether we are going to say: “Well, we would like to do it. We kind of have the responsibility to. We hear people in cloakrooms privately saying: I think it is wrong. Boy, it is screwed up. But it doesn’t translate into votes.”

It is that simple. If you think the policy is broken now, then we ought to fix it now, because lives are at stake, as are the interests of our country. Our security is at stake, and the war on terror is at stake.

If anybody needs a reminder of the urgency, I say to them respectfully: You don’t have to wait until September to get a reminder. All you have to do is go out to Arlington Cemetery almost any day of the week. You can see the many military funerals but particularly those of service members who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. You can see the precise military honor given to each of those soldiers, the flags draping the coffin rippling in the breeze. You can see the honor guard folding that flag meticulously into that sharp triangle of blue and white stars and then handing it to the loved ones, the wife, the mother, husband, father. Then hear those words: “On behalf of a grateful nation,” and watch people crumble.

We are losing about 100 soldiers a month. I ask my colleagues: How many more times is that scene going to be repeated between now and September? How many more times is that scene going to be repeated before this institution does what it is supposed to do? How are you going to feel in September if you finally wind up saying: “Well, I think the policy is broken now?” And what will happen with respect to the parents of those soldiers and their families, those who gave their lives so we could wait for a report to tell us the obvious, what we know today?

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So my hope is we would work to find a genuine bipartisan majority in the Senate, a majority of conscience, a pragmatic and patriotic majority committed to work across party lines to right a failed policy in Iraq and leave in place a sustainable strategy.

We keep hearing the words “precipitous’’ and “failure.’’ None of us want failure. We want success. What we are hearing today is - we may have differing views about how you get it; it is not often talked about, but it is clear, and I think it should be talked about - that if we are unsuccessful in seeking the kind of political compromise necessary, there will be a lot of killing that will continue, and there will be people who have put themselves on the line to fight for their own future and for democracy whom we will have obligations to. We need to live up to them.

We need desperately to work together in the best traditions of the Senate and the country to find what I think is real common ground—that we have interests in the region, interests in Iraq, interests with respect to the Middle East peace process, that we will have long-term interests and obligations no matter who is President of the United States or how we approach this and that we need to shift course in order to get to that place.

[Update: Video footage and a full text transcript of this speech have also been posted online by the media bloggers at KerryVision.net.]