Statement by John Kerry

We must refocus our military efforts from the failed occupation of Iraq to what we should have been doing all along: tracking down and killing members of al Qaeda and their clones wherever they are. We must redeploy troops from Iraq - maintain enough residual force to complete the training and deter foreign intervention, so we can free up resources to fight the global war on terror.

Republicans want to wrap this strategy in slogans because they're afraid to debate what it really is: it's a redeploy-to-succeed strategy - to succeed in defeating world wide terror, and to succeed in making Iraqis themselves responsible for Iraq.

This is the opposite of the administration's stand-still-and-lose strategy - - it's a clear alternative from a broken policy of "more of the same." Every time President Bush tells the Iraqis we will "stay as long as it takes," he is giving squabbling politicians there an excuse to take as long as they want. All of us want democracy in Iraq but Iraqis must want it for themselves as much as we want it for them. It's long overdue for the president to realize that no American soldier should be sacrificed because Iraqi factions refuse to resolve their ethnic rivalries and their competing grasp for oil revenues.

At each step along the way, the Iraqi leaders have responded only to deadlines -- a deadline to transfer authority to a provisional government, a deadline to write a Constitution, a deadline to hold three elections. So we must set another deadline to extricate our troops and get Iraq up on its own two feet -- a clear deadline of July, 2007 to redeploy our combat troops. Make Iraqis stand up for Iraq -- and bring our heroes home.

We also desperately need something else this administration disdains: diplomacy. Real diplomacy -- a Dayton-like summit of Iraq and the countries bordering it, the Arab League, NATO, and the Permanent Members of the United Nations Security Council. Our own generals have said Iraq can not be solved militarily. Only through negotiation and diplomacy can you stem the growing civil war, and only by setting a deadline to get out can we force Iraq and its neighbors to take diplomacy seriously. In almost every aspect of life -- I mean, in school, at work -- if you tell someone to do something and you don't tell them when you want it, you'll never get it. You see when the test is, then you do what you need to do to get ready. Let’s get real -- this will only happen with a deadline.

"Staying the course" isn't far-sighted; it's blind. Leaving our troops in the middle of a civil war isn't resolute; it's reckless. Half of the service members listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall died after America's leaders knew our strategy would not work. It was immoral then and it would be immoral now to engage in the same delusion.