CNN

SPEAKERS: SEN. JOHN KERRY, D-MASS.
JIM CLANCY, CNN INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR

CLANCY: Well, Democratic senator and former presidential candidate John Kerry says the president's speech did not address all of the core issues that face Iraq. We asked him earlier if he thought that the president had accepted responsibility for the situation in Iraq today.

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KERRY: First of all, last night, the president said mistakes had been made. He didn't say they were his. And he accepted responsibility for those mistakes. He didn't say I made mistakes. So there is a distinction.

Secondly, what was absent from the president's speech last night, regrettably, was the political solution, the diplomatic political solution that is critical to ending the violence. The president, the secretary of state, the former secretary of defense, our generals, have all said, that this can not be resolve military.

And yet all you heard last night was really the military piece of this. If you don't resolve the question of oil revenues, if you don't resolve the federalism issues between Sunni and Shia, you don't have a hope to end to this sectarian violence. And unless the principal leaders, Mr. Hakim of the SCIRI Party, Muqtada al-Sadr and Mr. Maliki, et cetera, all come together, this is not going to end. The violence won't end, and our additional troops will be put at greater risk, become a bigger target, and we'll have been down this road before.

You're putting forward a bill, which would demand that the president get Congress' approval to increase these troop levels. Doesn't it just face an obvious veto? What would be the effect?

KERRY: The effect is to make it clear that we're exercising our constitutional responsibility and our responsibility to troops, frankly. You know, these young people are amazingly courageous. Their lives are on the line. We owe it to them to have the best policy for them. And I don't think we want them being sent out on missions that are preordained to fail, or to put them at a higher level of risk without resolving the fundamental problems in Iraq itself.

CLANCY: We have heard have heard from troops in Iraq that they want more boots on the ground. They can not control the situation. Now doesn't that call for some kind of engagement here?

KERRY: What it calls for, and I think they would be the first to say it, is that they don't want just an endless revolving door of violence. The violence, you have to get at the cause of it. The cause of it is the fundamental insecurity of different entities in Iraq, with respect to their future. The Sunni want to come back to power. They believe they were born to it. They believe it's their right, and their uncomfortable without sufficient oil revenues, and guarantees of a national state.

The Shia, on the other hand, were oppressed by the Sunni for years. They now have the power, won at the ballot and they have a desire to sort of have a kind of separate federalist without a strong central government, and that's the fundamental tension.

As long as those politicians continue to use the American security blanket as a cover for them pursuing their own goals and ends underneath that blanket, we're in trouble. You have to resolve those fundamental differences. And I saw nothing in the president's plan that says those differences are resolved.

CLANCY: Now there are many people that believe today, Muqtada al-Sadr, backed by Iran, is the most important politician who literally may hold the future of Iraq in his hands. Many of the same people who stood on the sidelines, in what you termed a couple of years ago as misleading the U.S. public into war with Iraq, are calling for a confrontation with Iran. Would you support a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, knowing it could open up a new front with Iran?

KERRY: No, I think that that would be a very bad idea right now. That is not the first option of what we should engage in with respect to Iran. I certainly wouldn't be against a hot pursuit. I mean, if we catch people coming across the border, or they're firing on our troops, or they're engaging directly and unsettling Iraq, and we catch that, I think we have a right to respond to it.

But I think a proactive effort that at this time, starts to think militarily, with respect to Iran, is wrong-headed and dangerous.

I think we need to engage Iran. I would have liked the president last night to talk more about the diplomatic solution that he's seeking, a political resolution. We should have heard talk of a summit, of a major conference of all the neighbors, and partners and the factions in Iraq, to bring them all to the table and try to drive a resolution to this.

Without that, I'm afraid that this add-on of troops is not going to get the job done.

And if you really want to, you know, pacify Iraq in a military form, you need something like 500,000 troops or more. So this is a token effort, which is trying to send a message to the Iraqi leadership. I think the Iraqi leadership should be required to step up before American troops have to further put themselves on the line.

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