Ed Schultz: Joining us, one of my favorites and one of the favorites of our listeners, Senator John Kerry from Massachusetts. Senator, great to have you back with us.

John Kerry: Good to be with you, Ed, how are you?

Ed Schultz: Well, we’re doing fine, but I’m just sitting on the fence right here trying to figure out who’s going to win this battle here, after this veto comes up. What’s the next available option, you think, Senator? It looks like the President is going to veto this, and the sparring goes back and forth. What’s your call on this?

John Kerry: Well the next step is that we have to pass the supplemental, we have to pass funding for the troops, which we will do, but with some kind of restraints. I mean, the president does not have an open-ended hand here, and he’s got to realize that. He may not like it, but he’s got to realize it. There was an election last year, the election resoundingly called for a change in direction in Iraq, and we’re fighting for a change in direction in Iraq. Period.

Ed Schultz: Well, he wants a clean bill -- no dates, no benchmarks, so --

John Kerry: Well, sorry Mr. President. We don’t – you know, we don’t trust these guys. Ed, it’s just that simple. They’ve been wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong. And you can multiply that out, probably. Almost every single decision with respect to Iraq has been wrong. You can go back to Dick Cheney talking about Saddam Hussein having reconstituted nuclear weapons, to his definitive statement in 2002, 5 years ago, “Saddam is actively pursuing nuclear weapons at this time” -- boom! Wrong. He was wrong. He was wrong when he said 2 years ago, “We’ll succeed in Iraq, just like we did in Afghanistan.” Well, we have troubles in Afghanistan, and he said – we all remember, who has forgotten him saying that the insurgency is in the last throes? This was two years ago. You got more violence month to month than ever before. Why should we listen to them? They have been wrong, and we need – you know, they claim we’re interfering with their management of the war-- well, of course we are, because they are not managing it effectively.

Ed Schultz: So you’re saying, Senator Kerry, to our listening audience and the country that there is no way that a clean bill’s going to end – and I use that term --

John Kerry: Well, I’m not saying that, I’m saying that we are going to try to send something with some responsible benchmarks. Look, I mean, let’s be realistic about what we’ve sent him. The President keeps mischaracterizing it – as usual – misleading Americans – as usual – when he stands up and says to America, “This is a surrender bill.” I mean, since when? What a stupid characterization of an important foreign policy decision. To set a date, which is the same date that the Iraq Study Group with Jim Baker and other people effectively said we could meet, to set a date leaving the president discretion to have troops continue to be there to finish training, to have troops there to chase Al Qaida, to have troops there to protect American facilities and forces is hardly a surrender or departure. It is the way to leverage the behavior of the Iraqis, which this Administration has consistently been unwilling to leverage. They’re unwilling to get tough with these guys, and so they stay there and say, “Well, we’re here, we’re here to help you as long as it takes.” And so what do they do? They take as long as they want to do anything. The most simple kind of decision – they take as long as they want, and our kids get blown up, and our kids come back to Walter Reed, and get, you know, shunted around as we’ve seen, and it’s a disgrace – it’s just a disgrace.

Ed Schultz: Senator John Kerry with us here on the Ed Schultz show. Does Dick Cheney have any kind of credibility with anybody anymore?

John Kerry: I don’t know, I guess 9% of the people approve of what he’s doing, so he’s got a 9% base out there.

Ed Schultz: I get a sense, Senator, that they’re flat out playing their last card here, that they’re almost playing a game of chicken. The President comes out yesterday and says this before he gets on Marine 1, and then Cheney goes up to the Hill and makes uncharacteristically a comment, coming out of caucus the way he did, is this their last-ditch strategy --

John Kerry: Well, they don’t have anything else – look, they have nothing, there are only two choices here, you either sit down and responsibly do diplomacy, and they’ve obviously refused to do that properly, so they’re sitting there, you know, putting American lives at risk in order to pursue something that almost everybody understands is not the way to resolve the crisis here. I mean, when your own general tells you there’s no military solution, you gotta say well where is the political solution, where is the diplomacy, where is the negotiation, where’s the summit? Where are the things necessary to try to resolve the real differences here? You know, I think, I gotta tell you, I think a lot of those countries over there are just waiting for these guys to leave town.

Ed Schultz: What about General Petraeus – he, of course, is saying that he needs the full troops to make this escalation work – do you believe that?

John Kerry: Well, I don’t know what he means by “the full troops.”

Ed Schultz: Well, they’ve only got like 60% of this surge effort --

John Kerry: Well of course, whatever his plan is, he needs his opportunity to carry out his plan. I understand that. I’m not negating that; I just don’t think it’s a plan that can work, ultimately. And I think – you know everything that I’ve said previously has borne out here.

Ed Schultz: No question.

John Kerry: I said that what’s going to happen when they start putting in more troops is they’ll retreat into the shadows for a few weeks, they’ll take a look at how the troops maneuver, how they patrol, where they go. They’ll take stock of the weaknesses and then they’ll probe and come at them and attack. And that’s exactly what they’ve done. And they’ve now got these, you know, little pockets of Americans deposited around the city, which is just a great target for these guys who know the streets and speak the language and look the same way -- and different from our guys. So I mean, this is not a hard equation to understand.

Ed Schultz: Senator Kerry, what do you think the Tillman testimony on the Hill yesterday is going to have any effect – if any effect on our troops – and who’s going to pay for that? I mean, what a horrible sin--

John Kerry: I honestly don’t know. It’s a terrible story. I just don’t know the answer to that. I think our troops are remarkable people, they have shown themselves to have incredible resiliency, they’ve been asked to do a lot and they’ve done it, and they’ll continue to. I don’t think that they’re gonna be affected by that. I think what they want is a policy that can work for them. I mean, that’s what I’m looking for. You know, I’m not – this is not a “quit” attitude, this is the how-do-we-win, how do we get to be successful. The only way I know of now to be successful is to resolve the political stakes between the stakeholders – the politicians who are jockeying for power in Iraq. And the Shia have one set of interests and the Sunni have another set of interests. And unless those interests get met through some negotiating process, they’re going to go on killing each other. And I don’t want our guys caught in the middle of that. We just – we did not vote to put American forces in the middle of a civil war. Nor did the American people choose people to put them in the middle of a civil war.

Ed Schultz: Do you think Senator Reid was correct when he said the war was lost?

John Kerry: Well, you know, everybody will choose their own language to express their frustration here. I think that -- my hope would be that we can get what we need to get in terms of a modicum of stability in Iraq so that our troops can come back and feel like they gave them their best–these folks their best shot. You know, you can argue – Harry Reid, I understand what he’s saying in terms of what they set out to do, this sort of democracy that would be simple the way they promised – in all those regards, those promises are broken and old and not retrievable. But I certainly still believe we can protect America’s interests and honor the sacrifice of our troops by coming up with a new security arrangement for the Middle East, a new security arrangement for Iraq and the sort of, you know, a level of stability and accomplishment by a government that allows our troops to come home, as I say, over the course of the next year. I see nothing precipitous in that, I think it’s a goal most Americans would support, and this Administration just doesn’t seem to know how to get it done.

Ed Schultz: Finally, Senator Kerry, there’s been a lot of parallels drawn between the Viet Nam conflict and this situation that we’re in right now. And you lived through it both and visible about and it’s been played out quite a bit in the American media. Did you ever think that this country was ever going to get itself in a mess that we’ve got ourself in right now? I mean, isn’t this Viet Nam all over again? I mean, you’re living through this again – do you believe this – I mean, what are your --

John Kerry: It’s quite shocking. No, it’s really – I mean, these are arrogant, there’s an arrogance to the policy and to the way they’ve approached it that is a complete reminder of what happened in Viet Nam. And just a lack of candor with the American people, similar to it, a complete misunderstanding of culture and of history, and there are a lot of similarities. And it’s very depressing to see a generation that was supposed to have learned those lessons so willfully and obtusely turn their backs on them and ignore them. And it’s quite shocking.

Ed Schultz: Senator, great to have you on. Thanks so much.

John Kerry: Good to be with you. Thank you sir.