CNN’s Larry King Live: Larry King Interviews Senator John Kerry (TRANSCRIPT)
November 29th, 2006 @ 10:43 pm
John Kerry was on Larry King Live tonight. The interview, as I expected ran the gamut of some of today’s news on the Iraq War and of course included the obligatory speculation about the ‘08 presidential race. Kerry was on the money about Iraq and needless to say much of what he has said in the past, including Iraq being a Civil War, is all very prevelant in the news today.
King brought up that Kerry had met with the Iraq Study Group, on Monday and asked Kerry if he had any idea what they would say — the interview was a few short hours before the N.Y. Times broke their story revealing that the Iraq Panel will recommend “pullback of combat troops.” No doubt Kerry had an indication that the Iraq Panel would recommend “a gradual pullback” of the troops, somewhat similar to his proposal months ago, and in the interview he also stressed the need for a real diplomatic summit, “bringing all of the warring parties together, bringing the permanent five of the United Nations together, bringing the Arab League, the neighbors of the region and all coming together at a major conference at which the real stakes with respect to Iraq are put on the table.”
“That kind of diplomacy has been absent here.”
The transcript is as follows:
KING: Good evening.
We begin with the Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, his party’s presidential candidate in 2004.
He joins us from Boston.
We want to get into news right at the top of things.
The president and the prime minister of Iraq were supposed to meet today in Jordan. Senator, they did not. It’s postponed until tomorrow.
What do you make of that? Was that a snub today?
KERRY: Well, it’s hard to interpret. But I think what’s more important is really what happens tomorrow and what happens in the next days.
Obviously, the memorandum that was released today in the “New York Times” is devastating in the candor that it expressed about the lack of confidence in the prime minister. And I think what’s critical is that the president needs to express a change of policy.
I hope the Baker Commission is going to come out with very strong language that expresses the need to begin the process of disengaging from Iraq, of shifting responsibility to the Iraqis and beginning to move on.
We cannot continue the way we are.
KING: What do you make of the Iraqi prime minister?
You met him.
KERRY: I think that all of the politicians in Iraq are using the American presence as an excuse, Larry, not to take on the responsibility they need to, which is why I have said for three years now that this is the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time and particularly within the last year that we need to be clearer about a date by which they will assume the responsibility.
In the absence of a date, they have an excuse to simply continue to dawdle and procrastinate as long as they want. I don’t think one young American soldier ought to be killed because Iraqi politicians are unwilling to compromise in order to assume responsibility for their own country.
KING: Are they dying in vain?
KERRY: No. I think that any soldier — and I said this including during the time of Vietnam — any soldier who makes the choice of serving their country and puts the uniform on and goes for whatever the commander-in-chief asks them to do is a patriot and is serving their country in the highest way possible.
And we honor that sacrifice best by giving those soldiers the kind of policy that is successful.
The current policy is not succeeding. The current policy is needlessly putting many of them, in my judgment, at risk in ways that they don’t have to be and it is helping the Iraqis to avoid the responsibility for their own country.
So what we owe those young men and women who are the most capable volunteer force we’ve ever had in our lifetimes, what we owe them is a policy that, in fact, gets success. And the only way to do that is not through a military solution, it’s through a political solution, which will come through diplomacy.
KING: Colin Powell says that this conflict is a civil war. NBC calls it a civil war. The “New York Times” calls it a civil war.
Do you?
KERRY: Yes. And I have for some time. It is a civil war.
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http://blog.thedemocraticdaily.com/?p=4854
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