MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: To continue this debate, I am now joined from Boston by Senator John Kerry.
Welcome back, sir.
SEN. KERRY: Thank you. Glad to be with you. Thank you.
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: You -- you heard Senator McCain right there. He said this is a new strategy, it's only been in place for a few months, we have to give it more time to work.
SEN. KERRY: Well, that's the same kind of flawed thinking, I regret to say, that has brought us the first four and a half years of this disastrous war. And the same kind of thinking, actually, that got us mired in Vietnam. You heard Senator McCain say, "I don't want to see a defeated Army." That tells the whole story, George.
There is no military solution. It's not a question of a defeated Army. It's a question of whether or not the Iraqi government is going to step up and make decisions that are out of the hands of our Army, that are outside of any military solution. So, in effect, when Senator McCain and the Republicans set up this equation -- you know, we can't have our Army defeated; our troops have to come home with honor -- of course they have to come home with honor. They've done all that they can do. They've given the Iraqi government the opportunity to make those choices and, as we've seen, the Iraqi government is failing utterly to make any of the critical compromises.
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator, that is true, but it's also true that not only Republicans are making this argument; some Democrats have come back from Iraq this summer saying they see progress. Congressman Brian Baird from Washington said this -- He said, "I believe the dynamics on the ground in Iraq are changing for the better. There are still serious challenges, but the -- the changes I have seen warrant continued support of current actions through the next spring."
SEN. KERRY: Well, I think it's really important that people in quick visits to Iraq don't get sidetracked by what's really at stake here. Anbar province is Sunni violence by al Qaeda against -- it was originally al Qaeda. And the Sunni sheikhs decided they were tired of seeing their daughters raped and their sons beheaded and violence in their villages, so they took advantage of this moment and they've decided to cooperate with us in order to protect Sunni within their essentially Sunni province.
No one can explain -- no one in the administration can particularly say how what has happened in Anbar province in fact translates into anything in the rest of Iraq. And the fact, as John McCain also just said, you know, there's going to be no soft partition, et cetera. George, there already is a soft partition. At the beginning of this war, Baghdad was 65 percent Sunni. Today it is 75 percent Shi'a. And the fact is you've had tens of thousands of Iraqis who have been driven out of communities, and one of the reasons the violence is down is because this level of partition has already taken place.
Moreover, in Basra, the British have pulled back into their base. What's happened there? You -- you have an essentially Iranian- dominated -- southeastern portion that has militia fighting for control among themselves. Is that a success; is that a failure? Is George Bush rushing to send troops into the breach to save the south? No. They're willing to accept that, but they're unwilling to accept the notion that a similar kind of realignment would work in the rest of Iraq.
General Jones's report makes very clear that he believes it is time for a troop redeployment -- he calls it a realignment, a retasking -- and ultimately move into an over-watch strategy.
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: That's true, but sir, General Jones, when he was speaking to Capitol Hill this week, also spoke out against what you've been recommending, a time line for withdrawal. Listen.
USMC RETIRED GEN. JAMES JONES: (From videotape.) I think deadlines can work against us, and I think a -- a deadline of this magnitude would be against our national interest.
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: He says your prescription is against our national interest.
SEN. KERRY : Well, I'm not sure the general is fully briefed on exactly what the legislation says, because it is precisely what he then recommends in his own report, and it is precisely what the administration is now moving to, which is effectively some drawdown of troops with a transition of the mission so that our troops are essentially completing the training and providing sort of an emergency back-up as the Iraqis undertake more responsibilities.
The problem is, George, if you don't have a deadline and you don't require something of the Iraqis, they're simply going to use our presence as cover for their willingness to delay, which is what they have done month after month after month.
You know, the benchmarks that they have failed to meet were not set up by the Congress. The benchmarks were set up by the Iraqis. They said this is what you should measure us by, and the administration said this is what you should measure us by. Well, we are, and when you look at only three out of 18 benchmarks met and the three that are met are almost unimportant in terms of the real issue of the oil revenues, the elections, the amnesty, the de- Ba'athification, the fact is the sole reason given to the Congress and the American people for escalating this war, for sending more troops, was to give them time to make that decision. They've been given that time and they haven't even begun to make the critical decisions.
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Do you trust General Petraeus to deliver a credible and honest report?
SEN. KERRY: I think the general will present the facts with respect to the statistics and the tactical successes or situation as he sees them. But none of us should be fooled -- not the American people, no you in the media, not us in Congress. We should not be fooled into this tactical success debate.
That's not what this is about. We all know we will never have enough troops to provide the kind of tactical success in one community or another all across Iraq. So the only way in which this is ultimately going to be resolved and honor the troops and meet our national interests is to have the political reconciliation. Right now, that political reconciliation really depends on those critical things I just mentioned -- de-Ba'athification, on the amnesty, on the provincial elections, on the -- on the adequate oil revenue sharing. And until that reconciliation takes place, George, things are going to get more and more tense. Front page of The New York Times today, an important story about the real tensions in the streets and what is really happening there.
I think that they're courting disaster. I think there is an -- sort of an illusion being put forward. And you can take a tactical success and misread it, as we did in Vietnam.
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me turn to that Osama bin Laden tape before we go. In the -- over the course of the tape, and I want to show it right now, he seemed to be taunting Democrats for not stopping the war. He said the Democrats haven't made a move worth mentioning; on the contrary, they continue to agree to the spending of tens of billions of dollars to continue the killing and war there.
Now, it is true that there are more troops in Iraq today than when the Democrats were elected last November to control of Congress. Is that a failure?
SEN. KERRY: We don't have 60 votes, George. No, I don't think it's a failure. We have changed policy; we've already changed direction. We've had these reevaluations taking place. We've had an accountability that never existed in the last years. And obviously that's what the election's about -- in 2008 will be about it.
Osama bin Laden's tape is testimony to one thing -- the failure of this administration to capture and kill him, the failure at Tora Bora and the failure subsequently. And it's astounding to me that some of the candidates -- I mean, you have Mitt Romney, who the other day said that capturing or killing Osama bin Laden would be insignificant and that he wouldn't move Heaven and Earth to do it. Now you got -- Fred Thompson seems confused about whether or not it's important.
Here is a man who is sending tapes, influencing the region, influencing and recruiting terrorists, who is still directing from Afghanistan and from Pakistan attacks against the United States, and -- and we have some Republican candidates for president who think it's insignificant? That should disqualify them from being president in the first place.
This is an insult to everybody in the world that this man is still sending his tapes, and it is the real failure, because Iraq had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden in the beginning. And if we had focused on the real war on terror -- where, incidentally, most of the measurements show the real war on terror is going worse. There are more incidents of terror. From September 11th of 2001 till January of that year, there were about 1,100 incidents of terror in the world; last year there were 5,188. It's gone up five-fold, and we have only five of the 22 most-wanted al Qaeda operatives capture or killed.
I think this -- Iraq is distracting from the real focus of the real war on terror. America could be safer. And we need to redirect those troops and we need to do it with a -- with a certainty, with clarity.
MR. STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Kerry, thank you very much.
SEN. KERRY: Thank you.