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.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
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.
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