Kerry on Meet the Press
Designed to offset President Bush's press conference last week, Senator John F. Kerry went on Meet the Press on Sunday. He struggled with specifics and long-winded contradictory explanations....again.
From the transcript--
"MR. RUSSERT: If you were elected one year from now, will there be 100,000 American troops in Iraq?
SEN. KERRY: It depends on what the situation is you find on the ground on January 20th of 2005. I will tell you this, Tim. I will immediately reach out to other nations in a very different way from this administration. Within weeks of being inaugurated, I will return to the U.N. and I will literally, formally rejoin the community of nations and turn over a proud new chapter in America's relationship with the world, which will do a number of things. Number one, change how we're approaching North Korea. Number two, change how we're dealing with AIDS globally. Number three, change how we're doing with proliferation with Russia and other countries. Number four, change our approach to global warming and the effort of 160 nations. And that will take some of the poison out of the well that this administration has put there.
MR. RUSSERT: Senator, the concern I think people have watching is that there's no other guarantee that these other nations are going to come forward with any kind of troops or help. Now, this is the way--Democratic adviser Ivo Daalder had this to say: "[Kerry] faces questions about whether his alternative has been overrun by events--whether it is still realistic for the U.N. to accept political responsibility for Iraq, or other nations to contribute more military help, when conditions are so chaotic..."
SEN. KERRY: That's an accurate...
MR. RUSSERT: Let me just finish here.
SEN. KERRY: Yeah.
MR. RUSSERT: Ivo Daalder, a national security adviser to President Clinton: "Is the U.N. more
capable of running Iraq than we are? If we turn this over to NATO, are we going to get a significantly larger number of troops? In both cases, the answer is no."
And then NATO Secretary-General George Robertson added this. He said, "The Afghan stabilization has prevented NATO from getting involved in Iraq. We're trying to get it right to make sure it works in the long term. ...And before we take on any new obligation, like Iraq, I think we've got to get Afghanistan right."
The U.N. today, front page of The Times. U.N. envoys are worried about going back in there.
SEN. KERRY: Sure, they are. Of course, they are.
MR. RUSSERT: So if Iraq is not secure, how can you possibly say the U.N. and NATO are going to come to our rescue when they don't have the troops or the interest of going in there?
SEN. KERRY: Tim, that is the dilemma. That is exactly the quandary that President Bush and this administration have put the United States of America in. And the tragedy is that there were three great opportunities for this administration to make it otherwise. Opportunity number one was when we voted and when the president broke his promise to build a legitimate coalition by being patient with the U.N. inspection process. Opportunity number two was when the statue fell in Baghdad and Kofi Annan invited the United States to come to the table and offered help and we rejected it. And opportunity number three was when this president went to the U.N. last fall and once again did not invite people, didn't even acknowledge the kind of difficulties we were in that might have elicited some sympathy from other
people.
Now, here we are. I believe the following very deeply. Number one, we cannot fail. I've said that many times. And if it requires more troops in order to create the stability that eliminates the chaos, that can provide the groundwork for other countries, that's what you have to do."
Nothing close to a sound bite in that. Kerry needs to get better at these type of interviews, or quit doing them.
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