A Conversation With John Kerry

First of all, I would have had enough people around who understand and define to me adequately the nature of the threat that we now face. . . . And that requires a pretty extensive outreach effort which includes, in my judgment, not just the Joint Chiefs of Staff and your national security adviser and your intelligence director, but it really includes. . . . President George Herbert Walker Bush, President Jimmy Carter, President Bill Clinton, you know, President Ford, Brent Scowcroft, Zbig Brzezinski, Jim Baker, George Shultz. I mean, you start running the list. I would have had all of those people to some evening sessions, sat up there in the Yellow Room and sat around and said, "What are we facing here? What are the challenges? What's the most important thing we do? How do we win?" Once you define the war on terror, then you can really understand what you've got to do. I think these guys rushed to a definition of the war, saw it the way they wanted to see it, clouded by ideology, and then went out and made people do things accordingly. . . .

It's incomprehensible to me. I mean look -- go back to that period. On that November 21st date [Nov. 21, 2001, when Bush first asked Rumsfeld to look at the war plan for an attack on Iraq], we had not yet fought Tora Bora. . . . We were deep in Afghanistan with an enormous priority to kill al-Qaeda. And we also had a very tentative Pakistan that was fragile, which was a country with nuclear weapons, which we were just moving to the place of sort of participation with America. . . . So my instinct, absent evidence of intelligence, would not have been to ask the secretary of defense for war plans on Iraq. I would have said, "Do we have sufficient troops on the ground to trap Osama bin Laden?" . . . It would not have moved me to take the eye off of Osama bin Laden and the fundamental goal, which was destroying al-Qaeda. . . .

You would have gone to Bush's father, even?

Oh, absolutely. You kidding? I would have said, "Come down here and spend the evening at the White House. Let's talk. I want to talk to you. Tell me about your decision. Tell me all the things that went through your head when you were thinking about going into Iraq and you made the decision finally not to go."

In August '02, Powell asked for a two-hour dinner alone with Bush. Condi Rice is there and he says, "The consequences have not been fully examined and if you invade . . . 'you break it, you own it.'" What would you have done at that moment, if you were president?

If I were president and my secretary of state came to me and said, "Mr. President, you're on a bad track," I would slow the baby down and find out if I was on a bad track. Or I'd fire my secretary of state. . . . I mean, if a guy with Colin Powell's credentials who's been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who'd risen up through service to other presidents, who's been to war, and who is your chosen secretary of state, came to me and said that, I'd say, "Okay. What do we need to do? Where are we? What are the downsides? What haven't we done?"

ON THE "AXIS OF EVIL"

Do you think that the idea of lumping North Korea, Iran and Iraq together is, from a policy point of view, possible or wise, as Bush did in his 2002 State of the Union?

No, it's neither wise nor possible because they are different challenges, different cultures, different historical backgrounds to those challenges. And in the case of the Middle East, we really had an opportunity post-9/11. This is what I think was so important. This is what I saw staring us in the face as I went through 2004 . . . a remarkable opportunity to reconnect to the post-9/11 goodwill of the world, which in my judgment this administration squandered. And that goodwill was perhaps one of our greatest assets. Had we taken that goodwill and built it into a larger strategic concept -- I mean, you can go back to Woodrow Wilson. . . . And then you go to Roosevelt. You go to Kennedy . . . and Eisenhower. They all had a larger strategic concept, which -- this is important -- had the ability to bring the world to our side.

Bush thought this was a strategic concept.

This was an ideological concept, not a strategic concept. . . .

I mean, this is what I would have wanted in first discussions. What are we up against? What is this all about? Did these guys just attack us because this is part of Osama bin Laden's strategy for a greater caliphate in the Middle East, or are they attacking us for other reasons? . . . And it seems to me that the transformational aspects of it require a much more massive kind of public diplomacy, global cooperation on religious issues as well as on economic issues and human rights and other issues, as it did the barrel of a gun. These guys could only see it in the context of the military piece.