Iraq: One Year Later: Kerry's View: Interview: I'm All for Strength, When Appropriate

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As he flew to Florida the morning after Super Tuesday, Senator John Kerry spoke to TIME's Perry Bacon Jr., Lisa Beyer and Karen Tumulty:

TIME: What would you have done about Iraq had you been the President?

KERRY: If I had been the President, I might have gone to war but not the way the President did. It might have been only because we had exhausted the remedies of inspections, only because we had to--because it was the only way to enforce the disarmament.

TIME: But it turns out there was nothing to disarm.

KERRY: Well, if we had kept on inspecting properly and gone through the process appropriately, we might have avoided almost a $200 billion expenditure, the loss of lives and the scorn of the world and the breaking of so many relationships.

TIME: Would you say your position on Iraq is a) it was a mistaken war; b) it was a necessary war fought in a bad way; or c) fill in the blank?

KERRY: I think George Bush rushed to war without exhausting the remedies available to him, without exhausting the diplomacy necessary to put the U.S. in the strongest position possible, without pulling together the logistics and the plan to shore up Iraq immediately and effectively.

TIME: And you as Commander in Chief would not have made these mistakes but would have gone to war?

KERRY: I didn't say that.

TIME: I'm asking.

KERRY: I can't tell you.

TIME: Might the war have been avoided?

KERRY: Yes.

TIME: Through inspections?

KERRY: It's possible. It's not a certainty, but it's possible. I'm not going to tell you hypothetically when you've reached the point of exhaustion that you have to [use force] and your intelligence is good enough that it tells you you've reached that moment. But I can tell you this: I would have asked a lot of questions they didn't. I would have tried to do a lot of diplomacy they didn't.

TIME: You would have asked more questions about the quality of the intelligence?

KERRY: Yes. If I had known that [Iraqi exile leader Ahmed] Chalabi was somebody they were relying on, I would have had serious doubts. And the fact that we learn after the fact that that is one of their sources disturbs me enormously.

TIME: As a Senator, could you not have asked that question?

KERRY: We asked. They said, Well, we can't tell you who the sources are. They give you this gobbledygook. I went over to the Pentagon. I saw the photographs. They told us specifically what was happening in certain buildings. It wasn't.

TIME: You were misled?

KERRY: Certainly by somebody. The intelligence clearly was wrong, fundamentally flawed. Look, the British were able to do a two-month analysis of what happened to their intelligence. This Administration wants to put it off to 2005. It's a national-security issue to know what happened to our intelligence. We ought to know now.

TIME: Obviously it's good that Saddam is out of power. Was bringing him down worth the cost?