Good evening. I have asked for this radio and television time tonight for the purpose of announcing that we today have concluded an agreement to end the war and >bring peace with honor in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia.
But it seems to me, McCain doesn't really believe this kind of rhetoric since he later in the program proclaimed that what really don't want is a "defeated" army like the one we had after declared our "peace with honor" in Vietnam.
McCain: I know what it’s like when you have a defeated army. In the 1970 after we had a defeated army we had riots on our aircraft carriers we had rampant drug use we can insubordination, we had a broken army and it took us a decade to recover from that. I don’t want a defeated army.
Stephanopolous: The question is what does it take?McCain: It does appear that this is moving toward a soft partition. If we leave the Sunni will ally the Iran, the Kurds declare independence. (If we leave) I am convinced that it will be chaos and genocide.
Here's a newsflash you Johnny, it's already is chaos and there already has been genocide and ethnic cleansing. A point which John Kerry made perfectly clear in response.
Kerry: And the fact of the matter is - John McCain just said there isn’t going to be a “soft partition” in Iraq – well the fact of the matter George is that their already is a soft partition in Iraq. At the beginning of this war Baghdad was 65% Sunni, today it is 75% Shia. And the fact is that you’ve had tens of thousand of Iraqis who have been driven out of their communities. And one of the reasons the violence is down is because this level of partition is already taken place.
The real issue isn't about our troops being "defeated" - didn't we declare Mission Accomplished several years ago? Our troops have long ago succeeded in finding out that Saddam had no WMD's, and that he had no ties to Al Qaeda - and managed to depose and execute him anyway. Good Job. Now the question is somewhat different, it's not whether the troops will be defeated - it's whether democracy and diplomacy will be defeated and that's something the troops have nothing to do with.
Stephanpolous: Sen. McCain says we have to give it more time to work.
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 thinking that got us mired in Vietnam. You heard McCain say “I don’t want to see a defeated army”. That tells the whole story. It’s not a question of a defeated army, it’s a question of whether 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 setup this equation "we can’t have a defeated army, our troops have to come home with honor" - well, of course they have to come home with honor - but they’ve done all that they can do. They've given the Iraqi government time to make those choices, and as we’ve seen the Iraqi government is failing utterly to make any of the critical compromises.
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These benchmarks were set 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 - the oil revenues, the elections the de-bathification, the amnesty – the sole reason for sending more troops was to give them time to make that decision. They’ve been given that time but they haven’t even begun to make the critical decisions.
Ah, yes isn't that nostalgia for the 60-70's intoxicating? Meanwhile in the present day, the question of have we made any "progress" in Iraq is still pressing. The real question is "Should we Stay or should we Rock The Casbah"? What does Mccain say?
McCain: No, the Iraqi government has not met benchmarks, but there has been significant local progress. But this strategy has “only just begun” and I think we’re just getting to a point where we could start withdrawing troops.
Stephapolous: How much time do we give them? Gen Patreaus strategy is based on having a functioning Iraqi government...
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