I guess we can just play whack-a-failed-state for the next decade or two.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/katie-couric--john-kerry-interview-213218299.html

Both the question of Iran and drones were asked - and in both cases, his answers were very cautious. The Katie Couic interview is good with serious questions and answers - the problem is a media that seems to want to think in a series of twitter messages 140 characters each. This leads to a detailed interview being dumbed down to - "may use drones" and "open to working with Iran". Some may say that statesmen should consider the sound bites, but this issue is too complex to be intelligently summarized in short sentence segments.

As to the drones, the context is that we absolutely do not want to commit American troops, but we can't ignore the massacres that have taken place. Here, he did not say we WOULD use drones - he simply says we could find there are times that they could be used. President Obama has set that tone - no troops, but other things are on the table.

The number one thing he is speaking of is the need for Iraq to reform to serve the entire population - not just one sectarian piece. This is a very old position for Kerry - going back to 2004. In 2006, when Kerry wrote Kerry/Feingold with Feingold, a major piece was a regional conference to help Iraq determine how it could form a government that would meet the needs of ALL of its people. Senator Warner added that piece to the defense bill passed in 2006. The next year, Biden got a bill which called for the same thing with an added focus on the Iraqis drqwing the lines of possible partitions to create pieces that were relatively homogeneous. Both of these resolutions were ignored by Bush -- and there was no effort to have such a conference even under Obama.

At this point, we have less influence, but it may be that Iraq needs such a conference - even if it includes just leaders of the various areas. It does seem that the Sunnis and Kurds have been given very little power.

In the case of involving Iran - it is clear that Iran has not even suggested what they would do. His answer is that they would welcome anything constructive. Taken in connection with his words on the needed reform -- I would think he is pretty skeptical about what Iran could do - as they are aligned with the Shites, who clearly have almost all the power. It is hard to imagine them pushing Al Maliki to give more power to the Sunnis and Kurds. However, saying no, before they even say what they want to do would be pretty bad diplomacy - and one might question whether it is even our decision whether Iran gets involved.
This is in contrast to a John McCain answer that boils down to "No, they are evil" or a Lindsey Graham answer that supports Iran backing the Shite government in Iraq - ignoring that the Sunnis have a real concern that they have no representation.

highly-autonomous Regions or even Nations sharing the country's oil- and other wealth somehow equitably.

Or one can imagine three independent Sovereign States, which could even broaden to rope in neighboring Syria, Turkey, Iran, Saudi...

Why should early twentieth-century ex-colonial lines on the then map still need to be held sacred today?

...not even the guy with the joystick. But the results are still the same.

with respect to every group in Iraq except the Shia.

That works really well with our policy of helping "moderate" Sunnis fighting the Alawite and Shia government in Syria led by Assad.

Getting involved in the centuries-old Sunni-Shia conflict in the Middle East does us no good with either group, and is likely to convince them to unite to come after us.

Obama should resist getting involved. There is no way for him or this country or the Dem party to win anything anywhere with intervention.

Petite Chanson des Mutilés
Benjamin Péret

Prête-moi ton bras
pour remplacer ma jambe
Les rats me l'ont mangée
à Verdun
à Verdun.

J'ai mangé beaucoup de rats
mais ils ne m'ont pas rendu ma jambe
c'est pour cela qu'on m'a donné la croix de guerre
et une jambe de bois
et une jambe de bois.

Small song of the mutilated
Benjamin Péret

Lend me your arm
to replace my leg
Rats have eaten me it
in Verdun
in Verdun.

I ate a lot of rats
but they have not made me my leg
that is why they gave me the croix de guerre
and a wooden leg
and a wooden leg.

what in the world that poem is about, and that includes the President, who has never appeared to this history major to be much of a student of the subject.

And that's a huge part of the problem.

I remember when he had a Spine

Here is the CIA redux 1975 soon to be the Baghdad US Embassy

The President doesn't remember either, and there's no one to clue him in. It certainly won't be Kerry.

I hope that that trillion dollar marvel called the US embassy in Baghdad at least has two or three reinforced heliports on the top of it. They're going to need them.

This just makes me so sick.

Hillary, McCain and Rmoney.

But I guess not.

Does that "warrant" in your screen name have the military meaning?

And sought a lot of Warrants I was born in 46

In Nam I was a SSGT

Now I do project work between trips to help my elderly Mom in the midwest. I was born in '55.

I figured that you were there. Thanks for going and getting out in one piece. That was one nasty, awful war. I watched it on Walter Chronkite every night with my parents starting when I was 8 or 9. I remember General Westmoreland and the body counts. By the time I was 12 or 13, it seemed like there simply could not be that many men of military age in Vietnam who could be wounded or die and continue the fight. So I went to the 1964 World Book and found out how many people were in Vietnam and did the math. Then I put an anti-LBJ poster on the inside of my jr. high locker. My friends thought that I was crazy, but I thought that they just weren't paying attention. Then we got Nixon. Well, anyway . . .

It's hard to remember that you once hoped he was president.....

The questions asked if he could rule out air strikes or drones - given President Obama's public comments - he could not take things off the table. The key thing he spoke of was that the Iraq government had to reform and share some power with the minorities. Here is a link - http://news.yahoo.com/video/secretary-state-john-kerry-live-170000643.html

One thing both he and Obama say is that the US will not resume a combat role here. That does suggest that he absolutely does remember Vietnam.

This interview is worth watching because it is a very detailed, complex interview on Iraq.

The new media, which now seems to report things as if it were a tweet and they were limited to 140 characters. For instance, the two stories that were taken out of this were: " Not ruling out drones" and "may work with Iran". (On Iran, he answered essentially "if it would be constructive" and leading to the reforms needed in Iraq to represent all the people. This story is a complete misread of what he said -- and all because the top US diplomat, working with Iran on the nuclear weapons issue, did not say something McCain like ruling it out and calling them evil.)

Although this was a great interview, it could be seen as an ambush interview. It was set up as an interview on the Oceans summit that Kerry was heading yesterday and today. Her first question acknowledged that she was here to speak of that, "but first" Iraq .... This led to several detailed questions on Iraq. Only at the very end, does she finally ask a question on the summit - "Did you ever think you should cancel it given all that was going on?" I suspect there are few people who would have acted as professionally as Kerry did here. He had to know that any push back to Couric would have made her look good at his expense.

Is a time machine...

On the upside, most of us giggled at that declaration