John Kerry's statement on his Iraq War vote

MATTHEWS: Were we right to go to Iraq?
KERRY: Not the way the president did it. Clearly, no, because he didn't plan for how to win the peace. He didn't build the kind of coalition he said he would. He didn't keep his promises to the American people. He promised he would respect the U.N. He promised he would, in fact, build an international coalition and he promised he would go to war as a last resort. And, Chris, one of the great lessons I learned in Vietnam is the meaning of the words last resort. I think the test for a president as to whether or not you send young men or women anywhere to fight is whether you can look in the eyes of parents if you lose one of them and say to those parents, I tried to do everything in my power to avoid this happening to your child. But we had no choice for the security of our country. I believe the president of the United States fails that test in Iraq.
MATTHEWS: Would you have gone to war with Iraq if the U.N. had supported it?
KERRY: Well, we...
MATTHEWS: Well?
KERRY: The answer the answer is very simply yes. If the U.N. had supported it, there was a very...
MATTHEWS: Would you have gone to war if the U.N. had not supported it?
KERRY: If I were president at the time?
MATTHEWS: Right. Right.
KERRY: I would have made the judgment of whether or not to go to war, which is what a president is supposed to do. The United States of America should never be perceived as or never should go to war because we want to. We should go to war because we have to.
MATTHEWS: Did we have to go to Iraq?
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: Did we have to go?
KERRY: ....until you've exhausted the remedies of....
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: Let me ask you. Howard Dean is opposed to going to Iraq. He's simple. Absolutely, bottom line, against the war.
KERRY: Well, he's not, actually....
MATTHEWS: Joe Lieberman is for the war. Dick Gephardt is for the war, John Edwards sat right there last week and he is still for the war despite the bad intelligence he got. He says, I'm still for the war. How are you different than Dean on this issue?
KERRY: Let me correct you. Howard Dean is not clear and he is not simple. He has, in fact, embraced several positions. One of which is the Biden-Lugar amendment which, in fact, gave authorization to the president but under a slightly different wrinkle than the one we passed. Howard Dean also said he believed there were weapons of mass destruction. He believed that Colin Powell was correct. Now the question that has to be asked is, once you've come to that conclusion, what are you going to do about it? What you should do about it is precisely what I and Tom Harkin and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and a whole bunch of us thought we should do. Which is, go to the United Nations. Properly go through the inspection process. Build a legitimate international coalition and, in fact, exhaust the remedies available to you. And if you need to go to war, you go to war because you have a sense that the country has come to the point where it has no other option. I don't believe the president did that.
MATTHEWS: Would you have gone to war if the French had said under no circumstances we would go to war with you?
KERRY: I would do whatever is necessary to protect the security of the United States.
MATTHEWS: We're going in circles here.
KERRY: No, we're not going in circles.
(CROSSTALK)
MATTHEWS: In retrospective, Dean says, I think it was wrong to go to war. In retrospect, Lieberman says we were right to go to war. Dick Gephardt says we were right to go to war. John Edwards says we're right to go to war. General Clark says we're not right to get to war go to war. Where are you in that with that kind of clarity?
KERRY: I just answered I answered your question.
MATTHEWS: Were we right to have gone to war?
KERRY: I answered your question right up front. I said to you....
MATTHEWS: Well, yes or no?
KERRY: I said no. Not under the circumstances he went. I told you that, Chris.
MATTHEWS: So were we wrong to go to Iraq in war?
KERRY: The way the president did it, yes.
MATTHEWS: What was the right way to go to war?
KERRY: As a last resort, when you exhaust the remedies available to you and you have proven that you have to do it because there is no other alternative. In other words, in Iraq, we had a legitimate threat, according to every intelligence indicator we were given. But we hadn't built the coalition. We didn't have a plan to win the peace. The president rushed to war. I said so at the time. I said I would have preferred that he did more diplomacy. I don't know how you can be more clear than that.
http://www.csgv.org/document.cfm?documentID=139