Kerry visits Iraq as part of fact-finding mission

BAGHDAD: Senator John Kerry, who's shifting positions on the war in Iraq may have cost him the presidency, arrived in the Iraqi capital this week searching for clues about the ongoing conflict. Kerry visited U.S. soldiers from his home state, American intelligence officials and Iraqi officials on a pair of quick trips to Baghdad and other parts of the country as part of a fact-finding mission through the Middle East. The veteran Massachusetts senator, who waged an unsuccessful presidential bid based in part on the premise that U.S. President George W. Bush had botched the war effort in Iraq, said he came to Iraq to see for himself whether the country was moving toward stability or deeper into chaos. Kerry declined to compare the insurgency in Iraq with the one he faced in South Vietnam as a navy gunship lieutenant three decades ago. But he insisted that superior firepower alone wouldn't quell the Sunni Arab uprising disrupting Iraq.

"No insurgency is defeated by conventional military power alone," he said.

"Look at the IRA," he added in reference to the Irish Republican Army. "It was defeated by a combination of time and political negotiation." The senator was also scheduled to meet with officials of the U.S. Embassy as well as members of the interim Iraqi government, including Prime Minister Iyad Allawi and a deputy to Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, the Shiite leader at the top of an electoral list thought to be the front-runner in Iraq's Jan. 30 elections. On Tuesday evening Kerry met with about 20 soldiers based in his home state. "They all joked about how living conditions had changed since Senator Kerry was in Vietnam," said David Wade, the senator's communications director.

Kerry asked the Massachusetts soldiers how often they get to call their families and reminisced about writing letters home when he was in Vietnam. The senator spent Tuesday and Wednesday night in Amman as the guest of King Abdullah II. On Thursday, he flew back to Iraq, where he had lunch with U.S. troops in the city of Mosul and met with military commanders and local officials from the area. Kerry said he was more interested in asking questions of soldiers, American officials, Iraqis and even the journalists themselves than rehashing the battles of the presidential campaign. But on several instances, he attacked what he called the "horrendous judgments" and "unbelievable blunders" of the Bush administration. The mistakes, he said, included former U.S. proconsul Paul Bremer's decisions to disband the Iraqi Army and go along with a scheme to purge the government of former members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. Both moves are widely believed to have fueled the Sunni Arab insurgency. "What is sad about what's happening here now is that so much of it is a process of catching up from the enormous miscalculations and wrong judgments made in the beginning," he said. "And the job has been made enormously harder," but he added that it was time to move forward. "Mistakes have been made," he said. "Now it's a different time and different set of judgments that have to be made. I'm here to make judgments about what moves are available to us." Kerry, who is visiting Iraq as part of a Middle East tour that also includes visits to leaders in Syria, Egypt, Israel and the Occupied Territories, said success in Iraq was very important within the broader context of a struggle for change in the Middle East. "The stakes are very important, very high and not just for Iraq," he said. "You have another election in the West Bank, a set of challenges to Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the region that are quite daunting."

http://dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=2&article_id=11631