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?
KERRY: If there are no weapons of mass destruction— and we may yet find some—then this is a war that was fought on false pretenses, because that was the justification to the American people, to the Congress, to the world, and that was clearly the frame of my vote of consent. I said it as clearly as you can in my speech. I suggested that all the evils of Saddam Hussein alone were not a cause to go to war.

TIME: So, if we don't find WMD, the war wasn't worth the costs? That's a yes?
KERRY: No, I think you can still—wait, no. You can't—that's not a fair question, and I'll tell you why. You can wind up successful in transforming Iraq and changing the dynamics, and that may make it worth it, but that doesn't mean [transforming Iraq] was the cause [that provided the] legitimacy to go. You have to have that distinction.

TIME: You've said the foreign policy of triumphalism fuels the fire of jihadists. Is it possible the U.S. show of force in Iraq tempers the fire of jihadists?
KERRY: I'm all for strength when appropriate, and, you bet, there are a lot of countries in the Middle East that understand strength, and it's a very important message. But in my judgment, the way it was applied this time, it has encouraged street-level anger, and I have been told by people it encourages the recruitment of terrorists. I mean, look, even Rumsfeld's own memo underscores that they haven't discovered how to stem the tide of recruitment.

TIME: Why would internationalizing the occupation of Iraq be a more effective strategy for stabilizing the country?
KERRY: The legitimacy of the governing process that emerges from an essentially American process is always subject to greater questioning than one that is developed with broader, global consent.

TIME: How do you bring in others?
KERRY: I spent the time to go to the U.N. and sit with the Security Council before the vote, because I wanted to ascertain what their real state of mind was and whether or not they would be prepared to enforce the resolution, provide troops, whether or not they took it seriously, whether or not they would share costs and burden, and I came away convinced after a two-hour conversation, a lot of questions, that they would.

TIME: You've criticized the pre-emptive nature of the Bush doctrine.
KERRY: Let me emphasize: I'll pre-empt where necessary. We are always entitled to do that under the Charter of the U.N., which gives the right of self-defense of a nation. We've always had a doctrine of pre-emption contained in first strike throughout the cold war. So I understand that. It's the extension of it by the Bush Administration to remove a person they don't like that contravenes that.