John Kerry

This event enhances America's security and it brings us closer to our objective of dismantling and destroying al-Qaeda.

Bin Laden's death deals an enormous blow to al-Qaeda's ability to operate.

I predict you are looking at an enormous multiyear effort to help this country essentially become a functioning country.

I don't think we've persuaded ourselves that our intervention will necessarily make a bad situation better.

I can guarantee everybody--I guarantee you, that, sure as I am sitting here today, that if President Obama had simply turned his back on the Arab League and Gulf States' request and on the opposition's request, and we sat here, and CNN and…

They are eager for assistance, advice, and training, which the United States, the European Union, and the United Nations can and should provide.

I don't think we should underestimate the strength of the nonmilitary measures that are now in place to pressure the regime.

This was probably the most rapid multinational military response to an impending human rights crisis in history

As Senator Kerry said, the idea of a pay-as-you-go formula ought to be the going-in assumption.

People have not begun to plan for it, as I can tell, and have not begun to politically prepare their own publics for it.

I don't think we can have a one-size-fits-all policy here.

I think it's hard to suggest that, even with a stalemate, if that's where we are--and I want to come back to that in a minute--that, with a Qadhafi who can't sell his oil, with a Qadhafi who has a divided country, with an opposition that…

I think President Obama chose the better of those two difficult options.

This would have haunted us for quite some time

We ought to at least acknowledge what would likely be happening in eastern Libya today, had Qadhafi's forces continued their march

I would advise against taking this path. We cannot be confident of the agenda of the opposition toward either the Libyan people or various U.S. interests, including counterterrorism.

But, before we intervene, we have to be sure humanitarian catastrophes on a scale beyond what one would normally expect to come from fighting in a civil war are imminent.

They need help in setting up a justice system, courts, police, all of the elements of a functioning state.

We must recognize that we face an all-too-familiar foreign policy conundrum: There is a large gap between the professed goals of the United States and the means we are prepared to devote to realizing them.

It should be insisted on and absolutely guaranteed.

But, just because we can't help everybody, everywhere, doesn't mean that, for the sake of consistency, we should help nobody, nowhere.

There is little reason to conclude that the Libyan opposition will any time soon be able to defeat the Libyan Government.

We cannot be confident of the agenda of the opposition toward either the Libyan people or various United States interests, including counterterrorism.

That would be an al-Qaeda recruiter's dream and something that we had a national interest in avoiding

This all argues for reducing the immediate aims of American foreign policy and giving priority to humanitarian as opposed to political goals.