What the hell does this mean?!

From a recent interview with Tom Brokaw:

Brokaw: This week you’ve been very critical of the president because of the missing explosives in Iraq. The fact is, senator, we still don’t know what happened to those explosives. How many for sure that were there. Who might have gotten away with them? Is it unfair to the president, just as you believe he’s been unfair to you, to blame him for that?

Kerry: No. It’s not unfair. Because what we do know, from the commanders on the ground, is that they went there, as they marched to Baghdad. We even read stories today that they broke locks off of the doors, took photographs of materials in there. There were materials. And they left.

Brokaw: The flip side of that is that if you had been president, Saddam Hussein would still be in power. Because you...

Kerry: Not necessarily at all.

Brokaw: But you have said you wouldn’t go to war against him...

Kerry: That’s not true. Because under the inspection process, Saddam Hussein was required to destroy those kinds of materials and weapons.

Brokaw: But he wasn’t destroying them...

Kerry: But that’s what you have inspectors for. And that’s why I voted for the threat of force. Because he only does things when you have a legitimate threat of force. It’s absolutely impossible and irresponsible to suggest that if I were president, he wouldn’t necessarily be gone. He might be gone. Because if he hadn’t complied, we might have had to go to war. And we might have gone to war. But if we did, I’ll tell you this, Tom. We’d have gone to war with allies in a way that the American people weren’t carrying the burden. And the entire world would have understood why we were doing it.

But when do we stop threatening, Senator? When do we stop waiting for Hussein to cooperate with the inspectors? We did it your way, and Hussein refused to cooperate and refused to comply. You’re saying it’s okay for us to go to “threaten” force—but when do we go beyond the threat? If we never go beyond the threat, it becomes an empty threat, Senator, and we cannot afford empty threats in the post-September 11th world! Your Nixonian “plan” to do it faster, smarter, more efficiently, cheaper, and whatever, appears to be: wait, threaten, wait, threaten, wait, threaten... and then...nothing?

Then we “might” have gone to war. But “not necessarily.” Just “maybe”...if Germany and France said okay? I guarantee you that, no matter what else you say about the Iraq war, the rest of the world knows why we did what we did. They may not like it, they may be right not to like it, but they’re under no illusions as to why we did it.