If you can resolve this transition of [Bashar] Assad, that is absolutely possible, but you have to have a clarity for everybody about the way forward.

Let me just say you could end this violence within a very short period of time, have a complete ceasefire - which Iran could control, which Russia could control, which Syria could control, and which we and our coalition friends could control - if one man would merely make it known to the world that he doesn't have to be part of the long-term future; he'll help manage Syria out of this mess and then go off into the sunset, as most people do after a period of public life. If he were to do that, then you could stop the violence and quickly move to management.

The threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real, but as I said, it is not new. It has been with us since the end of that war, and particularly in the last 4 years we know after Operation Desert Fox failed to force him to reaccept them, that he has continued to build those weapons. He has had a free hand for 4 years to reconstitute these weapons, allowing the world, during the interval, to lose the focus we had on weapons of mass destruction and the issue of proliferation.

We've been waiting since 1918 for the Boston Red Sox to win the World Series, and ... if I had a choice between the White House and the World Series this year, I'm going to take the White House. How's that?

I'm John Kerry, and I'm reporting for duty.

I personally didn't see personal atrocities in the sense I saw somebody cut a head off or something like that. However, I did take part in free-fire zones, I did take part in harassment and interdiction fire, I did take part in search-and-destroy missions.

We achieved a deal with the Russians that didn't wind up in two days of strikes that would have sent a, quote, "message," but would not have removed the weapons. We struck a deal to get all of the declared weapons out of Syria. Never before in a conflict has that ever happened, that during the conflict weapons of mass destruction are taken out of the zone of conflict. And thank God we did that, because if we hadn't done that, today ISIL would have those chemical weapons in large parts of the country.