Kerry prepares for tour of Mideast

WASHINGTON -- Senator John F. Kerry today is leaving for a nine-day trip through Iraq and five other Middle Eastern nations, as he seeks to hone a regional approach to ending the Iraq war while entering the final stage of his deliberations about another run for president.

Kerry said he hopes to use the regional trip, his first there in nearly year, to meet with political leaders and US troops in Iraq about solutions to the Iraq conflict. His meetings will include a session with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, a country the Iraq Study Group recommended should be included in direct talks about the future of Iraq.

"The Mideast policy as a whole is in tatters, and the situation is getting more dangerous, and there is a lot that's at play," said Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat. "This is the most compelling and important issue on the table today: the war on terror, how it would more properly be fought."

In addition to Iraq and Syria, Kerry will visit Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel, and he will meet with the head of state in all of those countries. He said he plans to venture outside the heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad to talk to US troops stationed in the more volatile parts of the country, including the Sunni Triangle.

The trip is being made amid intensifying debate in Washington over the future of Iraq, spurred by the Iraq Study Group's long-awaited report last week.

The White House announced yesterday that President Bush will lay out his course of action in a speech in January.

The trip will be Kerry's fourth visit to Iraq since the war started and his first since his election-eve "botched joke" where he suggested that poor students would "get stuck in Iraq."

Kerry said he wanted to meet with the National Guard soldiers who mocked his blunder by holding the banner: "Halp us Jon Carry -- we R stuck hear N Irak." When he saw the banner in a widely circulated photograph, Kerry said, he laughed, adding that he'd have done the same thing if he were in their shoes. But he said he won't make that part of this trip because he is interested in "business, not politics."