Kerry: U.S. Must 'End the Empire of Oil'

Sun Mar 5, 6:34 PM ET

Sen. John Kerry said Sunday that the United States must rebuild the power of the United Nations and help "end the empire of oil" to defeat terrorism.

Kerry, who lost to President Bush in the 2004 presidential election, avoided explicit criticism of the U.S. administration during a wide-ranging speech on the global dynamics of terrorism. But he said Bush's policy of imposing democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan risked looking like a crusade in Arab, Muslim eyes.

"If it is seen as the result of an army marching through Muslim lands, it will fail," Kerry told an audience at the University of Ulster in Londonderry, the second-largest city in Northern Ireland.

The "war on terror," Kerry said, was not principally about the U.S.-led military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but was "fundamentally a war within Islam for the heart and soul of Islam, stretching from Morocco east to Indonesia." He said terrorist threats against the West and within Muslim nations exist in part because "no center of moral authority has emerged to stop those who would murder in the name of Islam."