Part II
Transcript: Condoleezza Rice on '60 Minutes'
BRADLEY: Let's move on. Clarke has alleged that the Bush administration underestimated the threat from al Qaeda, didn't act as if terrorism was an imminent and urgent problem. Was it?
RICE: Of course it was an urgent problem. I would like very much to know what more could have been done, given that it was an urgent problem. We were every day talking with George Tenet and with the CIA about disruption activities, particularly in that period between June and July. The DCI and I met practically every couple of weeks to review where we were on getting various elements done. We had a list of ideas that Dick Clarke and his team gave us: accelerate the efforts to arm the Predator. We did that -- the Predator being the spy drone that could also fire. We put additional funding into counterterrorism for the intelligence activities that we were pursuing. We increased counterterrorism assistance to the Uzbeks, one of our key allies in the war on terrorism. We worked to get more people involved in countering terrorist financing.
We were looking for a more comprehensive plan to eliminate al Qaeda, but we weren't sitting still while that plan was developing. We were continuing to pursue the policies that the Clinton administration had pursued.
BRADLEY: But even the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Hugh Shelton, has said that the Bush administration pushed terrorism -- and I'm quoting here -- "farther to the back burner."
RICE: I just don't agree. We did have a lot of -- a lot of priorities. We did have to build a new relationship with Russia and a new relationship with China. It's a good thing that we did with Russia, because, after all, our ability to function in Central Asia was very much dependent on that good relationship with Russia. Yes, we had issues -- you may remember in the early days -- with the Chinese having forced down one of our planes. Yes, there were other issues. But terrorism was considered important enough and urgent enough that the President had sessions with George Tenet 46 times on that issue; that George Tenet and the rest of us were told to develop a strategy that would not just swat flies.
I don't know, Ed, how, after coming into office, inheriting policies that had been in place for at least three of the eight years of the Clinton administration, we could have done more than to continue those policies while we developed more robust policies.
BRADLEY: After 9/11, Bob Woodward wrote a book, in which he had incredible access and interviewed the President of the United States. He quotes President Bush as saying that he didn't feel a sense of urgency about Osama bin Laden. Woodward wrote that "bin Laden was not the President's focus or that of his national security team." You're saying that the administration says fighting terrorism and al Qaeda has been a top priority since the beginning.
RICE: I'm saying that the administration took seriously the threat -- let's talk about what we did, which demonstrates...
BRADLEY: I understand, but you've listed...
RICE: -- which demonstrates that we took this as a priority.
BRADLEY: You've listed the things that you've done, but here is the perception: the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at that time says you've pushed it to the back burner; the former Secretary of the Treasury says it was not a priority; Mr. Clarke says it was not a priority. And, at least according to Bob Woodward, who talked with the President, he is saying that for the President it wasn't urgent, he didn't have a sense of urgency about al Qaeda. That's the perception here.
RICE: Ed, I don't know what a sense of urgency, any greater than the one we had, would have caused us to do differently. We weren't going to invade Afghanistan in the first months of the Bush administration. Dick Clarke, himself, said that if the strategy that we were pursuing, that we were developing, had been completed on January 27th, it would not have stopped 9/11. What we were trying to do was to put together a strategy that might finally, over a period of time, actually eliminate al Qaeda.
Now, the Clinton administration, for a period of eight years, very intensively after the bombing attacks of 1998, worked on this problem and they were not able to eliminate al Qaeda or even to hurt al Qaeda enough that they didn't continue to launch attacks. The fact is that what we needed to do was to get a more comprehensive way to deal with this threat.
In the meantime, we continued to work under all of the authorities that were there during the Clinton administration, we continued to work under the policy that they had been pursuing, we continued to pursue al Qaeda under the old strategy. But we felt that the priority should be given to getting a new, more comprehensive way to address this threat.
Richard Clarke said that -- talking about that meeting on September 12 th, said the President dragged him into a room, said, "I want you to find whether Iraq did this. He never said 'make it up,' but the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this. I said, 'Mr. President, we've done this before, we've been looking at this, we looked at it with an open mind, there's no connection.' And he came back and said, "Iraq, Saddam, find out if there's a connection,' and he said it in a very intimidating way."
What's your reaction to Clarke's description of that day?
RICE: I have never seen the President say anything to people in an intimidating way to try to get a particular answer out of them. I know this President very well, and the President doesn't talk to his staff in an intimidating way to ask them to produce information that is false.
The President asked, I believe -- though, none of us recall the specific conversation -- the President asked a perfectly logical question -- we had just been hit and hit hard -- did Iraq have anything to do with this, were they complicit in it? This was a country with which we'd been to war a couple of times, it was firing at our airplanes in the no-fly zone. It made perfectly good sense to ask about Iraq.
But I will tell you, Ed, when we went to Camp David to plan our response to the al Qaeda attack; it was a map of Afghanistan that was rolled out on the table. It was Afghanistan that became the focus of the American response. And Iraq was put aside, with the exception of worrying about whether Iraq might try and take advantage of us in some way. The President focused our energies and our attention on winning in Afghanistan and expelling the Taliban and thereby expelling al Qaeda.
BRADLEY: But the appearance here, because there are other examples of countries with state sponsored terrorism -- Iran, Libya, Syria -- he didn't ask him about that; he asked just about Iraq. The perception is, people listening to what Clarke had to say, is that the President was preoccupied with Iraq.
RICE: Given our relationship with Iraq, which was probably the most actively hostile relationship in which we were involved, given that they were firing at our airplanes every day, given that, I think that it's a perfectly logical question. But I was with the President a great deal in those first days after 9/11, and I'll tell you what was on his mind. What was on his mind was to avoid a follow-on attack. What was on his mind was how to reassure the American people. He was talking many times a day with the economics advisor, Larry Lindsey, about how to get Wall Street back up and running so the financial system wouldn't collapse. He was concerned about how to get airplanes flying again and was talking constantly to Norm Mineta about how to get Reagan Airport operating again.
Those were the things that were on the President's mind. And when we look to retaliation, yes, we asked the question, given that this is a global war on terrorism, should we look at other threats? But I can tell you that when we met at Camp David not a single one of the President's principal advisors suggested that he do anything more than go after Afghanistan, and that's what we did.
BRADLEY: Al Qaeda has become a decentralized collection of regional networks, said to be working autonomously. Does that make them more dangerous today?
RICE: They're very dangerous. I still believe that we have done a lot to hurt this organization. We've been able, through our international partners, to cut off a lot of their support and their funding; we've killed two-thirds of their known leadership, and, of course, that takes the field generals out of business, which is very important.; we have managed to take away territory that they most want to use -- territory like Afghanistan, they can't function in Sudan, they obviously can't function in places like Libya -- they're being pursued in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan with an aggressiveness that was not there prior to 9/11.
And the President has also understood that this is a wide war, not a narrow war, on terrorism. And that when we succeed in building a stable and democratic Iraq, we will have given a real blow to terrorism. And that's why, Ed, Zarqawi, who is an al Qaeda affiliate, has been writing letters about how they cannot afford to lose in Iraq. The terrorists understand that Iraq is a central front in the war on terrorism.
BRADLEY: We've had this war on terrorism since -- concentrated since 9/11. But it's been reported that if you look at the 30 months since 9/11, there have been more attacks by al Qaeda than in the 30 months prior to 9/11. So what effect does this taking out two-thirds of the leadership have?
RICE: We are being attacked by them because they know that we're at war with them. And they're going to continue to attack until we defeat them.
BRADLEY: But here's what I'm saying -- you had a 30-month period leading up 9/11 in which you had fewer attacks than the 30 months afterwards, when you have this war against them.
RICE: Ed, I think that's the wrong way to look at it, with all due respect. I think you have to look back to the '80s, and most certainly the '90s, when what was happening is the terrorist attacks were getting bolder, they were getting more imaginative, they were getting more daring.
So you have the attack in '93 against the World Trade Center. You then have the attack in 1998, against the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Then you have the attack against the Cole. Then you have 9/11, which is a spectacular and devastating attack that, by the way, was aimed at decapitating us. That was an act of war, going after the Pentagon and going after, perhaps, the Capitol or the White House. These attacks were getting bolder and they were getting more daring, and that's because the terrorists were getting a sense of inevitability of their victory. We were not aggressively going after them. They believed that they were going to win. They saw us cut and run in Somalia. They go all the way back to the fact that the Marines left Beirut after the bombing of the barracks. They believed that if we took casualties we would not respond. And what they've been surprised by is the fact that this has this time has been a launching of an all-out war against them.
And, yes, they're going to continue to try to attack, they're going to succeed sometimes; but they are going to be defeated. And as the President said, you cannot fight this war on the defensive. We can't sit back here and try to defend the United States, or we will not be the country, the open country that we know and love. So we are on the attack against them. They know that this is all-out war, and they're pulling out the stops.
BRADLEY: Is the Bush presidency, or the Bush legacy, at stake here?
RICE: This President doesn't care about his legacy. What he cares about is keeping this country safe and secure. We are safer today than we were on September 10th. We're not yet safe. We've got a lot of work to do. We've got a lot of work to do in homeland security. We've got a lot of work to do against the terrorists abroad. This is a war and it's going to take time. But all of the...
BRADLEY: But you say we're safer -- don't you expect another attack on this country?
RICE: We are still safer today because we have an umbrella of intelligence and law enforcement worldwide. When the President sits in the Oval every morning, he gets reports from intelligence services all around the world. Our allies in places like Pakistan are fighting in places that they never even went into -- up in Waziristan, this lawless part of Pakistan where al Qaeda has a safe haven.
So we are safer, but not yet safe. And we're going to have to continue to pursue this war aggressively. The one thing that we have to be very careful about as a country is to not lose sight of one of the things that hurt us most, was not knowing and not having light on what was going on inside the country with al Qaeda. There's been a lot written about the fact that the CIA and the FBI were not sharing information. Well, in large part, they were by tradition and culture and legally not able to share and collect intelligence information in the way that might have helped to keep us safe. The Patriot Act, which the President has now gotten through Congress, is doing precisely that. So we've a lot more tools now than we had before. But no one should think that this war on terrorism is by any means over.
BRADLEY: One final question. Is al Qaeda more dangerous today than it was on September 11th?
RICE: Al Qaeda is not more dangerous today than it was on September 11th, but you don't have to make that choice. Al Qaeda is dangerous. And we're going to have to pursue them and we're going to have to defeat them, and we're going to have to change the context in which they operate by working to develop a different kind of Middle East, in which you don't have ideologies of hatred; in which people fly airplanes into buildings.
This is going to be a long war. It is a comprehensive war. It is not going to be enough to win in Afghanistan, to even kill bin Laden and to return to law enforcement. They declared war...
BRADLEY: So capturing or killing al Zawahiri doesn't...
RICE: Will not end this war. What will end this war is a sustained effort, over a long time, in which the United States mobilizes all of its means, its military means, its law enforcement means, its means of taking away economic support -- takes all of those measures and pursues them on a daily basis; and in which we are not, as a country, afraid to go after them where they live. We are not going to be able to sit back here and fight this war on the defense.
(BREAK IN COVERAGE)
BRADLEY: The decision -- the decision to go to war with Iraq. Nearly 600 American soldiers have died, thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed and continue to die due to guerilla violence and terrorist attacks. Given the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been found and there's no proof that Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11 or al Qaeda, the country is split about why we're even in Iraq and if we're fighting the right war.
RICE: The war on terrorism is a broad war, not a narrow war. And Iraq, one of the most dangerous regimes -- I think the most dangerous regime in the world's most dangerous region in the Middle East -- is a big reason, or was, under Saddam Hussein a big reason for instability in the region, for threats to the United States; he was firing at our aircraft practically every day as we tried to keep his forces under control; he had used weapons of mass destruction; he had the intent and was still developing the capability to do so. Saddam Hussein's regime was very dangerous. And now that Iraq has been liberated and that Iraq has a chance to be a stable democracy, the world is a lot safer and the war on terrorism is well-served by the victory in Iraq.
BRADLEY: Are you prepared if they say, we don't want a democracy in Iraq?
RICE: Everything that has happened so far shows that they want a democracy in Iraq. They're learning to compromise, they're learning to negotiate with each other -- Shia and Sunnis and Kurds and others. They've put together a really terrific interim document called the Transitional Administrative Law that is, by far, the most liberal document, from the point of view of protection of human and democratic rights, rights of women, freedom of religion. They're off to a very good start, but it's going to take a very long time.
And, Ed, when Iraq is democratic, you're going to have one of t lynchpins of a very different kind of Middle East. And after what happened to us on September 11th, I think all Americans would agree that we've got to have a different kind of Middle East, because it was the center of gravity from which al Qaeda came.
BRADLEY: If you will, may I ask you just one follow up to that? You do expect a vote in Iraq, yes?
RICE: We will have elections. There will be elections in Iraq.
BRADLEY: And if the result of those elections the Iraqi people say, we want an Islamic republic, not a democracy?
RICE: Ed, there is simply nothing that suggests that the Iraqi people want anything but what most people in the world want -- and that is the freedom to say what they think, the freedom to send their girls and boys to school, the ability on basis of conscience to carry out religious practice. This is a sophisticated society, and everything demonstrates so far that what they want is to be perhaps the first really great democracy in the Middle East.
BRADLEY: Dr. Rice, thank you very much.
RICE: Thank you very much.
END
washingtonpost.com
lurqer |
