Powell on Sean Hannity show [DemocRAT charges re: Iraq are outrageous and irresponsible]

State Department ^ | January 21, 2004 | Sean Hannity

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		Interview on The Sean Hannity Show Secretary Colin L. Powell Washington, DC January 21, 2004 MR. HANNITY: Joining us now, Secretary of State Colin Powell. Mr. Secretary, how are you? You're looking great. SECRETARY POWELL: I'm doing fine. As you know, I had cancer surgery five weeks ago and I'm up, the energy is fully returned, and I'm (inaudible). MR. HANNITY: You know, five weeks. It's pretty amazing how far we've come with things like that. SECRETARY POWELL: Really. I had a few ups and downs the first week or two, but I had great care from Walter Reed Army Medical Center. And if I just might take the opportunity to talk to the men in your audience, who should be worried about it, and they're at that age, make sure you get your prostate screening done. MR. HANNITY: I've got to tell you, it's very common in my family and I've had a lot of family members go through that at fairly young ages. SECRETARY POWELL: Yes. MR. HANNITY: So it's scary for me, too. SECRETARY POWELL: Especially, if I may, black men have a higher likelihood -- MR. HANNITY: Incidence? SECRETARY POWELL: -- of incidence of prostate cancer. So get your checks. MR. HANNITY: It's so preventable, I mean, and if they catch it early -- SECRETARY POWELL: Sure. Catch it early. MR. HANNITY: And that's the key. What I loved about the President's speech last night, and I liked a lot of it, when he said America will never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people, I thought that was a direct attempt, let's say, at a discussion, especially with the Democratic presidential candidates that want to go to the UN for everything. SECRETARY POWELL: It's a powerful line, and the President meant it. And the President has to mean that because, ultimately, he is responsible to the American people for their security, not to the UN or anyone else. But at the same time, I hoped you noticed in the President's speech that he talked about internationalizing our efforts, he talked about partnerships, he talked about diplomacy. And so the use of force, the use of diplomacy, the use of our political influence in the world, the use of our economic power -- all of these are tools in the toolbox that the President has. And he used the right set of tools for the right job. And you want diplomacy to work. We don't look for war. We don't look for conflict. We don't look to have problems with our allies and friends. But, you know, ultimately, the President has to defend the American people. Sometimes it comes down to making that lonely decision that says I've got to do this for the American people whether others are with me or not. In the case of Iraq, fortunately, many, many others were with us. MR. HANNITY: Well, and that was the point, too, when there was a very interesting moment of applause for the President last night. SECRETARY POWELL: Yes. MR. HANNITY: Just before we were coming on the air, you were discussing a little bit your days as being a soldier. Anybody that, I'm sure, has ever been in a trench somewhere and having bullets and bombs fired at them has got to be a reluctant warrior. You don't do this -- this war was brought to us. SECRETARY POWELL: Well, one of the little subtitles that always was put against my name when I was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff was that Powell was a reluctant warrior. And my answer was, "You're right. War is a terrible thing. It should be avoided. Young men and women pay with their lives in war, on both sides." And so politicians and generals should see whether or not we can solve problems through peaceful means. But if war comes, then I am also known as being an advocate of "The Powell Doctrine," that says fight it and win it. MR. HANNITY: Win it. Win it as quickly as you can, which is the important point. SECRETARY POWELL: Right. MR. HANNITY: It's interesting because I was comparing and contrasting the President's remarks last night with those of his Democratic rivals in the Democratic response. Nancy Pelosi, in particular, went on and said there was no evidence, it was preemptive, there was no coalition. And it's become a bit of a mantra by -- SECRETARY POWELL: It's wrong. MR. HANNITY: It is wrong. SECRETARY POWELL: It's just flat wrong. A coalition exists of, first, a UN resolution that was passed unanimously last fall that said Saddam is in material breach, and if he doesn't tell us what he's doing he's in further material breach. I think that -- Prime Minister Blair of the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Aznar of Spain, Prime Minister Berlusconi of Italy, Prime Minister Howard of Australia, and all the other countries the President listed -- if this isn't a coalition, I don't know what is. Now, it didn't enjoy the unanimous support of all the members of the Security Council, of all the nations of Europe, but so many of those nations joined us. For example, people ask, "Why isn't NATO involved?" Well, 18 of the 26 nations in NATO are involved, and we will get the alliance involved as we go through this year -- (inaudible) they prepare themselves to take on the broader responsibilities of Iraq. MR. HANNITY: You laid out, and I watched every moment of it, the case before the United Nations. We waited 12 years. We gave them every opportunity. We came back with a final resolution, 1441. They still would not abide by the ceasefire agreement or any of these resolutions. So it became necessary at that point. We have not found "the smoking gun" -- weapons of mass destruction. You still believe they exist, don't you? SECRETARY POWELL: I believe they exist. I don't know whether they were removed or destroyed prior to the war, but I know that when I went before the United Nations last February 5th I went with the solid backing of the intelligence community. I was essentially presenting the intelligence case. We spent four days and three nights out at the CIA. No hyping of it. No single-sourcing of it. Multi-sourced. And the entire intelligence community stood behind it. Guess what? It's the same intelligence that President Clinton had received earlier that caused him to bomb Iraq in 1998, and also to get the Congress to support regime change as the policy of the United States of America. And all the other intelligence agencies in our various allied capitals around the world had the same conclusion. The UN had the same conclusion. Saddam Hussein would not answer the questions. One thing I know is he had the intention of using these weapons, he's used them before, he had the programs to develop them. We don't know what stockpiles he actually had. That -- we expected to find more. We haven't found them. But I'm sorry, I'm confident that with his intention and capabilities, the President did the right thing to remove this threat from the world. MR. HANNITY: You mentioned we have the evidence, we knew he used them before so we knew he had them. He wouldn't allow the UN inspectors in, which tells us there's a reason for that. SECRETARY POWELL: There's a reason for that. MR. HANNITY: Bill Clinton, when he bombed Iraq -- President Clinton -- said definitively that he had nuclear capa -- he was pursuing nuclear capability, he had biological and chemical capability. But, politically speaking, almost on a daily basis, prominent Democrats are suggesting the President lied, the President misled. Ted Kennedy went as far as to suggest a war was concocted for political gain. SECRETARY POWELL: Well, that means that President Clinton lied. President Clinton didn't lie, nor did President Bush. The facts are clear. The UN didn't lie. The UN inspectors were never able to complete their work. It was Saddam Hussein who caused the UN inspectors to have to leave in 1998, which led up to the Desert Fox bombing that the President conducted. And so it's rather disingenuous for Democrats to say this. The Democrats had access to the same information that the President and I did. They had hearings from the intelligence community. They read the National Intelligence Estimate about all of that. They all stood up and voted for it in a resolution last fall. So it's a little disingenuous to suddenly start deciding that, well, we were misled. MR. HANNITY: I have found in particular, and I know we're in a political season -- I don't want to drag you down a political alley here -- but it's even gone further. I mean, you have the proposal by -- or the theory pushed forward by Howard Dean that the President even knew about 9/11 ahead of time. SECRETARY POWELL: That is a total absurdity. It really is sad that any candidate would make such a statement. He has no basis for making such a statement. None of us knew about 9/11 before the attack. My God, to suggest that responsible people, the President of the United States, would have known about that before the fact and not done anything about it, it is just -- it's just -- it's awful. MR. HANNITY: It's outrageous. SECRETARY POWELL: It's outrageous. MR. HANNITY: And my question is, it's these comments, rather extreme, coming from presidential candidates: Dennis Kucinich said we're targeting civilians in Afghanistan, which is not true; the theory put out by Ted Kennedy, a prominent Democrat. What do you make of that when you hear these things? And here you are, you're trying to lead this effort, America fighting back after this attack on September 11. What do you think? SECRETARY POWELL: One, I'm annoyed. Second, they know better. Three, they must be desperate. I mean, the American people aren't going to fall for these kinds of ridiculous, outrageous and irresponsible charges. MR. HANNITY: Yeah. And then, of course, we're not any safer having found Usama bin -- sorry, Saddam Hussein. SECRETARY POWELL: Saddam. MR. HANNITY: Yeah. (Laughter.) One of the things the President pointed out last night, and it was actually very impressive, is we've come pretty far. He's talking about getting two-thirds of the al-Qaida leadership that have either been captured or killed. Do we have a line on Usama? Do we know if he's alive? What are your thoughts? SECRETARY POWELL: I don't know. I don't know if he's alive or dead. I do know that he's hiding, if he's alive. And we don't know where he is, if he's dead. But we've been very successful at rolling up large portions of the network. At the same time, they haven't been totally destroyed. They still have the capability to act. We are pleased that there has been no attack on America since 9/11, and that may reflect the success of our efforts. A good news story here is that we are working with our friends and allies, even some of those who disagreed with us over Iraq, with respect to intelligence exchange, law enforcement cooperation, to roll up these networks, going after their financial infrastructure. We really have put together a solid anti-terrorism coalition with all of the civilized nations of the world. MR. HANNITY: Yeah. The President said last night, of the top 55 officials of the former regime in Iraq, we've captured 45; we're on the offensive, leading 1,600 patrols a day, conducting 180 raids a day; and, as I said, we've got two-thirds of the leadership of al-Qaida, we're tracking them around the world, the known leaders have been captured or killed. So we've come very far. The nature of the threat, though. We have these increased threat levels that the public is informed about occasionally. It's real. SECRETARY POWELL: It is still very real, and we're probably much more sensitive to these warnings than we might have been before 9/11. At the same time, I would suggest to my fellow Americans that while you listen to these cautions, don't let it fundamentally change what you're going to do, don't let it fundamentally change life. Travel, go to entertainment, go out and enjoy this great country of ours. MR. HANNITY: Can I travel less, please? I'd rather -- SECRETARY POWELL: No, no, we want you traveling a lot, Sean. (Laughter.) MR. HANNITY: I think there's a magnet -- SECRETARY POWELL: I'm the one who wants to travel less. (Laughter.) MR. HANNITY: Is that right? (Laughter.) I'm the guy -- I walk through every airport and they say, "That's Hannity. Wand him." (Laughter.) It doesn't matter if there's 150 people on the plane. I'm the guy they pick. SECRETARY POWELL: You're the guy. Off with the shoes. MR. HANNITY: Off with the shoes. No, that's a given. That's the least of my -- the wand thing gets a little personal there. (Laughter.) I want to talk about the Patriot Act. The President laid out the case last night, the importance for that. What do you say to civil libertarians? Now, I know there's judicial oversight and review, clearly, and we have used these techniques and tactics in the past. What do you say to people who -- this is a violation of civil liberties? SECRETARY POWELL: No, I think the Patriot Act was a necessary act to help us protect the American homeland and protect the American people. If there are certain parts of the Act that are problematic, we have a Congress and we have courts to deal with it. But I think the President was quite right in suggesting that we needed the Patriot Act and it should -- all aspects of it should be renewed when it comes up for change in the course of the year. People complain about some of the things we've had to do. Airport security -- everybody would rather not have to go through all of that. But keep in mind, we're doing it to protect the people. We're protecting travelers. And I've had a lot of conversations with a lot of my foreign minister colleagues over the fingerprinting that we're doing at our airports now. Well, gee, this is annoying. But it turns out it takes approximately 14 seconds to put your fingerprints on and to have a picture taken, and it takes another four seconds to check that against our database. We've picked up drug traffickers, we've picked up criminals, we've picked up rapists as a result of this. And I hope that people understand you're a little bit safer because we are doing this, so please, take, you know, take the 20-second inconvenience that it causes. MR. HANNITY: One of the things the President went into last night was about America being a nation with a mission, and more specifically said, "This great republic will lead the cause of freedom." You have been engaged in this battle for the better part of your professional career. You were in the Reagan Administration. You watched the decline of the former Soviet Union. You watched that wall come tumbling down. Now we're dealing with this battle on terrorism. To what extent is it America's mission to expand and push forward the boundaries of freedom and combat tyranny in the world? For example, North Korea has nuclear capability, or so we are told. We don't have -- we certainly cannot go in there and confront them the way we would confront Afghanistan or Iraq. Where do we go from here? SECRETARY POWELL: Well, with respect to places like North Korea and Iran, I think these are problems that can be solved diplomatically. We're not looking for wars. But I think that we do have a destiny as a nation to show our values to the world, to tell people what democracy is all about, what it means to believe in the rights of individual men and women to pursue their destiny as God gave them that destiny to pursue. What's fascinating to me, Sean -- you're right, I have been in this business a long time, Reagan all the way through. What's fascinating to me is leaders from around the world come to my office these days. They used to be behind the Iron Curtain. They used to be behind the Bamboo Curtain. They used to be dictatorships in South America. And they come and they sit in my office, and all they want to talk about is democracy and how do we handle it. Teach us, help us. They continue to see America, as Reagan used to call it, the Shining City on the Hill, as you know so well. And they look to us for inspiration. They know that we do not seek dominion over anyone, we do not seek power, we do not seek territory, we do not seek anything other than to help people. And that's why we are the most trusted nation on the face of the Earth. MR. HANNITY: You know, it's interesting. A good friend of mine, former -- who is also a talk show host in his own right, Barry Farber, always says there's never been a country on the face on the Earth that has accumulated more power and abused it less and used it more for the good than this country. And, clearly, that's our mission. SECRETARY POWELL: One line I always -- occasionally use because I don't want to overuse it, when I hear people talk about America being unilateralist and America trying to throw its weight around. I said, you know, we went to Europe twice in the last century and brought freedom to people from fascism and dictatorships, and we stuck it through, through the Cold War, ended that war as well. And all of that time, we never asked for a single bit of ground except that ground needed to bury our dead. MR. HANNITY: It's chilling. But that's true. SECRETARY POWELL: It is true. MR. HANNITY: But it's true. SECRETARY POWELL: And it puts it in very solid relief and perspective as to what America is all about. MR. HANNITY: But as Secretary of State, as we've had this disagreement with some of our closest allies -- France, Germany -- it's got to be a disappointment in light of that fairly recent effort of beating back fascism and Nazism and Japan and the like. SECRETARY POWELL: It was a disappointment. I regret that we couldn't bring the French and Germans around to our point of view. I regret that the Russians were not also supportive of what we had to do in Iraq. But, you know, Sean, in my business you take your regret and you move on. The best thing about this being disappointed is you get over it. And we have done a lot with the French and the Germans over the years. They're our allies. Russia is a friend and partner with us now. So we move on. And where we are now together again is on the rebuilding of Iraq, helping the Iraqi people with democracy, and I think all of us can contribute to that goal. MR. HANNITY: One day, will we see a candidate Powell for President? SECRETARY POWELL: No, I don't think so, Sean. MR. HANNITY: I don't know, I think it could happen. SECRETARY POWELL: I know who I am and what I am. MR. HANNITY: I think it could happen. That's my take. (Laughter.) Mr. Secretary, you've done a lot of great work for the people of this country and for the cause of freedom, and for that we are indebted to you. It's always great to see you. Thank you for being with us. SECRETARY POWELL: Thank you. It's good to be here. 2004/60 [End] Released on January 21, 2004

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