Interview: Condoleezza Rice Discusses The Bush (Position on Iraq's WMD -- transcript)

On today's program, we'll talk about some of the challenges and triumphs of fathers today, and we'll get our laugh on with comedian Rickey Smiley.

But first, where are the weapons of mass destruction? Did the Bush administration lie about evidence for going to war with Iraq? Earlier I put those questions directly to National Security Adviser Dr. Condoleezza Rice, who's been on a trip to California promoting US foreign policy. But before we got to the real conversation, I asked Dr. Rice whether the rumor was true that she was here in LA fund raising for an upcoming bid for governor of California.

Dr. CONDOLEEZZA RICE (National Security Adviser): I'm here in California to bring the foreign policy message of the Bush administration to the West Coast, Tavis. I'm busy being national security adviser; don't have anything else on my radar screen.

SMILEY: All right. So, OK, if not governor of California in a couple of years, how are your plans coming for your role as NFL commissioner?

Dr. RICE: I'm still waiting. Now I told Paul Tagliabue I didn't want the job till he retired, so I'm willing to wait.

SMILEY: All right. Let me go to the serious stuff, then. Some observers, namely newspaper columnists, have noted an increased visibility at the White House for you of late. That's the spin, as you well know. They are remarking that your role in foreign policy, speaking of which, is as great as it was when Henry Kissinger was secretary of State. Do you buy that? Has your role changed or expanded of late?

Dr. RICE: No, Tavis. These are the stories that I would call inside-the-Beltway Washington stories. Look, I'm doing my job as national security adviser. I've been doing it the same way ever since we came, and I have a great working relationship with all of the secretaries. And as national security adviser, I, from time to time, play the role of going out and working with other international parties, and the president has asked me to do that when necessary in the Middle East, but I've also done it on Russia and a number of other accounts. So nothing has changed.

SMILEY: You mentioned a moment ago that you have a great relationship with all of the secretaries. If we are to believe what we read, speaking of inside the Beltway, there's much made these days, as you well know, of a conflict between the departments of State and Defense, a conflict between Rumsfeld and Powell. I know you're not going to share any confidences, but what do you make of those stories that there's a rift here with regard to policy between what State wants and what Defense wants on any number of issues?

Dr. RICE: Well, on any given day, I probably speak to Secretaries Powell and Rumsfeld three, four, multiple times a day. We have a telephone call every morning. And I can tell you that these are two people who work together extremely well. Now the president encourages his, as we call them, principals--that is, the secretaries and myself--to have strong views and to make those views known. And I think it would be a surprise to anybody if there weren't debates about the very big and important issues that we find ourselves dealing with. But the most important thing is that when the president decides what direction he's going, everybody salutes and follows.

SMILEY: What do you think the US, in fact, has accomplished by going to war with Iraq?

Dr. RICE: This was a really awful dictatorship, and it is a dictatorship that had threatened its neighbors, that had used weapons of mass destruction on its own people and on its neighbors, that was doing nothing for the benefit of its own people. And the Iraqi people have been liberated. We've removed, I think, one of the real sources of threat and instability in the region. We've removed in the region a regime that was supporting terrorists and, I think, given a new impetus to the possibilities for a new Middle East. It's going to be hard, Tavis, and anybody who thinks that the reconstruction of Iraq and setting Iraq on a democratic path is going to come easily or quickly knows very little about the history of this region or about how hard it is to do those things. But we're in this for the long run. We have good partners in Iraq, and we've already achieved for the Iraqi people liberation from this terrible tyrant.

Dr. RICE: Tavis, there are two separate issues here. First, what did we know about weapons of mass destruction going in? And we knew going in, and the intelligence agencies gave us assessments and judgments going in, that this is someone who had weapons of mass destruction, who had pursued advance weapons programs. We knew that there were large, unaccounted-for stockpiles of VX and sarin and anthrax. And we knew that this was somebody who was fueling a program with $3 billion a year in illegal revenue from oil transfers. So we knew a lot coming in.

And I'm struck that people who say, `Well, you should connect the dots, should have connected the dots about September 11th'--let me tell you, we had hundreds of dots about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program, and it wasn't just US intelligence. It wasn't just intelligence from other foreign services. It was also the United Nations itself who talked about these missing weapons.

Now that's separable from what will we find on the ground. I am quite certain that when we've had an opportunity to interview people, to go through the thousands and thousands of documents that we're finding and the thousands and thousands of documents that are being turned over to us, that we're going to find the extent of his weapons of mass destruction program, we're going to find what happened to his weapons of mass destruction, and we're going to be able to put together a complete picture. But that's going to take a little time. This was a program that was built for concealment, and so it's not surprising that it's going to take a little time to put the picture together.

SMILEY: Dr. Rice, as I sit here listening to your answer to that question, three things come to mind: Either the US got bad intelligence or wrong intelligence, one could argue; one could argue that the president, George W. Bush, lied to the American people to engage and win a war that he wanted to win for a number of other reasons; or one could argue that the president does, in fact, deserve more time to find these weapons of mass destruction. If you buy the latter argument, how long should the American public wait, indefinitely?

Dr. RICE: Well, we do have to unravel a program that was very concealed. But let me go back, Tavis, to the first two arguments that you made. President Bush was not the only person who talked about a weapons-of-mass-destruction program. When President Clinton in 1998 got ready to attack Iraq after the weapons inspectors left in December of 1998, he talked about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and the fact that, heaven forbid, he might use them in the future. Defense Secretary Cohen at the time, on television, talked, I remember very well, with a sack of Domino sugar, saying that that much anthrax or more was missing in Iraq. Weapons inspectors said that Iraq had failed to account for large stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. So President Bush was following in a long line here, going back to the very early 1990s, of people who knew that Saddam Hussein was pursuing weapons of mass destruction.

Now we will see how long it takes us to interview people and to put together the full picture, but it is simply revisionist history to say that people were somehow making this threat more than it was when you look back at the entire history of what people thought and knew about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.

SMILEY: Ultimately, if we do not find weapons of mass destruction, if the American public waits indefinitely and we never do find weapons of mass destruction, how then will the administration justify the president's reasons for going to war with Iraq in the first place?

Dr. RICE: Well, first of all, we are going to find the truth of this program and weapons of mass destruction and what he did with them. We are going to find that out, because we're going to interview people and we have documents, and we're going to know what happened to...

SMILEY: But, Dr. Rice, if we don't, though--let--at the moment we have not found--so let's assume that there are two sides to every story. There is a possibility that we might not find them. If we don't find them, what will the spin be?

Dr. RICE: Well, the--Tavis, let's not call it spin. We're going to find the truth about what Saddam Hussein did with weapons of mass destruction, how he built his programs, how he concealed them. You know, we didn't make this stuff up. There was intelligence. There were other intelligence services. There were UN inspectors. There were sanctions against this man for his weapons-of-mass-destruction programs. Come on, let's not revise the history. But we can also say that, in addition to the threat from weapons of mass destruction, this was one of the most brutal dictators of modern times, somebody who had attacked his neighbors in the past. And the Middle East, as a region, is far better off for his removal. And that, in and of itself, is a very important contribution.

SMILEY: I know you are inside the White House and working hard, you know, 24/7. I know you don't get exposed to all of the conversation taking place across America, but I wonder whether it would surprise you to know that inside of black America--and I get a chance to talk to black folk around the country every day through radio--there are a lot of African-Americans who respect you greatly, as you well know, a lot of African-Americans who clearly respect Secretary Powell greatly, who feel that, namely, the two African-Americans who are high up in this administration that the Republican Party brags about all the time, given their high placement--Condi Rice and Colin Powell--are being played by this administration, that the two of you on all the talk shows last Sunday were the ones who were sent out to explain this, and a lot of black folk take exception to that.

Dr. RICE: We were sent out to explain this, Tavis, because we're the secretary of State and the national security adviser. Who else would you send out to explain it? You know, I would just say to African-Americans, if you're national security adviser or you're secretary of State, you do that job. And, indeed, if we're going to go out and talk about what the United States knew going into the war and what the United States will find in Iraq, there are only two officials whom one would expect to do that: the secretary of State and the national security adviser.

SMILEY: To the Middle East, Dr. Rice: Is the president still optimistic about his road map for peace in the Middle East, given the renewed violence of the last 48 hours?

Dr. RICE: It's certainly been a difficult couple of days, but the president is absolutely committed to the resolutions that we got at Aqaba. He's completely committed to the road map. And we believe that the parties remain committed to the road map. We're going to have to deal with terrorism, and the way that we have to think about this--and it's a change in thinking for the parties--is we have to get Israel and the Palestinian authorities to think of this as their common enemy. The Hamas said they were going after the road map; they're actually going after Israel, who they consider an enemy, and they consider this Palestinian leadership to be an enemy, because the Palestinian leadership has signed on to the road map. So we're going to try to get people to work in partnership to deal with terrorism so that the Palestinian people, who have suffered mightily and who suffered humiliation and great difficulties in their lives, can have their own state and have a better future, and so that the Israeli people can live in a secure environment with a Palestinian neighbor.

SMILEY: Finally, I know you're an exercise buff. With all the stuff going on, are you still finding time for the gym?

Dr. RICE: Still finding time for the gym at 5:00 in the morning, Tavis. You'll have to come join me sometime.

SMILEY: That's why I love Condoleezza Rice. She squeezes it all in in a day. Condoleezza Rice is, of course, the national security adviser, and joined us via phone while on a trip here to Los Angeles.

SMILEY: Just ahead, what does it take to be a good father these days? And how many fathers are actually living up to the task? We'll talk with the president of the National Fatherhood Initiative.

I saw Condi on the Stepacoucus show, and she really is a brilliant lady. She deflected all of Streps soundbites, and ran circles around him. If Strep wants to draw some blood from her, he really is going to need to do some more homework, and hope he gets lucky.

of a conflict between the departments of State and Defense, a conflict between Rumsfeld and Powell.

There was some guy from the State Dept. on Charlie Rose show last night, he said (I paraphase) Look in the end it's the President who makes the decisions and decides who he wants in his administration. We have two people here who are doing their job, giving the president different options, then He decides.

I mean just how much "bad blood" can there be when they have lunch at least once a week to talk things over.

I think Condi Rice did a great job, but trying to explain facts to liberals is like talking to the four walls.

The transcript shows the interviewer tried the usual liberal spin (Bush=bad, mean, liar, etc.) on Condi. His demeanor sounded arrogant, condescending, and just plain snobbish. She answered him with facts and well thought out logic. But that didn't deter him -- he had an agenda that he had to present and pressed onward. I find especially offensive his innuendo that as blacks, she and SOS Powell, shouldn't be pushing the administration's line, presumably because they are considered just token blacks (by the libs) and shouldn't let themselves be used in that way. What the interviewer ignores is that these two formulate policy, present it, and follow the decision of the President regarding it. (Of course it wouldn't happen, but imagine the lib outcry if anyone else presented it to the public and press!!)

I can't believe that only several years ago I contributed to public radio and was a faithful listener and supporter with my $$. Now I can't stand to listen to them, or if I do, it is only to catch their lies, distortions and mis-statements.

Tavis Smiley is a really nasty, hateful man. Typical liberal. He really doesn't deserve to interview someone as fine as Condi Rice, but she's too gracious. She sure did put him in his place when he got nasty though. Condi is a really impressive lady and one tough cookie!

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