Interview by Stan Crock of Business Week

So this is the beginning. This is the start. And we have to be patient, deliberate, and not give them responsibility that they're not able to handle yet. And it is simply unreasonable for any of my Security Council colleagues to expect that we would put somebody else in charge and second the American army to them.

So we'll -- there -- you understand quadratic equations. There's a solution set in here. And we have begun the discussion of the resolution. And the French have ideas, the Germans have ideas, the Russians have ideas. And I think there is a solution set in here.

What's different now is we're not talking about going to war. We're talking about going to peace. We're talking about giving the Iraqis sovereignty over their own land and their own people. Nobody is disputing that. Therefore, nobody is going to veto whatever comes forward, I don't think. In fact, I would be surprised. So we're talking about getting the necessary votes, and we hope it will be unanimous, we hope we can persuade them.

QUESTION: You mentioned weapons of mass destruction. Obviously, there's a report upcoming. Where are we?

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, we are waiting for the report. David Kay is hard at work on it. I don't know what's in it yet. I haven't talked -- I talked to David a couple months ago before he went back out. And we're waiting to see what the report contains.

I'm confident that the work he is doing will demonstrate that we were not blowing smoke. We said this was a place that was dangerous, a regime that was dangerous, with respect to weapons of mass destruction.

QUESTION: If I could ask you a broader question. Jim Woolsey's op-ed aside, most people don't think there's a military option in North Korea. Iran would be an enormously complicated military operation since we don't exactly know where the sites are that we're worried about, are. And one could argue that the military options have essentially been exhausted in some of the trouble spots. That puts diplomacy in the forefront going forward. But there are some who argued that the club in the closet, and out of the closet, actually helped diplomacy, that that was one of the reasons you were able to get a unanimous --

SECRETARY POWELL: The what inside the closet?

QUESTION: The military club -- that it was one of the reasons that you were able to get unanimous UN resolution on Iraq because things seemed inevitable. Now that there's a greater premium on diplomacy, but people know how stretched we are, does that make your diplomacy harder? How do you go forward?

SECRETARY POWELL: No. The North Koreans keep running around saying that they're going to -- they're scared to death of us, so they have not dismissed the (inaudible) residual power of the United States of America.

But we don't, we don't need to -- the President will never take any option off the table. We always have a military option. And obviously the more places we're involved in, the fewer forces are available to go somewhere else. But the way the President sees it, he doesn't really have to think right now about a military option in North Korea because he has good diplomatic options to pursue, and he's pursuing them.

We've got six-party talks going with North Korea, even though some people believe that what we should have done was immediately say to the North Koreans, "Ah, gee, gosh, you got a new nuclear program? Let's negotiate on what you're going to charge us for this one." No, that's not what we did. We didn't do that. And everybody's screaming we've got a crisis, the situation is grim, all hell's going to break loose, The Washington Times even predicted we would see a new missile at the parade this morning, which we didn't.

And so there are -- there are diplomatic options with North Korea and diplomatic options with Iran. Iran's under considerable pressure right now, even the Russians.

QUESTION: And you think we're making progress on both of those fronts?

SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah. It's -- it's not breakthrough time yet, but we are hard at work on it and we're getting good response. The first thing you do with a diplomatic problem is to get some friends to join you in solving the problem. And everybody last fall was saying, "Okay, America, you caused this problem with the North Koreans, you've got to go to Pyongyang to sort it out."

We didn't cause the problem in North Korea. The North Koreans caused the problem with the rest of the world. Nobody knew they were developing another, a technology for nuclear weapons until we found out, and said, "Hey guys, look what we found." And they said, "Eh, we're doing it. So what? Now, come on in, and let's talk," meaning, "What are you going to pay us for it this time?"

QUESTION: Right.

SECRETARY POWELL: And the President said, "I'm not going to pay anything for it. You're -- we are the offended party, not you." But the North Koreans are masterful in terms of painting themselves as the offended party and the victim. And what the President said, "Not going to attack you, not going to invade you," and everybody said, "There is no solution." I don't know how many people walked in here and said to me -- my foreign colleagues said to me--there's no solution, no way, they'll never talk to you in any other format but direct. And you've got to yield. You've got to go talk to them, as if we are the offended party. We said, "No." And we pressed and we pressed and we stuck with it. Voila. The Chinese now are as engaged in it as we are. As are the Russians, who wouldn't even acknowledge there was a problem for a while.

They're all now engaged in it and they're all now saying the same thing to the North Koreans. "This is not good. We will not have a nuclearized Peninsula." Now, Kim Jong-il lives in an unusual state. And I watched parts of the parade this morning. I can't wait to see it all on CSPAN later. It looked like it was a great, you know, wonderful, colorful event.

But when all those young people are through parading and put down their pom-poms, there's still going to be a country that is in deep trouble. And he looks around. He looks to the North. China is telling him to find a way out. And he can't get them as an ally.

Russia, Japan, South Korea -- where is his future? And just to say, "America is hostile to me, and this will rally support." It's rallying nothing. He's blown a lot of economic aid that might have come in from China as a result of Koizumi's visit last year. It hasn't happened. The abductee issue.

QUESTION: Japan

SECRETARY POWELL: Koizumi -- I'm sorry, what did I say? You're already getting a lot of heat from China, which puts us at risk (inaudible) Chinese.

QUESTION: It's hard to measure.

SECRETARY POWELL: Huh?

QUESTION: It's hard to measure progress in the North Korea talks because they come out with a belligerent statement or two, "We're going to test, we're part of the nuclear club."

SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah. It is.

QUESTION: So we see a process where China and Russia are engaged but, you know, if they test, would --

SECRETARY POWELL: If they test, we'll take note of their test. The only reason they are testing is to scare the international community. And they will scare it, scare it to death, and everyone will run to the battle stations. The President has already accepted the possibility that they might test. And we will say "Gee, that was interesting."

We're not going to be -- the 50-year history of dealing with this regime is that they are marvelous in terms of threats, in terms of rhetoric and actions. Well, they might take an action, but this time they would be sticking their eye -- not just sticking their finger -- not just in the eye of the United States, but I think Kim Jong Il will have to think twice about whether he would do such a thing in light of Chinese involvement.

QUESTION: Well, Sam asked a question from one end which was, has the demonstrated use of force --

SECRETARY POWELL: Can I answer (inaudible)?

QUESTION: Yes, go ahead.

SECRETARY POWELL: You always have the possibility or the option to use force, but it doesn't mean even if we had all the forces available would this suggest that the smart thing to do or the right thing to do would be to invade Iran or North Korea? They had a body of resolutions 12 years long with Iraq. It's different. And people leapt to the conclusion that the President might have bought into some of the ideas being tossed around by Mr. Woolsey and others. But I mean when you look at what Jim is saying is the fourth world war has begun, and we're just going to go around invading people everywhere. That's not the President's policy. It certainly isn't the policy of the American people who the President represents.

QUESTION: Well, there is a neo-conservative premise, though, that when you're fighting state-sponsored terrorism, unconventional weapons, people willing to use them, that sovereignty in some cases is subsume to the need to be proactive. That doesn't sound all that wacky when you sort of look at it that way.

SECRETARY POWELL: Some neo-conservatives feel that way.

QUESTION: I guess the question is, has that made your diplomacy easier or harder? Because in Europe, among your presumed friends, you know, the character of the United States now is itching to use a military option. It's not the policy you've just described -- gets its objectives by force -- this kind of swaggering bully thing -- and that the fear factor of the Iraq operation is supposed to cause other countries to fall in line. But in fact, it could embolden other countries to model themselves on the US. In the incident with Pakistan, China and Taiwan, we could have uncorked, you know, this whole unilateral thing.

SECRETARY POWELL: I think a lot of this overwrought. And of course, the same commentators and opinion-makers in Europe don't ever want to use force hardly for anything if it can be avoided.

And I know what these attitudes are. I have to live with them every day in one way or another. Yet, when you look at Europe, and pick your European club, NATO, EU, plus some others, and the majority of the governments essentially understand what we are doing and have been supportive.

I really like to point at Germany and France. You mentioned Spain. Even in the presence of strong resistance within the Spanish public, President Aznar joined in fully. Berlusconi -- same way. The Dane, the Pole, the small states in the north know what it means to be impressed. So when you look at Europe, we haven't done a bad job of bringing Europe together. Not the public. We still have a problem with the public in every one of those places because they have bought into this caricature. When you look what the President has actually done, he's improved relations with China in a significant way. He's improved relations with Russia. We signed a treaty in Moscow. We got rid of the ABM Treaty and we allowed missile defense programs to move forward with Russia without slitting our relationship with Russia.

We got the Baltic States added to NATO without causing Russia to go nuts over it. We got Russia added to the NATO family through a device called the NATO-Russia Council. So this isn't the action of a swaggering bully who doesn't take into account the thoughts of others and the feelings of others. This is a sophisticated president who did that. He discussed it with Moscow. He did it with China. He's done it with Japan. He's done it with South Korea. He's brought all them together to tell the North Koreans that their policies won't work.

It's this President that went to Africa, not to say gee, King Leopold's ghost, which country do I want, but to talk about HIV/AIDS, the greatest weapon of mass destruction on the face of the Earth, to talk about poverty elimination, to talk about the Millennium Challenge Account.

It's this President who has gone all over the world to pursue free trade agreements, start the WTO rank again. Chile Free Trade Agreements, Singapore Free Trade Agreement, Jordan Free Trade Agreement. Free trade area in the Americas. You've got poor Bob Zoellick down there now in Cancun (inaudible) four days. He's got a Middle East Trade Agreement in the next 10 years.

And so it's easy to caricature our foreign policy, and it fits into European intellectual conceptions of America as the cowboy. The President speaks in a direct manner with a very direct approach that is refreshing but sometimes does not meet European standards of intellectual mumbling.

QUESTION: That wasn't bad, that was terrific. (Inaudible) recited by heart.

SECRETARY POWELL: We've got a lot of stuff going on and it doesn't get written about because everybody would rather write caricature. The caricature is that I'm in a constant battle with everybody. And it's more caricature than reality. I'm either going to get fired next week, or quit next week. Gee, that didn't work, he didn't quit or get fired, let's say he's going to leave the end of next year.

QUESTION: Well, if we just talked about the national occurrence of internal debate, would that be better?

SECRETARY POWELL: Sure, there's internal debate constantly. I've never -- you know, I've been a National Security Advisor, Deputy National Security Advisor, I've been with Weinberger and Shultz, I was in the NSC at the height of the Iran Contra Crisis. That's when I got into the NSC. I was Acting Corps Commander minding my own business in Germany. I would have had a totally different career track if it hadn't been for that. Boom, and then the White House.

I have been through Desert Storm, I have been through many, many crises. I've been through four presidential administrations, and there are always these kinds of pressures and tensions. And it's no secret that my views tend to be more moderate than some of my colleagues, but the President knew that when he hired me, and all of my friends in government have known that about me all along.

You think Dick Cheney didn't know?

QUESTION: I'm shocked by this abuse. Is this more an issue over, in a way, process and procedure rather than goal in that you did get out of the ABM Treaty. You discussed it with Russia. You ended up signing a piece of paper which a lot of people, including the President initially, you know -- when he said "I'll give him a piece of paper if he wants it," he really didn’t want to give him a piece of paper quite clearly.

You went to the UN before you went into Iraq. After the announcement of a review earlier in '01 of North Korean policy, you had said something about continuing to see where policy -- (inaudible) -- in the end of that review, you know, we're going to go forward. So the caricature that you've been run roughshod over in the early part of your administration seemed to me to be overblown a bit in the Time Magazine cover story about this.

SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah.

QUESTION: But in any event, what is the question of how you get to where you going, know where you're going? Is that more where the disputes arise?

SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah, I think that's fair.

QUESTION: And --

SECRETARY POWELL: I always measure not the daily line but who crosses the finish line.

QUESTION: Because of (inaudible)? (Laughter)

We didn't ask about the roadmap, which is kind of (inaudible) --

SECRETARY POWELL: But the fact of the matter is the only one whose foreign policy counts, decision counts, and whose philosophy counts at the end of the day is the President's. I'm not the chief foreign policy developer of the United States Government (inaudible) of the President. My job is to help him deal with the weighty issues. And he has a full range of tools available to him. Diplomacy is one of them; politics on the international stage is another one. And to the extent that we have been successful in the use of those tools, I feel quite satisfied with the advice that I and this department have given him.

QUESTION: And you say he didn't like the treaty. He had great reservations about the treaty, but he knew that Putin wanted it. And guess what we got? A treaty, a treaty that he is now very proud of. And you've seen the ratification ceremonies and the instrument of ratification. And despite what a lot of critics said about it, I told him we would easily pass that treaty in the Senate. Now, (inaudible) the vote was I think 99 to 0 or 100 to 0. I was away that day. And it satisfied the political purpose for which it was created.

I'll never forget (inaudible) when I told him we were going to bail out of the ABM Treaty. And he said you're wrong, that's bad, you shouldn’t do that, it's crazy. But that's behind us; we don’t have to talk about that anymore. And six months later we were out of the treaty, and I think it was -- when did we sign the Treaty of Moscow? June or July, I don't remember. But about the same time we were out of the ABM Treaty officially is when we cut the deal on the Treaty of Moscow.

And so it shows a President who understands the needs of other presidents and prime ministers (inaudible) and is willing to turn me loose even when there are voices who say don't do that.

QUESTION: Okay. The traditional weazily stand-up to depart extra question is -- tracks right out of what you just said.

SECRETARY POWELL: Did I walk in on the McLaughlin Show here?

QUESTION: No. No. Wait. There are people outside who would desperately like to see you stay around because --

SECRETARY POWELL: There are also people outside who would definitely (inaudible) --

QUESTION: -- because the counterweight of theory is that with an administration that is, shall we say, fairly well-stocked with super-hawks, to use the media caricature, it's good to have Colin Powell around to add another dimension to these discussions which we do not lampoon as big fights, but discussions.

Is there any circumstance under which you could re-up?

SECRETARY POWELL: There is only one answer to the question. I will answer it any other way. I serve at the pleasure of the President. And that's something for the President and me to discuss and decide when I believe we (inaudible) decide it. All I know is that notwithstanding what lots of people write and what lots of people comment on, I and my department get slammed unmercifully in various publications for this, that and the other and all of our misdemeanors and felonies, the President is satisfied with the performance of this department. We have transformed this department a great deal over the last two-and-a-half years with real transformation and not rhetoric. And it's reflected in the way the Department's (inaudible) and the way people feel about being in this department.

Who took a poll, Richard, of young people --

BOUCHER: It was on CBS Market Watch.

SECRETARY POWELL: Which of the main -- they were trying to find the top 25 corporations in America that young, upwardly mobile, college graduates are going to, and we were number two of the 25. CIA was also one of those (inaudible). So people know we're making a difference.

As long as the President thinks we're doing the job for him, we'll keep doing the job for him. You can also look at -- this is a little tacky -- but you can look at ratings from polling as to whether or not the American people believe that a good job is being done here, and they do. And if I broke it out demographically between independents, republicans and democrats, where do you think the highest ratings will be?

QUESTION: Probably republicans.

SECRETARY POWELL: Much higher. Very high.

QUESTION: Does Newt Gingrich show up on the samples?

SECRETARY POWELL: No. Six percent (inaudible). I know where they all work.

(Laughter.)