QUESTION: So, I'd like to talk a little bit about yesterday and also just about what -- you're about to -- heading off to the Middle East. How do you chart a way forward now, given the response yesterday from both Democrats and Republicans to the new Iraq proposal?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, I think people had the chance to ask questions, to -- you know, express their skepticism. Of course, skepticism isn't the policy and so I think now, people will have a chance to go back and think and really decide whether they think there is an alternative. I don't see an alternative to what the President has proposed. I think the President thought long and hard about alternatives and came up with this policy. And the policy is designed to get through -- to get the Iraqis through a transition in which they need to take care of Baghdad, because the violence in Baghdad is threatening to overrun the political process, but in which they don't yet have the forces to do it. And our forces augment their forces to help with this.
It's a very specific mission. As Bob Gates said, it's thought of as a temporary surge because it's a very specific mission. And it is, from the point of view of the President and all of us, the very best way to help the Iraqis stabilize Baghdad, move their political process forward, and at that point, be able to get full control to Iraqis of the security situation, as the President said, by November. But this is the way to get to that point in time.
QUESTION: What was yesterday like for you?
SECRETARY RICE: To answer the question -- you know, Helene, I've been through things like this before, come now. And I know that people wanted to express frustration. I know they wanted to express their skepticism. Some people wanted to express their pessimism about the policy, so they had an opportunity to do it. But I have to tell you that when you're sitting there, you're concentrating on what you're going to say next and so it's really not an issue of how -- what did you ask?
QUESTION: What was it like?
SECRETARY RICE: I was sitting there and answering questions, many of which were skeptical, many of which were pessimistic, some of which were hostile, some of which were -- many of which were thoughtful. And, you know, that's what I do.
QUESTION: It struck me that just seeing a lot of the skepticism was about Maliki and his --
SECRETARY RICE: Yes.
QUESTION: -- ability to perform. And much of it mirrored what either has been said to us by members of the Administration about their own concerns about Maliki, what was in Steve's memo that came out a few months ago which had a lot of concerns about whether Maliki could perform. Did you find it particularly difficult to be defending against doubters who were expressing doubts very similar to what you and your colleagues have discussed?
SECRETARY RICE: I think I said several times that I understand the skepticism because the Iraqi Government hasn't performed in the past. And I think that people are sometimes awfully impatient with a government that's nine months old, that has extraordinary difficulties to overcome. And the undercurrent that because they've not performed in the past, they won't perform this time, I think was -- is just -- there isn't a natural automaticity there; they didn't perform in the past, therefore, they won't perform this time. I think one thing that gives us somewhat greater confidence that they'll perform this time is that they themselves came to us with the problem about Baghdad. They themselves came to us with a plan to deal with it.
And I do think they have greater buy into this and I also think they know that the clock is ticking for them, not just with the American people -- everybody focuses on the American people -- but with the Iraqi people. And this is a democratic government, democratically elected government, and at some point, the Iraqi people will no longer accept this government's leadership. And so I think they have very great consequences for this government and the notion that somehow, we have to impose consequences because there are none if they fail, I think is just not right. I think they know that there are consequences that will be imposed on them.
QUESTION: Two more questions from the hearing from yesterday, if I could, a small one. Senator Boxer said to you, "You have nothing at stake here. You're not risking anything."
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah.
QUESTION: How did that strike you? And then to go bigger from that, the nation's allies and adversaries watch TV and read the papers.
SECRETARY RICE: Yes.
QUESTION: Did that hearing make your job more difficult as you embark upon what's going to be a very important diplomatic campaign in the Middle East?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, on the first question, I was actually a bit confused. I didn't, quite frankly at the moment, understand what she was talking about.
QUESTION: She held up your words so you could see them.
SECRETARY RICE: No, no, no, that was different. That I understood. But the thing about, you know -- it didn't actually dawn on me that she was saying, we'll, you don't have children that can go to war, which seems to me a rather strange comment to be quite frank, because I thought it was okay to be single. I thought it was okay to not have children and I thought you could still make the decisions on behalf of the country even if you were single and didn't have children. So it would never have occurred to me that that was the subtext. Later on, when people mentioned it, I thought, oh, is that really what she meant? And Tony Snow said something about sending feminism back a ways. I guess so.
QUESTION: So when you went through the murder board the day before with your staff and their questions, nobody asked you why you were single and --
SECRETARY RICE: No, nobody asked me why I was -- (laughter) why I didn't have children. (Laughter.) Yeah, right or can't possibly make decisions on behalf of the country. That's very strange.
QUESTION: Sean will bring his kids in here.
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah, exactly.
But on the second point, look, I do think when our adversaries or our -- even or our friends think that there are deep divisions in America, that it is unsettling for our allies. But what I say to them is that's just the nature of our democracy. It's the nature of democracy. Don't misread differences about what policy ought to be, to be a fundamental difference about the need to succeed in Iraq. Because I think what really has come out of this whole process is an understanding that failure in Iraq would be really disastrous.
You see it in the Baker-Hamilton commission report. You see it in the way even people who say that they didn't agree with going into the war to begin with, talk about the consequences of failure, so that's when I emphasize to our friends and to our adversaries and I think we have every opportunity to demonstrate that there isn't a problem here, so I'm not worried about the adversaries so much.
QUESTION: You mentioned Hamilton-Baker. One of the key elements of the report, of course, was their placing of a loose timetable of withdrawal of combat brigades by 2008. That report landed just, I guess, a little over two months ago now. Did that get serious consideration? Can you just take us through a little bit how that and the other major recommendation you did not adopt, which was the Iran-Syria recommendation? Just take us through the logic trail --
SECRETARY RICE: Clearly, people thought about and looked at what I would consider the other question -- the other big idea out there, which is the Baker-Hamilton and other people's ideas in various forms. And that is, you say to the Iraqis -- you know, we're going to give you X amount of time and if you don't do it, then we're going to get out, or we're going to begin to redeploy so that there's enough pressure on you to do these things. I mean, there are different variations of it, but it all comes down to confronting the Iraqis with consequences in order to get them to act.
I think that that assumes that this is an issue of will, not an issue of capability. And since, when the President reviewed the plan for stabilizing Baghdad, he was told quite directly by General Casey that it is an issue of capability, then a plan that -- or an option that relies completely just on will really doesn't make very much -- much sense any longer. Now, it's --
QUESTION: Some say it's both.
SECRETARY RICE: No, I was going to say -- well, thank you, David, I was just about to say that. (Laughter.) It is, in fact, both. It's both will and capability, but it's not just will; it's will and capability.
The other point is that I think the Iraqis do understand that there are consequences and -- but there are benchmarks. The President has been -- you know, they're not benchmarks in the sense of, you must do this by X date. But there are clear indications to the -- indicators to the Iraqis -- or indicators of Iraqi -- let me start again, there are clear milestones that everyone expects the Iraqis to meet and the Iraqis couldn't possibly be confused about what those are since they themselves developed them, whether it's an oil law or a de-Baathification law or the ability to do something about provincial elections.
Or perhaps most importantly, the one that I'm looking at very, very carefully, the most important one here is rules of engagement for going after these militias and going after the death squads. Because one thing that I do think is just not right in how people view what's going on in Baghdad is there's some sense of Sunnis and Shia just sort of wildly killing each other in civil conflict; "I'm a Sunni, you're a Shia, therefore, we want to kill each other."
But in fact, what you've got is a very organized campaign, a sectarian campaign of death squads, people tied to militias going into neighborhoods, particularly mixed neighborhoods, killing the men -- that's where some of the bodies come from -- sending the women into exile and taking over the neighborhood. This is a breakdown in civil order. And it's the Iraqi Government's responsibility to recreate that civil order and they need help to do it.
But that's why, even though, of course, people looked at that option, it didn't seem to be one that was likely to succeed, because George Casey was very explicit that he did not think the Iraqis would have the capability to do the kind of Baghdad plan that is being anticipated until the summer. And the gap between now and the summer is just too great, given what's going on in Baghdad.
QUESTION: Do you have faith in Maliki at this point that he's capable of carrying this out and that he will carry this out?
SECRETARY RICE: I do think he will. I really do. I think he understands the stakes and I think he'll carry it out. I'd go in clear-eyed. I know that a lot is riding on Iraqis making the right decisions. I think they have plenty of incentive to make the right decisions, but it's not just Maliki. This has to be the other moderate forces as well, the Kurds, the SCIRI, Hakim, the Dawa leaders, the IIP of Tariq al-Hashemi. And we talk about Maliki, but it has to be the Iraqi leadership and that's why the President made phone calls to all of them before his speech, not just to Maliki.
The other thing that we are doing here at State in conjunction with Defense is that you want multiple points of success, not just a single point. And so the decentralization and diversification of our support for governance out to the provinces and to the localities means that you're working with local leaders who can also affect success, even obviously on a more local scale.
I think we've had some effect in Anbar where the tribal sheikhs are -- now seem to be willing to fight al-Qaida and where they're training -- they've sent 1,100 of their own young men to Jordan to train -- they call them the sons of Anbar -- to come back and fight, so I think you will also see that you want to build from the bottom up, not just from the top down. And that gives you multiple points for success rather than a single one.
QUESTION: Is that a hitch in your bet strategy, though? And how do those multiple points then pressure the center to move in the right direction? How does that happen?
SECRETARY RICE: Yeah. Well, first of all, it is a federal system and there are two advantages to it. One is that then you actually begin to deliver to populations, which is an important element of counterinsurgency, keeping places that are stable stable and starting to stabilize some that are not. And I think you do that better at the local level than -- and even in Baghdad, we're increasing the number of PRTs inside Baghdad so that we can get out to more local councils.
The second advantage it has is that it does, I think, as these people have a stake, put pressure on the central government to act. I don't think of it as hedging. I think of it more as, you know, we're a federal state too and we sort of understand that if you're dependent on Washington to do everything, not much would actually happen if you live in Birmingham or Denver or, you know, San Francisco for that matter. And so it's a model, I think, with which we're very comfortable.
But if I could change one thing going back, the more localized provincial strategy, I think, has been much more successful than the concentration in Baghdad, which even for reconstruction, we did a lot of good in the electrical grid and water and sewage and so forth. But it was actually a pretty centralized approach and in retrospect, a more decentralized approach may have been more successful --
QUESTION: Not that I want to edit the White House slides they put out in advance, but as someone who has traveled much of Iraq, I had to drop my pen at the line that said, "Events outside the Green Zone increasingly affecting Iraq." It's like somebody had to write that down for the government to understand it?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, sometimes governments are slow at times. But I think we understood that. I mean, we started trying -- at the very beginning after the invasion, there were local councils that were growing up. But then I just think we were kind of insufficiently attentive to it. You know, it became -- first you had the CPA, which, by its nature, was pretty centralized, although they spent a good deal of time with the Kurds. But we thought of it in kind of big chunks.
As we've gotten to really know the country and to get this PRT structure in place -- the other thing is we didn't we have a delivery vehicle, really. You could go out and visit, but if you didn't have a delivery vehicle, it was hard to actually make a difference out in the provinces and localities. And I remember going to Mosul on my first or second trip to Baghdad shortly after I'd become Secretary and talking with the governor of Mosul and thinking, "Hmm, he sounds just like, you know, so many governors I've heard," except he was writing letters to Baghdad that they weren't answering. And, you know, they weren't responsive to his requests for budget to do this or that project.
And it's, I think, going to be more effective to be more localized in some of our assistance and reconstruction. And for the Iraqis, the other big challenge, and this didn't get enough attention, the Iraqis have devoted $10 billion of their own to reconstruction and job growth and community stabilization. Again, to keep it not just to be very Baghdad-focused, 2.4 billion of that is to go out to the provinces. It's really important that that gets spent in the provinces.
QUESTION: When I hear you talk about this, about Iraq, but also about the larger Middle East, you describe sort of a geopolitical framing of moderate, you know, Sunnis and moderate Shiites on one side and sort of the extremist Iran-Syria coalition on the other side. But it seems as if the Sunni Arabs in particular see this as a Sunni-Shia split. That's the case, sort of, with Saudi Arabia, with Egypt and Jordan.
How does that -- I mean, how do you manage that tension, particularly when we move on to Israel as well, where the Sunni Arabs see this as a Sunni-Shia split, and in that case, they see Hamas as Sunni? And part of what they're doing is trying to help Hamas to make sure, you know -- about Hamas so that Hamas doesn't end up -- so that Hamas doesn't end up --
SECRETARY RICE: But they're not funding Hamas.
QUESTION: So that Hamas doesn't end up (inaudible) to the Shia, to Iran ending up in the Shiite camp.
SECRETARY RICE: No, but really, they're not funding Hamas. That's been Hamas' problem. Hamas can't -- Hamas comes back with, you know, $35 million from Iran because they're not funding Hamas. They have thrown their support behind Abu Mazen. And I remember, again, that when we said that Hamas could be isolated financially, people said "No, the Arab states will fund them." They're not. And that is part of Hamas' problem and that's why Hamas flirts from time to time with a different formula for how they talk about Israel and talk about the existence of Israel because they can't govern. And if there were lots of Arab money flowing to Hamas, they would be able to govern, but they can't.
So I do think, though, your larger point is right. I mean, that -- you know, there's still a tendency to see these things in Sunni-Shia terms. But the Middle East is going to have to overcome that and one of the issues in getting these responsible states to support Iraq is to understand that the Iraqi-Shia-led government is Arab and it is -- indeed sees its identity with the Arabs, that it has no intention of becoming -- you know, trading Saddam Hussein for the Iranians and that the only way that Iraq probably makes the choice that some of them fear is if people deny the Shia-led Iraq a place in the Arab world. It's why I thought it was extremely important that Amr Mussa of the Arab League has been involved. He's gone to Iraq. The Iraqis are not -- you know, not Iranian blind.
QUESTION: When you were in that standoff the other day, I guess right around New Year's with the Iranians where the U.S. had captured -- and I don't have a hold onto -- you, I guess, eventually stepped into --
SECRETARY RICE: That was at the Vienna convention.
QUESTION: It was the Vienna convention, problem, yes. It sure sounded a lot like they were not treating them as alien beings.
SECRETARY RICE: No, they're not alien beings and -- look, a lot of these people were in exile in Iran. They're going to have relations with Iran. I'm sure they have friends in Iran. And if Iran wants to have good transparent, neighborly relations with Iraq, that would be a good thing. But I don't think that -- while Iraqi leaders have good relations with Iranians, I don't think they want to sign over control of their country to the Iranians for undue influence. There's a difference there.
QUESTION: The Iran section of the President's speech and of your testimony particularly struck all of us because if you add up all of the elements that we've seen happen in the past couple of weeks, the raids, the two raids the U.S. has carried out, and moving of the carrier, Stu Levey's most recent sanctions, the Patriot missiles -- what am I missing? Anything else in there? And obviously, the resolution on the nuclear issue and --
QUESTION: The appointment of an admiral to CENTCOM, which I think got Iran's attention.
QUESTION: Right. It all sounds like it's got the hallmarks of having been part of a new phase of your strategy, very different from the one that Helene and I discussed with you when we came in here -- when was that, May, I guess?
QUESTION: June, June 2nd.
QUESTION: June. This was when you first did the opening and you had your multi-colored chart and the timeframe.
SECRETARY RICE: Yes, yes.
QUESTION: You've gone into a new phase.
SECRETARY RICE: I think we are. I think we are.
QUESTION: Maybe if you could describe that to us and also tell us along the way, did this come with some presidential decision that we could go after Iranians in Iraq and so forth?
SECRETARY RICE: No, we have had a strategy toward Iran, I think, that has been evolving to deal with the serious problems that Iran is causing. You know, the nuclear problem -- we're going to continue to leave the door open for diplomacy. But frankly, the process that we went through to get this last resolution was -- even though I think the resolution itself is very good, the process was, I think, not really actually helpful because I think it exposed certain splits. Fortunately, we were able to bring it back together around an actual resolution.
But it does mean, to my mind, on the Security Council, that the essential achievement of that period of about a year now since February of '06 when we got the foreign governors resolution and all the way then through to the two resolutions in the UN Security Council, that that process has produced a good outcome. But I'm not sure what the next steps are in that process.
And I think the international community is going to have to think hard about what the next steps are in that process. It obviously will depend a lot on what Iran does, but we did get to a Chapter 7 resolution. But I've said many times, and Helene will remember, I think, that I've said this when we've been on the road, now, Chapter 7 resolution -- it's the collateral effects that I think will have perhaps even more -- David, are you beeping?
QUESTION: I wish I knew why.
SECRETARY RICE: That's a fancy tape recorder. It's that these collateral effects will probably have greater consequence than the resolution itself.
QUESTION: But is there a concern that the Iranians -- I'm not saying this is correct -- but looking at the American involvement in Iraq and the difficulties there, that somehow, American deterrents might have been weakened in their eyes and therefore, you had to move a carrier striker, PAC-3s, and very overtly issue a declaratory policy about Iranian behavior?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, let me put it in a positive fashion. We wanted to make certain that Iran understood that the United States was able and capable of and prepared to defend its interests and that of its allies in the Persian Gulf and it was probably important to take some steps to reiterate that message.
QUESTION: Have there been new presidential findings around this in recent time or presidential directives?
SECRETARY RICE: David. (Laughter.)
QUESTION: I'm not discussing silly, covert findings, but --
SECRETARY RICE: Yes.
QUESTION: -- I mean orders that legalize certain activities we're doing in Iraq. For example, this is -- we have never before had these kind of ratings and --
SECRETARY RICE: Well -- but force protection is force protection.
QUESTION: So that does not reply on anything.
SECRETARY RICE: It's the -- there was -- there has been a decision to go after these networks after a period of time in which we saw increasing activity in them and increasing lethality in what they were producing.
QUESTION: A presidential decision and a military decision?
SECRETARY RICE: Just -- let's just leave it at -- well, of course it's the President's decision.
QUESTION: And on the nuclear side, none of us have seen very much activity. There's been a lot of talk on their part, but if you actually take a look at where we are from, say, last February, they've added one new stand of centrifuges.
SECRETARY RICE: Yes.
QUESTION: Big deal, not much. Does that make you think, having been down this road where it's good and bad before, that there's a facility we don't know about? Are you --
SECRETARY RICE: Unfortunately, you don't know what you don't know. I think we continue to be suspicious because there are -- because the IAEA's access is limited, because the IAEA can't get answers to questions about things that have showed up in facilities that were associated with the military. I think people are suspicious, but I -- but, you know --
QUESTION: You've seen no new evidence that you find --
SECRETARY RICE: You don't know what you don't know.
QUESTION: May I return --
SECRETARY RICE: But in terms of the question of what they're actually doing on the ground, you know, that's one advantage to having the IAEA -- there are many, but that's an advantage to having the IAEA there, is that -- you know, they do monitor. I think that the problem is that they're getting more and more limited access and that's trouble.
QUESTION: If I could turn to your answer a moment ago, not to parse your language, but it's interesting. You said that one of the reasons there's a need to go after the Iranians in Iraq was because of the lethality of what they were producing, by which I mean the new IEDs. So it's more about their combat capabilities to the sectarian violence rather than their political meddling and destabilizing.
SECRETARY RICE: Well, it's both, because they're not only producing the IEDs but, of course, we think they're providing help to militias as well. And I can't -- and maybe even to some of the more violent elements of these militias, so it's both. But certainly, the concern for what they're doing in terms of the IEDs and dangers to our forces is --
QUESTION: So the mission has been cast as force protection?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, there is a force protection mission, but -- you know, we're also concerned about their destabilizing behavior in turn.
QUESTION: When was this decision made?
SECRETARY RICE: David, this has been evolving for some time, but it's several months ago now that the President -- well, many -- several months ago I would say, I'm trying to think -- well, that the President asked and the National Security Council asked what more could be done to disrupt these networks because, you know, we were clearly getting indications that there were actual networks and that Iran was involved with those actual networks, as the President said the other night.
QUESTION: I think it must have been -- I mean, October, November, it was -- they were in the fall?
SECRETARY RICE: No, I think earlier than that.
QUESTION: Senator Biden --
MR. MCCORMACK: You guys have just a few more minutes left here.
QUESTION: Sure. Senator Biden laid a clear marker yesterday about the Senate Democrats at least not accepting military action across the border. Now, there has been some cross-border work in Syria, in hot pursuit and all of that. How did you take the Senator's comments and do you think that there will be a decision not to go into Iran after these networks?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, first of all, you know this is the classic issue of constitutional authority of the Commander-in-Chief and the constitutional authority of the Congress, and so I thought that that was the marker that Senator Biden was laying down.
But I'm not going to get into a discussion, and I didn't yesterday, of what the President's authorities are, but the President is Commander-in-Chief. But I think Pace was asked this question about -- you know, he was actually asked, were you -- have you ever asked to be able to go into Iran; he said no. He -- they are the ones who, of course, with intel, designing how we go after these networks. And I think it's their view that this is work that largely get done and it can be done in Iraq.
QUESTION: You're about to take off on a huge trip. Can you -- we haven't even asked you about what you're going to accomplish.
SECRETARY RICE: Long, lots of countries. Yeah.
First, I do think it's important to go out and talk to our allies about the President's speech about support for the Iraqi government, about some of the elements that you are drawing attention to, about accounting -- covering Iran. Those are all important subjects. I think we'll also -- I need to go out and talk to these states that want to support the Lebanese. There's a Paris conference coming up soon.
And then on the Palestinian-Israeli front, it's really important to talk to people first rather than just coming out with here's what we need to do to accelerate progress on the roadmap and to begin to be able to contemplate a Palestinian state or begin to get to the place where we can establish a Palestinian state. I feel this is a very consequential and critical time.
I do think there are openings on the Palestinian-Israeli issue. The speech that Prime Minster Olmert gave, I think the meeting that he and Abbas had, I think some of the obvious willingness of the Arab states to recognize that their interests lie with the resolution of this issue and perhaps to -- we've heard more about the Arab initiative now in the last several months than we've heard in several years. There are a lot of people who seem to want to move this forward.
But I'm keenly aware that there is groundwork that has to be laid. You have to have a sense of where people really are. You have to talk to them. I think you will see on this trip, Thom, that we're not going to do the half-hour meeting here and the half-hour meeting there. I'm going to really sit with people for extended periods of time and ask questions about where they see the potential for coming together, the potential for agreement. And I think then we have to -- I will -- I then will come out through Germany, because I want to talk to the Germans because they're chair of the EU and then talk to Prime Minster Blair who obviously has been very active in this.
I then plan to come back and talk to the President, talk to others, and we also, I think, probably will try to have a Quartet meeting sometime in the next few weeks.
MR. MCCORMACK: Okay. One last question, guys. And if you don't have one, we're done.
SECRETARY RICE: You're done.
QUESTION: Thanks.
SECRETARY RICE: Thank you.
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