Interview With James Rosen of Fox News Channel

Secretary Condoleezza Rice
Port-au-Prince, Haiti
September 27, 2005
MR. ROSEN: Madame Secretary, thank you, as always, for your time. I wonder if we could begin by establishing on the record that you've missed me terribly.

SECRETARY RICE: (Laughter.) Of course.


MR. ROSEN: All right. There it is. Your tour of Haiti today, brief, but I gather meaningful for you, do you think that the security situation here will enable fully free and fair elections?


SECRETARY RICE: Well, the security situation has clearly improved here, several months ago. And there's better coordination between MINUSTAH, which is the UN peacekeeping operation here, headed by Brazil.

(Audio difficulty, transcript resumed once resolved)


The security situation here in Haiti has clearly improved over the last several months. MINUSTAH which is, of course, the UN peacekeeping operation headed by Brazil is being, I think, somewhat more aggressive in dealing with some of the problems here. That is something that they wanted to do and they now have the ability to do it. They also are working in closer coordination with a reforming Haitian police force. It is not yet a complete reform, but there is a new Director General of the police forces here. And by all accounts, the Haitian police are also doing better. So the security situation has improved. It's still not ideal by any stretch of the imagination. And we hope that the security can be improved even further by the elections, but I believe that most people think that we can get through elections here and that security can be provided.


MR. ROSEN: Obviously, a successful election here you would hope would be a model for other regions. Let's talk about one of those other regions. Not bad, right, (laughter) as these things go. And I want to talk about the IAEA Board of Governors vote that took place this weekend. Gregory Shulte said after the vote that this sends a clear signal. I gather you agree, but since then Iran has threatened to resume its enrichment of uranium. Obviously, they're not getting the signal if that's the case.


SECRETARY RICE: Well, Iran has threatened several things. Let's see what they do, because this was a very clear signal -- the IAEA Board of Governors vote. It was a clear signal because so many states voted for the deferred referral, making clear that Iran was in noncompliance. Iran found itself in a situation of which a number of countries did not vote for the resolution, but abstained, leaving clear that they had questions also about Iran and compliance. I believe the only country that voted against was Venezuela.


And the Iranians have to understand that they are isolated in the international community and they need now to go back to negotiations with the European-3. They need to recognize that they have lost the confidence of the international system and that this is not a question of their right to peaceful nuclear use; this is that they've lost the confidence of the international system. Nobody trusts them to have a fuel cycle and they're simply going to have to deal with that or they'll remain isolated.


MR. ROSEN: So this sort of sets the stage for another vote by IAEA Board of Governors in November, but between now and then, as you know, there's going to be a personnel change or a composition change. How do you think that will affect U.S. strategy and tactics in the interim?


SECRETARY RICE: Well, given the large number of countries that either voted for a resolution or abstained, sending a very clear signal that Iran should use this interim period of time to make progress, I would expect that you would have enough votes in favor of forwarding the resolution should Iran not make progress. Now we all hope that it won't come to that. Everybody hopes that the Iranians are going to take the message, that they are going to go back to negotiations, that they're going to recognize that they cannot have the entire fuel cycle on Iranian territory and that they're going to move on. Now, that's what this period of time permits and they should take advantage of this period of time.


MR. ROSEN: There have been some who have suggested that were it to get to that stage, sanctions might only further drive up the price of oil from its already high price. Is that a concern for the U.S. policymakers in fashioning how we go about this?


SECRETARY RICE: Well, it's early to talk about sanctions. We're talking now about possible referral to the Security Council. We'll see what happens when we get there. I might just note, of course the United States already has multiple layers of bilateral sanctions on Iran. And to the degree that others might want to consider them, I'm sure that there are many different possibilities, but I think it's early to talk about sanctions.


MR. ROSEN: So this exercise at the IAEA, did that reinforce positive notions of what multilateralism can do or did it reinforce negative notions about how useless the exercises can be?


SECRETARY RICE: I think it's quite positive when you have this many countries that say that Iran is in noncompliance. A number of others, but Iran, by the way, worked very hard diplomatically to try to turn a lot of these countries and these countries still refused to vote in favor of the Iranians. And what this means is that you can get from the international community a pretty strong signal, a coherent signal, one that brings everyone together when you have a case like Iran, where you have a country that simply will not cooperate.


Probably one of the elements of this has made it somewhat easier to get this vote, was the speech that the Iranian President gave at the United Nations. It talked not one bit about Iranian obligations; it talked about Iranian rights. It was bellicose. It didn't offer really to deal with the just concerns of the international system and I think people saw the true face of this Iranian Government.


MR. ROSEN: A final question on Iran, if I may. What is the sense of time urgency involved here?


SECRETARY RICE: As soon as possible. We need to get a handle on the Iranian program, but it is also clear that they are not yet enriching and reprocessing. It's also clear that there's still a number of safeguards in place -- IAEA safeguards in place, and so there is some time. But no one believes that this is something that should be left -- just left forever. We're going to have to deal with it sooner or later.


MR. ROSEN: All right. Onto the alleged off-the-charts questions because I know our time is short. I was criticized in the Washington Post after our last interview because I'd had asked if you ever wanted to be a superhero and you said, "Yes." And they said you didn't ask the obviously follow-up question, Rosen, of which one? And I thought doing that would make me sound a little too much like Barbara Walters asking Katharine Hepburn which kind of tree she would like to be. So I will follow-up simply by asking which super powers is it that you covet, that you would like to have?


SECRETARY RICE: Super powers?


MR. ROSEN: Yes. You said you wanted to be a superhero occasionally.


SECRETARY RICE: I'd like to be able to see through walls. (Laughter.)


MR. ROSEN: Which one? All right. You made the mistake of sharing what you called "an inside joke" with an interviewer recently, in which you said that you had been president of the family.


SECRETARY RICE: Yes.


MR. ERELI: What did that mean?


SECRETARY RICE: Well, there are only three of us, so it wasn't a very big constituency -- my father, my mother and me. And I could always count on my mother's vote and my own. My father, I think, probably wanted to be president of the family, too. No, it was actually a very important post. We organized -- I organized the family, as president, to do things like have a family meeting about when we were going to leave on a particular trip. So when we were going to go to Denver from Alabama, I would have a family meeting. We'd decide what time we were going to leave. We'd decide where we were going to stop over. So it actually had real responsibilities. But it said something about my parents who were determined that even at that early age that I'd have different experiences.


MR. ROSEN: And you were not autocrat in that role?


SECRETARY RICE: Of course not. Of course not.


MR. ROSEN: All right. You turned -- well, I don't want to get into age matters, but you were at an impressionable age during the counter culture and did it just pass you by entirely or did it anything from the counter culture lodge within you and stay with you?


SECRETARY RICE: I was very young at the time of the counter culture. I was 12 or 13 and that's kind of young. And I was a music major. All I did was play the piano and ice skate. And so I don't think I focused very much on the counter culture. But I was pretty young. I'm on the young end of that -- of that spectrum.


MR. ROSEN: Madame Secretary, I'll be blunt. Did you ever do drugs?


SECRETARY RICE: (Laughter.) James, why don't you go back to Iran? (Laughter.)


MR. ROSEN: (Laughter.) I don't think they'd like me there either. (Laughter.) Last question. Last question. You do so many interviews, sometimes five a day, and it requires a lot of repetition on your part. Part of me wants to ask simply how you manage to do that; but my real question is what advice would you give to somebody who's thinking about a career in public life of some kind, about how to deal with the media. What are a couple of most important things someone should keep in mind for dealing with the media?


SECRETARY RICE: I think the most important thing is to always be willing to say what you can say and what you can't. I told the media I simply can't talk about that because there's no reason to do anything but to state the truth. But part of the truth is to say when it's not possible to talk about things. Sometimes, I think, for instance, in diplomatic activities, I very often said to members of the media I'm going to actually talk to the President of that country or the Foreign Minister of that country before I talk about it in the press or I'm not going to reveal every detail of a diplomatic exchange just because I'm asked about it. And I think if you deal in that sort of straightforward way, you're better off -- if you could tell me.


MR. ROSEN: I think it's outrageous, frankly. All right. I close with a gift for you. You met this person once, I believe, but you really, I think, ought to know each other because this woman is, I think you'll have an interest in knowing her. She is one of our FOX News anchors in New York. Her name is Lauren Green. She is brilliant, she's beautiful, she's African American, she's single and she's a concert pianist in her spare time.


SECRETARY RICE: My goodness.


MR. ROSEN: And she asked me to give you her CD and I promised her that I would.


SECRETARY RICE: That's perfect.


MR. ROSEN: And here's her doing a number of different classical pieces.


SECRETARY RICE: Well, that's special.


MR. ROSEN: So there you have it.


SECRETARY RICE: Thank her very much and I look forward to seeing her sometime.


MR. ROSEN: All right. She's going to want to hear from you.


SECRETARY RICE: And maybe even playing dual piano sometime.


MR. ROSEN: That would be great. Thank you, as always.


SECRETARY RICE: Thank you.
2005/T14-4



Released on September 28, 2005





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Thursday, October 06, 2005