'Meet the Press' transcript for Dec. 21, 2008

MR. DAVID GREGORY:  Our issues this Sunday:  She has been a member of President Bush’s inner circle from the very beginning—first as national security adviser, now as secretary of state.  As she prepares to leave her post, we look ahead to the challenges that await her successor and back at her eight years in the Bush administration.  Our exclusive guest, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Then, embattled governor Rod Blagojevich remains resolute.

(Videotape)

GOV. ROD BLAGOJEVICH:  I will fight, I will fight, I will fight until I take my last breath.  I have done nothing wrong.  I’m not going to do what my accusers and political enemies have been doing, and that is talk about this case in 30-second sound bites on MEET THE PRESS or on the TV news.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY:  And so the political drama continues as the president-elect prepares to release additional information on internal contacts with the governor’s office.

Plus, automakers finally get a helping hand from Washington.  And what are the prospects for a Senator Caroline Kennedy?  Insights and analysis from our political roundtable:  Erin Burnett, anchor of CNBC’s “Street Signs” and co-anchor of CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street”; Carol Marin, political columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and political editor of NBC 5 WMAQ-TV Chicago; Andrea Mitchell, chief foreign affairs correspondent for NBC News; and Michele Norris, host of NPR’s “All Things Considered.”

But first, we welcome back the secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, for her 20^th appearance on this program over the past eight years.

Thank you for being willing to come on the program and explain your views all these times.

SEC’Y CONDOLEEZZA RICE:  It’s a pleasure to be with you, David.  And congratulations on...

MR. GREGORY:  Thank you.

SEC’Y RICE:  ...taking over the post.

MR. GREGORY:  Thank you, and I appreciate you being here.

I wanted to back to the beginning of this administration’s foreign policy, and we took a look at the presidential debate back in October of 2000.  Then Governor Bush was asked how people of the world should look at the United States, and here’s what he had to say.

(Videotape)

PRES. GEORGE W. BUSH:  It really depends upon how the—how our nation conducts itself in foreign policy.  If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll, they’ll resent us.  If we’re a humble nation but strong, they’ll welcome us.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY:  Eight years later, seven years later after that, do you think that the world views the United States as a humble nation?

SEC’Y RICE:  I certainly think the United States views the—that the world views the United States as a place to be respected.  All over the world, David, our values are respected; who we are, a place that you can come and come from modest circumstances to great things, that’s respected.  What we’ve done hasn’t always been liked or popular.  But if you look at some of the most populous places in the world—China, India—the United States is not only respected but, in fact, popular.  So yes, there are some places that have had real quarrels with our policies, but, but I think the United States is very well-respected worldwide.

MR. GREGORY:  A lot changed, obviously, after that debate, 9/11, principally. But even on the course of that, do you think that the president pursued a humble foreign policy as he, as he said he would, as he said it was important for the United States to?

SEC’Y RICE:  Well, I think it’s very humble to believe that there is no man, woman or child who should live in tyranny.  That people who say, well, maybe Arabs just aren’t ready for democracy or maybe Africans just are going to have corrupt governments, that seems to me arrogant.

MR. GREGORY:  Hm.

SEC’Y RICE:  To say that those people deserve the same, the same life that we have, the same freedoms that we have, that seems to me, humble.  I think it’s humble to say that the United States, which has been given so much, should give back and to launch the largest health program in history, the president’s emergency plan for AIDS relief, or to quadruple foreign assistance to Africa, or to double it to Latin America.  I think these are the hallmarks of humble policy, but popular?  Not always.

MR. GREGORY:  What have you learned in the course of your time, both as national security adviser and now secretary of state, about the limits of America’s power, Both militarily and diplomatically?

SEC’Y RICE:  Well, America cannot do most of what needs to be done alone.  You need friends.  And we have good friends around the world.  We have friends with whom we share values in Europe and Asia—thanks to the forward march of democracy—in Latin America, in Africa, and increasingly in the Middle East. But multilateral diplomacy is hard.  It’s slower, it’s tougher, it’s a bigger slog.  I’ve learned, too, that sometimes the things you’d most like to do something about, you really have difficulty unless the international community really mobilizes.  David, one of the real regrets I’ve had is that we haven’t been able to do something about Sudan.

MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.

SEC’Y RICE:  And we’ve tried to ameliorate the humanitarian...

MR. GREGORY:  Genocide in Darfur.

SEC’Y RICE:  Right.  Exactly.  The horrible lives that the people of Darfur are living, the horrible tragedy that is unfolding there.  Now, it’s true, we’ve been able to do a lot about the humanitarian situation.  We’ve even been able to support getting some peacekeepers onto the ground; and where there are peacekeepers, there’s less violence.  But we could’ve done so much more had there...

MR. GREGORY:  Why didn’t we act unilaterally?

SEC’Y RICE:  Well, because acting unilaterally in an Arab country or in a Muslim country that is that complex, that far away, really did not seem to be an option.  The president considered it.  He thought about it.  He thought about what we could do unilaterally.  But in fact, instead, we’ve tried to mobilize the international community and international opinion.  And frankly, given that, just a couple of years ago at the UN, the leaders of the world stood up and said, “We have a responsibility to protect, if a government will not protect its own people.” And then we’ve had trouble getting anybody to do anything about it.

MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.

SEC’Y RICE:  The United States has, by the way, imposed unilateral sanctions in Sudan.  We have been the country that’s been the most active in resisting calls to interfere with the international criminal court investigation of the leadership there, despite the fact that we’re not members of the international court.  So I think we’ve done a lot unilaterally, but we could’ve done a lot more if the international community were better mobilized.

MR. GREGORY:  Isn’t it amazing, the last 16 years of American leadership, two presidents, two big regrets stand out:  Rwanda and Darfur.

SEC’Y RICE:  Yes.

MR. GREGORY:  The failure to prevent and protect innocent people from genocide.

SEC’Y RICE:  Right.  Yes.  Although I will say that we’ve also been engaged in activities that have protected innocent people.  Look at Saddam Hussein’s record of, really, genocide inside of Iraq, what he did to Shia populations, to Kurdish populations, actually using weapons of mass destruction.  Look at what the Taliban did to populations in Afghanistan.  And so, in those circumstances, where the marriage of our values and our security interests has put us forward in a more active military way, we have tried to protect innocent people.  But yes, it’s, it’s really not a very good sign for the international community, and it does not reflect well on the Security Council that Darfur has...

MR. GREGORY:  And that all of this happened on the continent of Africa, whether it’s...

SEC’Y RICE:  Well, and that it all happened on the continent of Africa.  I was just at the UN last week.  We talked about Zimbabwe.

MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.

SEC’Y RICE:  This is another circumstance in which the international community, most of it, including, by way—by the way, several African states—Botswana, the leadership of Kenya, and others—are saying that the regime of Robert Mugabe has got to go.

MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.

SEC’Y RICE:  You’ve got a cholera epidemic there.  You have humanitarian disaster in terms of food.  You have the goons of the Mugabe regime going around and, and detaining people and, and frightening people, terrorizing people.  again, the international community, in that circumstance, needs to act.

MR. GREGORY:  Let, let’s talk about Iraq.  The president’s final visit there as president happening just a week ago today, and what became, obviously, the most noticed image of that, that trip was this press conference with the prime minister and a member of the press throwing his shoes.  As the president pointed out, as you’ve pointed out, certainly a sign of freedom in Iraq.

SEC’Y RICE:  Yes.

MR. GREGORY:  You got a press corps that can speak its mind and act the way it wants to act.  I think other people will look at that and say members of this administration said that America would be greeted as liberators in this country.  That was certainly not the case.  And now we have, even in a period of, of relative stability in Iraq, you have this kind of iconic image like this.  Do you see it differently?

SEC’Y RICE:  I see it very differently.  First of all, David, if ever there is a clear reason that history’s judgment and today’s headlines are, are different is that the focus on something like this when, in fact, the president was standing next to a democratically-elected prime minister of Iraq who is himself a Shia and at the lead—the head of a multiethnic, multiconfessional democracy in the heart of the Middle East that has just signed a path-breaking strategic forces agreement and Strategic Framework Agreement with the United States, that’s the headline.  That someone chose to throw a shoe at the president is what gets reported over and over?  I think that’s why history always shows these things differently than, than today’s news.

MR. GREGORY:  Let’s talk about the reflections about the Iraq war.  And you had some conversations, as did others in the administration, with Bob Woodward for his latest book, “The War Within.” This is what you had to say, in part: “There is nothing that I’m prouder of than the liberation of Iraq.  ...  Did we screw up parts of it?  Sure.  ...a lot of it wasn’t handled very well.  ... There are a lot of things if I could go back and do them differently, I would. But the one thing I would not do differently is, we should have liberated Iraq.  I’d do it a thousand times again.  I’d do it a thousand times again.” You remain resolute.  And yet, in our most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, people cite Iraq as the biggest failure of the Bush presidency.  How do you reconcile those two things?

SEC’Y RICE:  I believe that this is one of those long stories in history, not a short one.  And you look at what’s happened in Iraq, David, you have to look at the effect of a different Iraq on the Middle East, the place from which the 9/11 hijackers came.  Not Iraq, but the Middle East.  The heart of the middle—the heart of al-Qaeda is the Middle East.  And you look at the Iraq that was there prior to the American liberation, it was Saddam Hussein who had dragged the region into war several times, had dragged us into war, had used weapons of mass destruction, continued to seek them, who was an implacable enemy of the United States.  He put 300,000 of his own people in mass graves, and who was a danger to his people, his neighbors and to us.

Now you have in Iraq, after very difficult circumstances and a difficult journey—and let me say right now, lives lost that will never be brought back and a road harder than I would have ever thought.  But at that—at the end of that road is an Iraq that is a multiconfessional, multiethnic democracy that will not seek weapons of mass destruction, that will be at peace with its neighbors, that is being reintegrated into the Arab world with the Egyptian foreign minister having gone there for the first time in 30 years.  I went to Kuwait, I saw the Iraqi flag fly voluntarily in Kuwait.  This Iraq, at the center of the Middle East, a powerful Arab state that is a friend of the United States and democratic, is going to make the Middle East a fundamentally different place.

MR. GREGORY:  Do you believe that over time, then, the United States will emerge with what will be considered an unambiguous victory in Iraq?

SEC’Y RICE:  I believe that it will be, as time goes forward, absolutely clear that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq would never have allowed the Middle East to change, and that this Iraq has the potential to anchor a more democrat, a more prosperous, a more peaceful Middle East, and, by the one, one that—by the way, one that is friendly to the United States.

MR. GREGORY:  But it’s a slightly different issue.  Have we won the war in Iraq?

SEC’Y RICE:  We’re—I think we’re well on the way to winning it.  Iraqis are on the way to winning it.  It’s, it’s not just what we’ve done.  It’s that the Iraqi security forces were able to defeat the special groups and the Iranian-backed militia in Basra in the south.

MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.

SEC’Y RICE:  It’s the Iraqi security forces that are taking the lead in numerous provinces now as we’ve been able to step back to what the military calls a kind of “overwatch” position.  It’s the Iraqis who have gone to their parliament and been able to pass an elections law and pass an—a, a law that brings more and more people into the political system.  And it’s the Iraqis that have been able, despite enormous pressure from Iran, to sign with us a Status of Forces Agreement and a Strategic Framework Agreement that lays out a long-term relationship between the United States and Iraq.

MR. GREGORY:  The next administration and others will, will want to examine what went wrong internally in the lead-up to the war.  And again, Bob Woodward in his latest book has written about some of the disagreements in the—even in the run-up to the surge.  And he wrote this on the issue of complaints, talking about you:  “[Condoleezza Rice] never brought her complaints directly to the president for two reasons.  First, she was an optimist, as was the president.  ‘Everyone has a tendency toward optimism,’ she said.  In fact, the president almost demanded optimism.  He didn’t like pessimism, hand-wringing or doubt.  Second, Rice claimed that as secretary of state she didn’t feel it was appropriate to criticize” then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld or General Casey, who, of course, oversaw U.S. troops in Iraq, “to the president.” What you’re describing here, what Bob Woodward is describing talking to you, was a certain amount of pressure about what to bring to the president.  Did, did that make it hard for you, some of the things that he demanded?

SEC’Y RICE:  Oh, let me, let me put that in my own words.

More from NBC News broadcasts Santa 2.0: Christmas wishes go digital   Axelrod: Congress will pass health bill   Dean: Health bill has ‘long way to go’ Winter weather wallops East Coast Nelson's support seals health breakthrough Now on msnbc.com: Real-time news Follow on Twitter: Making a Difference

MORE FROM MEET THE PRESS

Meet the Press Section Front

Dec. 20: Axelrod, Dean, roundtable Dec. 13: Romer, economic roundtable Dec. 6: Clinton, Gates, McCain, roundtable Nov. 29: Rick Warren, Bill & Melinda Gates Nov. 22: Senate roundtable, Brinker, Snyderman Nov. 15: Clinton, Duncan, Gingrich, Sharpton Nov. 8: Casey, Barbour, Rendell, roundtable, Brokaw Nov. 1: Tim Geithner, David Plouffe, roundtable Oct. 25: Cornyn, Schumer, Burnett, Sorkin, roundtable Oct. 18: Jarrett, Dodd, Kyl, Shriver, Podesta Meet the Press Section Front   Add Meet the Press headlines to your news reader: