Condoleezza Rice plays Hardball

WASHINGTON D.C. - MSNBC’s Chris Matthews spoke with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in an interview scheduled to air Tuesday, June 14, on “Hardball with Chris Matthews,” 7-8 p.m.

Matthews asked the Secretary of State about the Downing Street Memo, the insurgency in Iraq, Bashar Assad of Syria, the Iranian elections, Russia, North Korea and the war on AIDS in Africa. In a poignant moment, Rice reflected on the pending Senate apology on anti-lynching legislation. Rice recounted her own personal experience on the topic.

Following is a preview of the interview:

On Iraq and the Downing Street Memo

CHRIS MATTHEWS, HOST, "HARDBALL":  Madam Secretary, there's a lot of concern in this country, as you know, about the strength and the violence of the insurgency.  We just got these two memos in the last couple of weeks that—they're called the Downing Street memos.  One of them is a memo from now the British ambassador to the United States, David Manning, in his capacity as adviser to British Prime Minister Blair, where he said in March of 2002, he met with you.  And among the big questions that were still out there in your mind was something to do with—what's it going to be like in Iraq the morning after?  Do you recall those meetings?

CONDOLEEZZA RICE, SECRETARY OF STATE:  Well, of course.  David Manning is a fine public servant and an extraordinary foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Blair.  And we had a number of conversations.  I don't remember this one in particular.  But I would just note, Chris, that that was a year before the actual invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime.  We had not yet gone to the United Nations to try and resolve the issue through diplomatic means.  But a lot of planning went on between March of 2002 and March of 2003.

MATTHEWS:  When the president made the decision or began to make the decision to topple Saddam Hussein, whatever it took, whatever means, whether it be multilateral or basically with coalition, did he calculating then the strength and violence of the current insurgency?  Did you have a fix then on the size of this opposition we'd face at this point?

RICE:  I think it's fair to say that we knew that there were a lot of unknowables about Iraq.  The strength of the institutions—we were concerned, for instance, that—whether or not the ministries would be strong enough to stand up once you had taken away the kind of Ba'athist leadership that was supporting Saddam Hussein.  We were certainly concerned about what to do about the armed forces. 

But it was our view, we thought at the time that the army would stand and fight.  You could then demobilize that part of the army that was associated with Saddam Hussein, and the remainder of the army could be brought to—for a transitional government in Iraq.  But we were looking at all of these imponderables, all of these unknowns in that period of time.

I think we had, when we went to war, having tried everything diplomatically to avoid war, I think when we went to war, we had a plan for how to deal with the aftermath.  There were a number of things that surprised us, including the fact that the army, in a sense, kind of melted away in those last days after Saddam Hussein was overthrown.

MATTHEWS:   Were you surprised that the Army was able to slink away into the cities of Iraq and still maintain the power of its ordinance and its fighting ability?

RICE:  Well, it's not clear to this day the degree to which this is the structure of the old Army.  There are clearly a number of old Ba'athists, people who want to return the Saddam Hussein-like forces to power.  There's also a significant of people who have come in as foreign terrorists, who recognize the importance of Iraq to the war on terrorism and are therefore fighting as if this is, in a sense, their last stand to make certain that democracy can't take hold in the Middle East.

So I would never claim that the exact nature of this insurgency was understood at the time that we went to war, but that there might be forces after Saddam Hussein was overthrown, yes, that was understood.

MATTHEWS:  Before we go on, that second memorandum that has been talked about—the one that was originally dubbed the Downing Street memo—said that the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.

What do you make of that word, “fixed?”  Is that an assertion that we were fixing the argument, making a case for intel that said there was a connection with al Qaida, a connection with the WMD, just to get the war started?

RICE:  Well, I don't understand—I can't go back and judge what was said.

MATTHEWS:  But the word “fixed,” which is like fixed the way you fix the World Series.

RICE: Right.

MATTHEWS:  Or is it British sense, which means just put things together.

RICE:  Put things together.  And I know the people who were involved in this, and someone like the head at that time of the British intelligence services was very much involved in the discussions we were having on intelligence.  A lot of the intelligence was from Great Britain, from British sources.  And the entire world thought that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

I think if the world had not thought that he had weapons of mass destruction, we wouldn't have had him under sanctions for 12 years, trying to deal with these weapons of mass destruction.  And there's good reason to have thought that he did, given that he'd used them before, that in 1991 he'd been much closer to a nuclear weapon than anyone thought.

The important thing is that I think we've all taken a look at the intelligence problems of the time.  We've made steps to try and improve the capability of the United States—and I think the British have too—for intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.  It's always going to be hard when you're dealing with very secretive regimes, when you're dealing with the dual-use capabilities that are usually involved in weapons of mass destruction. 

You know, Chris, the same chlorine that can be used in a swimming pool can be used in chemical-weapons development. 

And so it's not easy.  But the improvements that we've made to intelligence, the creation of a new director of national intelligence, the sharing of information, the changes in the way that sourcing is reported to policy makers—I think those are all things that we'll—we've learned those lessons from the Iraq experience.

MATTHEWS:  The interesting contradiction you just point to is the fact that the president, in his State of the Union in 2003, used that reference to British intelligence about the African—turned out not to be the case, apparently, although that's still murky—the purchase of the uranium from Niger, right?

RICE:  Right.

MATTHEWS:  At the same time the British intelligence was saying, “Well, we don't have our act together.” And yet we're trusting them.

RICE:  Well, in fact, the British intelligence services are fine services. I don't think there's anyone in the world who would say that they aren't one of the best services in the world.

But the nature of the intelligence around Iraq was always hard.  We were focused on a long pattern of engagement with weapons of destruction of Saddam Hussein.  And it's interesting, the report that Charles Duelfer did at the end when the Iraq Survey Group reported, showed that this was somebody who was never going to lose his connection to weapons of mass destruction, who continued to harbor ambitions, continued to try to keep certain capabilities in place.  Sooner or later, it was going to be necessary to deal with the unique circumstances of Iraq—a state that was linked to weapons of mass destruction, so linked that there had been 17 Security Council resolutions against him; who had used weapons of mass destruction before; who had invaded his neighbors twice; who had caused massive deaths of his own people, somewhere in the nature of 300,000 or more people found in mass graves; and who was, by the way, still in a state of suspended war with the United States and with Great Britain as we tried to fly these no-fly zones to try to keep his forces under control, was shooting at us.

So this is a pretty unique set of circumstances that led to war against Iraq, and that we had to sooner or later deal with this terrible tyrant in the middle of the Middle East.

On Syria
MATTHEWS:  You mentioned the fact that not all the insurgents are domestic.  Let me ask you about Syria.  Bashar Assad, is he supporting the movement of jihadists into Iraq?

RICE:  We believe that there is substantial activity of the terrorists on Syrian territory.  Now, the degree to which the Syrian government is or is not witting of that, I think no one would want to judge.

MATTHEWS:  Are they trying to stop it?

RICE:  Well, they're not doing enough to stop it.  And we understand that this is a long and permeable border, but there are many efforts could be made, many steps that they could take to improve the security on that border.  And the problem with the Syrian government is that they're out of step with the entire region.  They're still supporting Palestinian rejectionists who are frustrating the efforts of people like Mahmoud Abbas to bring about a Palestinian state.  They are still trying, through, we believe, their surreptitious means in Lebanon, to continue to have an effect on Lebanese elections there.  And in Iraq, with the Iraqi people trying to get a better life, trying to get a democratic government, they continue to do very little about the people who are gathering on their territory, despite the fact that those terrorists are coming to Iraq and killing not just coalition forces, but innocent Iraqis as well.

MATTHEWS:  Do we support the opposition in Syrian, like the Democratic Party of Syria?

RICE:  Well, obviously the Syrian people deserve to have the same freedoms that we've talked about everywhere else.  But how that comes about I think it yet to be seen.  We have had diplomatic relations with the Syrian government.  We still do.  But we just want to see a change in Syrian behavior.  That's the important thing at this point.

MATTHEWS:  What do you make of Bashar—  I mean, there's all this new generation coming into the Arab world.  King Abdullah seems to have done well.  Mohammed the VI is a moderate leader.  You've got Saif Qadaffi coming down the like, maybe a new Mubarak.  But Bashar, has he been a disappointment.

RICE:  Well, the Syrian regime has been a disappointment, and  we've tried many times, including trips that my predecessor, Colin Powell, took, that Rich Armitage took to say to the Syrian government, do these things if you want to be in step with changes in the Middle East and if you want to be—if you want to have better relations with the United States.

In Iraq, for example, yes, this is a very, very tough fight, but it is for a good cause.  It is to have in the center of the Middle East a different kind of regime that can be at peace with its neighbors, that can be a model for democratic development in the region worldwide, that, as the president said, can be an example of an answer to the ideologies of hatred that cause people to fly airplanes into buildings on a fine September day.

MATTHEWS:  But who's rooting for that?  You go through Syria, they don't seem to be rooting for it.  Iran, you know, Congressman Curt Weldon just got back, and I can't—you understand this.  Is Iran supportive of the Shi'a-dominated new government, or are they undermining it through support for insurgency?

RICE:  Well, Iran's behavior, I would say, vis-a-vis Iraq has been somewhat mixed.  On the one hand, I would have to say that the Iranians apparently, with the Iraqis, are trying to develop neighborly relations.  We want that to happen.  It is Iraq's neighbor.  They need to have good relations.  But we would hope that those relations would be transparent, that there would not be efforts in any way to destabilize there.

But the Iraqis do have people in the neighborhood who want them to succeed.  You mentioned the king of Jordan, King Abdullah, who is training Iraqi policemen and military people on his territory. 

We're going to have a conference in Brussels on June the 22^nd, where the European Union, the United States and the Iraqis will host many, many countries—I think it's now about 80 countries from around the world—that are going to say to the Iraqis, “We are ready to support a unified, inclusive, democratic Iraq that can be at peace with its neighbors.”

Think, Chris, what a tremendous change that will be for the Middle East, to have that kind of Iraq, not Saddam Hussein in the center of the Middle East.

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