Interview on ABC This Week With George Stephanopoulos

SECRETARY RICE: Thank you, good to be back.

QUESTION: Let me pick up on the comments Vice President Cheney made on his trip this week. Do you agree with him that the Democratic plans by Speaker Pelosi to set benchmarks for the Iraqis and begin to bring the troops home validates al-Qaida's strategy?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I think the question here is a policy dispute. No one is trying to question anyone's patriotism. Everyone knows that Speaker Pelosi, who by the way, I've known for a long time, well before I came to Washington, wants the United States to succeed. And the debate is about what policies will allow us to succeed. And I think policies that diminish the flexibility of the commander, the commander-in-chief, but especially, the commanders in the field that disrupt the normal process of allowing the Executive Branch to determine things like training times and so forth, this would be a problem.

QUESTION: Short of cutting off funding, do you think Congress has any power to restrict the commander-in-chief's power in this area?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I would hope that Congress would recognize that it's very important for them to have the oversight role. They're elected and they're elected as a separate branch of government. But when it comes to the execution of policy in the field, that has to be a clean relationship between the commander-in-chief and the commanders in the field. The commander-in-chief has to be able to rely on the best military advice, the best advice of people like General Petraeus as to what he needs, when he needs it, and how he needs to use it. If you ever disrupt that chain, then you're going to have the worst micromanagement of military affairs and it's always served us badly in the past.

QUESTION: Other Democrats want to replace the 2002 authorization for war in Iraq with a new authorization that would restrict the mission. Here's how Senator Biden described it.

Senator Biden: "We say, Mr. President, you only can keep troops through two-thousand -- up to 2008 in the following circumstances: on the border, training Iraqis, and denying al-Qaida occupation of territory. What you can't do, Mr. President, you can't put them in a city of 6.2 million people knocking on doors in the middle of a sectarian war."

Your response?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, the first question I'm going to ask is how do you possibly distinguish what is going on in Baghdad, for instance, from the fight for al-Qaida -- with al-Qaida? We have to remember that some of these car bombs may indeed be the work of an organization like al-Qaida or al-Qaida affiliated allies.

So I think it's best to leave the flexibility of what to do on the ground to commanders on the ground who understand the situation, who understand the intricacies and the relationship among these various tasks that the American armed forces have to do. Now we're there to fight al-Qaida, absolutely. We're also there to try and ensure the territorial integrity of Iraq. Those are both very important goals.

But when the President decided in January that it was important to help the Iraqis to stabilize Baghdad, it was because he was being told and he determined that it was not going to be possible to give political breathing space to this government to do the national reconciliation that it needs to do unless it could get control of its capital and --

QUESTION: But the experts have said that al-Qaida is a relatively small problem in the capital relative to the sectarian violence.

SECRETARY RICE: Well -- but how can you separate, again, what is going on in places like Anbar from what is going on in Baghdad? Obviously, there are elements of terrorism involved in what is going on in Baghdad. I'm not saying that it is the primary cause, but it is clear that al-Qaida helped to spike this entire sectarian spate of violence when they bombed the Golden Mosque at Samara. We know that this was Zarqawi's plan. It was to start this sectarian -- this civil conflict between Shia and Sunnis. We saw it in what he wrote in his emails. And so how do you separate al-Qaida's having helped to spike this sectarian violence from stopping this sectarian violence?

QUESTION: So to be clear, then, if this passes in the Senate, if this passes in the House, you would recommend a veto?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I -- the President will have to make that determination, but it is extremely important that the President and his commanders have the flexibility to do what they think is necessary to be successful and to be victorious in Iraq. We've just sent a new commander out to Iraq, General Petraeus. He is, according to everyone, the best counterinsurgency general that we've got in the armed forces. He spent more than a year studying counterinsurgency. He was in Iraq before. He knows what he wants to do. And to now have constraints on what he does from here in Washington, from people who are not in the direct chain-of-command, I think would be a serious mistake.

QUESTION: As we've sent new troops into Baghdad, the British announced this week that they're going to be withdrawing some of their troops from the south of Iraq in Basra. Vice President Cheney and others said this is a sign of progress, but a lot of military experts have disagreed. I want to show you what Tony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said.

He said it's a sign of British defeat and he goes on to say, "The coming British cuts, in many ways, reflect the political reality that the British lost the south more than a year ago. The Shiites will take over. Iranian influence will probably expand. And more Sunnis, Christians, and other minorities will leave."

Also, Michael Knights and Ed Williams of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said that this is a sign of a slide into chaos. They say, "Instead of a stable, law-abiding region with a representative government and a police primacy, the deep south is unstable, factionalized, lawless, ruled as a kleptocracy, and subject to militia primacy."

How worried are you that we are going to see a slide into chaos in the south as the Brits withdraw?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, let's remember that the Brits are leaving a lot of forces in Iraq. This isn't a drawdown of some of their forces.

QUESTION: There are 4,000, though.

SECRETARY RICE: This isn't -- that it's a drawdown of some of their forces. And the plan for the whole country, including for the south, has been to transfer responsibility to Iraqi forces as they're capable of dealing with the situation. And the south is different. Yes, there continue to be problems between militias in the south. Yes, there continues to be some political turmoil in the south. But the British, and in conjunction with and consultation with our commanders, believe that we can -- they can now transfer responsibility to the Iraqi forces. The area in which American forces serve is, of course, a different mix.

QUESTION: But why didn't we ask the Brits to -- if the situation is better in the south, why didn't we ask them to redeploy to other areas of Iraq where we need the help?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, the British need to get their forces -- to bring their forces down. They've made that very clear. But they've always said they wouldn't do it until conditions permit it. And I think to try and change that bargain now and to say, "All right, conditions permit, but we'd like you to go someplace else," would simply be unfair.

QUESTION: So it just wasn't on the table?

SECRETARY RICE: I think it just wasn't on the table. This is a long plan that, when the conditions were permitting, the British were going to hand over responsibilities to the Iraqi forces. And George, this isn't the only place that responsibilities are being handed over to Iraqi forces. We have indeed handed over responsibilities to Iraqi forces and other parts of the country. And so this is a part of a pattern that will take place over time as conditions permit.

In the center of the country around Baghdad, it's not yet possible to do that, but the expectation is, the hope is that at the end of the Baghdad security plan, or as the Baghdad security plan unfolds, that we'll also begin to hand over those responsibilities to Iraqis.

QUESTION: I want to talk about some other news about al-Qaida that we learned about this week. In The New York Times, there was a front page, a provocative front page report that said that "Terror officials see Qaida chiefs regaining power," and it quotes intelligence officials saying, "Senior leaders of al-Qaida operating from Pakistan have reestablished significant control over their once-battered worldwide terror network and over the past year, have set up a band of training camps in the tribal regions near the Afghan border. American officials said there was mounting evidence that Usama bin Ladin and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri have been steadily building an operations hub in the mountainous Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan."

Is Usama bin Ladin coming back?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, al-Qaida has taken a number of blows. If you just look at the entire group of field generals, if you will, who were probably --

QUESTION: But this says they're getting operational control --

SECRETARY RICE: -- who were probably there at the time of the attacks, they're mostly gone. And I don't doubt that al-Qaida has tried to regenerate some of its leadership. I don't doubt that. I don't think that anybody would claim that this is the same organization or the same kind of organization that operated out of Afghanistan. But we have to be vigilant and that's why we are working with the Pakistanis, we're working with the Afghans, we're working worldwide in our intelligence network to continue to degrade this institution, this organization worldwide and on the Afghan border.

QUESTION: But there's still some concern that President Musharraf is constrained in this fight. Isn't there -- and are you worried about how much pressure he can bear?

SECRETARY RICE: I'm certainly aware that there are political issues in Pakistan. To not say that would be not to face the reality, but this has been a stalwart fighter, Pakistan's Musharraf, in this fight. Let's remember that al-Qaida has tried to kill him a couple of times and the Pakistani leadership knows that al-Qaida would like nothing better than to destabilize Pakistan and to use Pakistan as a base rather than Afghanistan for its operations.

And so we have excellent cooperation with the Pakistanis on hunting down al-Qaida, on working to disrupt its networks. More al-Qaida have been caught in Pakistan and in Saudi Arabia than any other place in the world. And so they are working very hard with us. We have excellent cooperation on that.

QUESTION: One final quick question on Iran. President Ahmadi-Nejad said this morning there's no reverse gear on their nuclear program. Is there any evidence that our diplomatic efforts are actually slowing down the Iranian nuclear program?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, they don't need a reverse gear. They need to stop and then we can come to the table and we can talk about how to move forward. But of course, if you just read the press and you see the criticism of President Ahmadi-Nejad by people inside Iran, knowledgeable and authoritative people in Iran, that the policies are isolating Iran.

Ahmadi-Nejad said that the last Security Council resolution was just a scrap of paper. Well, it turns out that other people in the Iranian leadership don't think so. They think a Chapter 7, 15-0 resolution against Iran isolates Iran from the rest of the international community. People in Iran are concerned about the fact that financial institutions are moving out of Iran and refusing to deal with Iran. They're concerned that their oil and gas fields need investment that they're probably not going to be able to get at the high end, because people are not going to take the reputational and investment risk of dealing with a country that has gotten itself into a very bad club. The Chapter 7 group is a very small number of countries and it's not a club you want to belong to.

But I just want to repeat Iran has another course that it can take. If it stops its enrichment and reprocessing activities as demanded by the international community, we're all prepared to have full-scale negotiations anytime and anyplace.

QUESTION: Secretary Rice, thank you very much.

SECRETARY RICE: Thank you very much.

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