Interview With the NBC News Editorial Board

SECRETARY RICE: We are indeed.

QUESTION: Okay. So thank you for being here.

SECRETARY RICE: Well, thank you very much. And thanks for the opportunity to join you. I'm not going to really make very much in the way of comments because I'm sure there are plenty of questions, so we can get right to those.

It is a challenging time in international politics -- I'll put it that way -- but it's also a very exciting time. And the only overall comment I would make is that you don't get times of great historic transformation and thus opportunity without also the attendant downsides and difficulties that go with it. And I was lucky enough the last time around when I was in government to be at the end of a big historic transformation and therefore be a part of the unification of Germany and the liberation of Eastern Europe and the peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union, and that was because people had made good decisions in 1946 and 1947 and 1948. And when you find yourself at the beginning of this big historic transformation, I think one that is taking place principally but not exclusively in the Middle East, you have to think about how to position American power interests and values for what is undoubtedly going to be an evolution a long play out of that historic transformation. And that's how I think about the times in which we find ourselves now.

So with those general comments, Brian, whatever is on people's minds.

QUESTION: Well, let's begin with -- we'll head this question, "The truth about Putin." We got a bit of curveball from the other side yesterday, a very good offer on a radar facility in Azerbaijan, and today they're trying to sell us even more. How much of a curveball was it? How would you describe the present state of the Bush-Putin relationship and U.S.-Russia relationship?

SECRETARY RICE: First of all, I think the President and President Putin have a good relationship. It's pretty open, pretty candid. They can talk about almost anything. And it's friendly. It's cordial. And that's good because when you have to talk about difficult things it's better to be in a room with somebody with whom you have good and civil relations.

I would say the U.S.-Russia relationship is complex. It's -- on the one hand, you've got a lot of areas of cooperation, particularly on nuclear nonproliferation, issues like North Korea and even Iran, where I think we've come a long way in our ability to cooperate with the Russians. We certainly on issues of terrorism, on issues of nuclear issues more broadly, I think we've come a very long way. I think you'll see that the two presidents are going to want to institutionalize even more some of their cooperation on nuclear terrorism, on nuclear nonproliferation, efforts on strengthening the nonproliferation regime. So there's a lot that is good that's going on in the relationship.

There are also some areas of conflict, areas of tension. They relate, I think most evidently and broadly to issues arising out of the territories around the former Soviet Union. So when you look at Georgia or to a lesser extent even relations with Central Asia, there are sometimes suspicions by the Russians that we are trying to supplant them in an area in which they've had extensive influence. And we say, no, this isn't a zero-sum game, we just are pursuing good relations with Ukraine or Georgia or the countries of Central Asia.

And then of course, there is the matter of the democracy agenda and the fact that, as the President put it very bluntly, we think there's been some reversal of democratic trends in Russia.

But it's a mixed relationship and it's always going to be because it's big and it's complex, and Russia has its own interests and we have ours, and sometimes they're going to conflict.

As to this latest offer, well, I did say to Lavrov if you've got any ideas, put them on the table. Well, I guess they did.

QUESTION: You asked, you got.

SECRETARY RICE: We asked, we got. Yeah, it was a surprise to me, but I'm not with the traveling party. I don't know whether the President has given a heads up or not. But we'll talk about it. I can't do the geometry and the geography to know if Azerbaijan makes sense. Missile defense is a matter of geometry and geography because you have to intercept missiles at their optimal point. The Russians have made the point that they don't believe that we understand the threat similarly, so having those discussions can take place. They believe there may be other ways to address the threat. That's fine. And I think we should have those discussions. The President suggested that Bob Gates and I with our counterparts through something that we call the 2+2 mechanism might lead those discussions. I think it's a very good idea.

And then we will see. But we have to respond to missile threats from Iran and North Korea that are emerging. You can't wait until they emerge to be in a position to respond. But it's a while before there would be any deployment of this in any case. We're going to continue the discussions with the Poles and the Czechs and within NATO. So I think on balance that the Russians want to engage. It's a good move.

QUESTION: Forgive me, we've been joined by Jeff Zucker, who runs the place. And Steve Capus, oddly a back bencher today, who happens to run -- happens -- he's with the Tories and he runs -- (laughter). He runs the news division.

Just one more on this. When you see coverage on this network and others hinting at a new cold war, those of us old enough (a) remember who the last one benefited and (b) do you just dismiss that as hyperbole? They did take whacks at each other this week.

SECRETARY RICE: I think it is hyperbole. With all due respect, Brian, I think it's hyperbole. First of all, this isn't the Soviet Union. Now, in 1979, I went to the Soviet Union as a graduate student. Trust me, this is not the Soviet Union. Russia has -- is a very different place. And even its relationship to its citizens, the government to its citizens -- it hasn't made the democratic process -- progress that we'd like, but the average Russian citizen is freer, more prosperous, than Russians have ever been. And there is an increasing system of accountability. There are real problems with the free press. There are real problems with the independent judiciary. There are real problems with the potential use of oil and gas as a political weapon.

But the very structure that put us into ideological opposition with the Soviet Union on practically every issue, where if it was good for us in Africa it was bad for them, if it was good for us in Latin America it was bad for them, if it was good for us in the UN it was bad for them, there's a reason that you didn't get any -- you got essentially one Chapter 7 resolution on the use of sanctions and force between the creation of the UN and the Gulf War One, and there's a reason for that. It had to do with the fact it was a complete zero-sum game. That's not what this is.

The only thing we agreed with the Soviet Union was we didn't want to annihilate each other, which is why the moment when the General Secretary of the Communist Party and the President of the United States would get together and sign an arms control agreement was the high point of every summit because it demonstrated to the world that we didn't want to annihilate one another.

Well, now you look at the areas of cooperation and they are broad and in some cases deep. So that's why I often sort of recoil at the hyperbole of talking about a new cold war.

QUESTION: On another topic that falls within your bailiwick in a policy way, we can show you documents from the CEQ and EPA going back to the beginning of the Administration where phrases like "global warming" and "climate change" were either stricken or whited out. What gives? The President has clearly had a change of heart and the Administration has clearly had a change of policy.

SECRETARY RICE: The President has acknowledged for a long time that there was an issue of climate change. That's why the United States has been spending about $5.8 billion a year on climate change related research, R&D tax credits. We were one of the principal funders of the big intergovernmental report that everybody now cites. So we've been on this issue for a long time.

The President recognized -- I remember at the time that we said that we couldn't pursue the Kyoto Treaty that we never said that there wasn't an issue or probably addressed. The question is: What do you do? And how do you assess the priorities that one has to place on continued economic growth, energy -- provision of energy and protection of the environment, all of which are important priorities and important goals.

And I think what you have seen is, first of all, a perhaps better articulated over the last, I would say longer than a year but certainly the last year, recognition of the extraordinary importance of energy mix and dealing with the climate change issue. So -- and that that has a strong international dimension. So whether it is the Asia Pacific Partnership that we are in, which is by the way the only real international framework that addresses this issue that has China and India in it. So it's the United States, China, India, South Korea and Australia -- others are interested, like Japan and Canada -- to recognize that energy mix and drawing on technology to change the energy mix is going to be very critical and that you need to do that in an international fashion.

It also is a way for countries like China and India, that are not going to sacrifice economic growth -- China has to produce 25 million jobs a year. They're not going to sacrifice economic growth. So how do you get them into a system so that their emissions don't just drive the system even if you reduce our emissions, break the system?

So that is one of the partnerships. We also then pursue the bio-diesel -- I'm sorry, bio-fuels partnership with Brazil, which can change the energy mix in our own hemisphere in a very dramatic way. So one answer is clearly changing the energy mix. And you've had a better articulation, I think, recently of that.

The final step, and this is, I would say, a further evolution of our policy, but whatever you want to say about it it's an important big step that the President took in agreeing that there should be a follow-on international framework of some kind that addresses climate change, that sets global emissions targets, but that recognizes that you're going to have different ways for national solutions to this problem. The fact of Kyoto is almost nobody met the target, almost nobody. So you had a framework where people signed on to targets they can't meet; tell me why that's a good thing. And I don't see that setting targets again that states won't meet, particularly these big growing developing countries, is going to solve the problem.

QUESTION: Those of us who fly commercial these days have to have all of our traveling liquids in a Ziploc bag.

SECRETARY RICE: So I've heard.

QUESTION: You should try it at some time. (Laughter.)

SECRETARY RICE: Don't worry, I have plenty of family and friends who tell me. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Separated out from our regular luggage. Last Thursday, walking through O'Hare, there's a new recording every three minutes repeated that day's threat level color. And the net effect is that it's a drumbeat that national security is part of our lives inescapably. Why isn't breaking oil dependence just as big a deal as the TSA, as the Department of Homeland Security? Why isn't it on par with those other programs?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, you don't have to choose between the two.

QUESTION: Well, aren't you paying enemies for petroleum?

SECRETARY RICE: I don't consider Saudi Arabia an enemy. I consider Saudi Arabia a state that has a serious terrorist problem itself and that has now, particularly since the attacks in Riyadh a couple of years ago, been pretty fiercely pursuing those terrorists. But there's no doubt, and the President said this in the State of the Union and he's repeated it since that our dependence on oil, our addiction to oil is a very big problem for the country. And we ought to be, both for reasons of climate change and environmental stewardship. And for reasons of national security, pursuing policies that lessen our reliance on oil. And it's why futuristic technologies like the hydrogen car or the potential for a nuclear reactor that would have no plutonium byproduct, which is the GNET project that the President is pursuing with Japan, France, Russia and so forth. But those are very -- probably pretty far in the future. You've got some nearer-term technologies like being able to use ethanol, but probably given our geographic distribution of farmland, probably needing to rely on ethanol that is cellulosic in its origin.

I was just in California with the Australian Foreign Minister and we did almost a full day on alternative energy and we talked pretty extensively to some of the venture capitalists who are making big bets on alternative fuel. In fact, a lot of the people who were driving the IT -- and this is my little neighborhood, you know, the Silicon Valley, that's where I come from. The people who were driving the IT revolution are now going to drive the alternative fuels revolution and I think you're going to see real breakthroughs and you're going to see quicker commercialization from the private sector on this than we could ever do through the government. So there is an awful lot that is going on to try to change our energy mix. Clean coal technology is a near term. And if we can get the regulatory and storage environment right, nuclear energy, which is clean, is another piece of the mix. So I agree we are addicted to oil. And the President set some targets for reducing our reliance on gasoline, for instance.

They seem to me to be important ways to do exactly what you're talking about, which is to practically go after the issue of how to reduce our reliance on oil.

QUESTION: Did we hear the start of a Rice doctrine last night in your speech and you used the phrase -- I'm trying to put you up with Monroe. (Laughter.)

SECRETARY RICE: Oh, please.

QUESTION: You used the phrase "American realism." Define what you mean, please, by that.

SECRETARY RICE: Well, you realize that people use realism when they sometimes mean realistic and as a political -- a pragmatism. And as a political scientist, it doesn't seem to ring true to me, because basically realism asserts that it doesn't matter what goes on in states. What matters is the power of relations between them.

QUESTION: Right.

SECRETARY RICE: And then you hear people talk about idealism where you're really only supposed to care about what goes on inside of states, what people call humanitarian issues and human rights. And my point was that America has never accepted in its foreign policy those polar opposites. But rather, if you look at American foreign policy -- in large part because America was born as an ideal, not as a piece of territory, not as a set of blood relations, not as a nation based on ethnicity and blood; we were born as an ideal, so it's not surprising that our foreign policy rests on a union of our interests and sees our interest as the union of our values and our power.

And when I -- and I used Teddy Roosevelt in part because he's somebody who I think is sort of misunderstood, it was also the theme of last night's meeting. But it goes back a very long way that one of the reasons that Americans -- the early Founding Fathers were sort of disgusted with European politics was they saw it as just balance of power and contestation for power. And that was really the origin of Washington's language about entangling alliances. Why would we get involved in all of that?

So in today's America, if you think about how we have to look at our interests, we have to recognize that even more so now than at any other time in our history, although it's very much there in our history, we have to recognize that our interests are best served by the promotion and effectuation of our values in helping to develop a network of well-governed democratic states that can take care of their people, that are accountable to their people, where disease and poverty aren't rampant, where you don't have failed states like Afghanistan that come back to bite us. And where, frankly, the only answer over the long run to extremism in places like the Middle East is to have democratic institutions in place in which people can contest politics in a moderate -- moderate forces can contest politics in a political set of structures rather than have it spill out into violence and extremism.

If you look at the Middle East, I am quite certain that the absence of legitimate political institutions for the contestation of interests is at the root of why you get extremist forces that become the expression of politics like al-Qaeda. So, you know, that's a long way of saying that the United States has a long history of this.

But the most important point now is that the democracy agenda and the promotion of democracy is not some flight of fantasy. It's not some Utopian hope. It is the only way that we can fully pursue our interests and secure ourselves.

And I'll just give you two very quick other examples from the past. You know, when World War II ended, the one country that cared about what the internal composition of Germany would look like was the United States. And it was a belief that a democratic Germany and a democratic France, united in a democratic structure for security called NATO, they would never fight again and it turned out to be right.

If you look at the way we thought about the Soviet Union, we actually didn't just think of it as a balance of power. We recognized that you were going to have a Cold War until those values and principles that govern the Soviet Union were gone. So this has been around for a long time. It's often been how we think about our security. And I was as much trying to address what I think is an unfortunate bifurcation of interest and values as anything, rather than writing a Rice doctrine.

QUESTION: Okay. On the subject of Iraq, Madame Secretary, if you accept that the predicate of every speech this President gives on this topic, day in and day out, no matter where he is, is something akin to the following -- an eventual handover, takeover by the democratically elected government of Iraq with continuing U.S. presence as necessary. And then yesterday the nominee for so-called White House War Czar goes before Congress and expresses what I think could be called substantial or grave doubts about the ability of the Iraq Government to do same. Can you blame us for being confused? What are people to believe about the state of play of U.S. policy; the surge, the future and is September no longer a meaningful date for the reassessment?

SECRETARY RICE: September is a meaningful date for assessment. I don't think it's the only meaningful date. I myself kind of assess this every few days and I think by September we'll be able to bring a number of things together. But as to the Iraqi Government, there is no doubt that they are -- they have been slower to get in place what I'll call the de jure reconciliation, the oil law, the constitutional reform, provincial elections, de-Baathification, than we had hoped and that they need to be. There's no doubt about that.

I do not think that it means that they won't because they are not only under time pressure from us, they're under time pressure from the Iraqi people. And secondly, we have to recognize that what they're doing is really hard, you know, to decide how you're going to divide up oil revenue and tell people who are sitting on the oil revenue that they actually aren't going to own the resources is difficult and they've already gotten to that point. It's a question then of certain implementing legislation that will allow them to act on what is already agreement about how the oil is going to be divided. So what they're doing is hard.

In any other time, we would not probably expect a government that's only a little over a year old in power to have resolved every crucial existential issue about the nature of the new Iraqi state. But they are under particular pressures from their own people and because we can't afford to be endlessly patient. But I don't think that that means that they won't do it. And I think they are making some progress and they're going to have to continue to make progress.

But let me make a point about what I mean by reconciliation. Sometimes when we talk about reconciliation people seem to think that we mean the United States has to be responsible for this until they learn to live in harmony and peace with one another. What we have to do is to be a kind of external mechanism and external presence so that they can make the right choices about de jure reconciliation, meaning the laws, the constitution, the elections and so forth, the kind of normative peace accords where people really come to live with each other naturally and to deal with each other in that way is -- that takes a very long time.

If I could borrow kind of an imperfect analogy from our own history, now two days before the Public Accommodations Act passed in Birmingham, Alabama where I lived, "the races couldn't mix." Two days after the Public Accommodations Act passed, the races could mix. Do you really think the attitudes of people about race mixing in Alabama changed from two days before to two days after, no, but the laws changed. And people therefore had to start accommodating to those laws. They had to start reacting to those laws because it was the law. And over a much longer period of time then, it became normal for the races to mix in Birmingham, Alabama to the point now that when I go to visit at home I can hardly believe the degree to which people don't think about it so much anymore. And so when we talk about reconciliation, we're not talking about trying to get them to that point that it's -- with all of the normalization, all of the kind of normative reconciliation is taking place, but they do have to have space to put in place laws against which people can measure their behavior and where they know what's acceptable and what isn't.

QUESTION: I'm looking through the questions. Every person who has submitted questions, except for two, has asked you some form of if you had a do-over, if you had one regret, I know you get this question often.

SECRETARY RICE: Yeah.

QUESTION: Is there something, an item on your list, that you feel like confessing to the group perhaps for the first time? (Laughter.)

SECRETARY RICE: So that Andrea can go on the air. No, I -- (Laughter.)

QUESTION: It'll take her a few minutes to get downstairs.

SECRETARY RICE: (Laughter.) All right. Look, I am quite certain that when I have time and energy to think about it, there will be -- you know, there will be. But I'm a bit philosophical about this. I think there's some things we've done well and some things we haven't done well. I also recognize that over time when history looks back and judges, some things that seem like they were brilliant decisions at the moment turned out to have been pretty stupid and things that seem to have been not very smart decisions turned out to have been right. And so even when you're dealing with really big issues like this, it's kind of hard to judge on the spot. And I really seriously do think that you deal with the circumstances as you find them. It's how you got there, it's a combination of decisions and decisions that others made and the circumstances. So I don't really at this point spend much time thinking about it.

There are some small things that I've -- small -- there are some tactical issues that we've tried to correct that I think are very important. If I had it do over again, I would probably structure the reconstruction somewhat differently than we did. The initial reconstruction project was a very big national reconstruction project -- money into the electrical grid, large-scale projects to, you know, reform the oil sector and just very big projects. And I think some of that has had an effect. But we've also had probably more success with the projects that are more at the local level where you can both deliver to the population and you can strengthen local governance by having it be the provincial council chief that actually delivers that sewage system or that septic tank or that school.

And since reconstruction and building government structures needed to go hand in hand, these have seemed to work somewhat better. They also are less susceptible and less vulnerable to insurgent attack than kind of the larger scale projects are because the community will protect them. Now, I don't think you could ever have done all these localized small projects, but I certainly would have done a lot more of them. And sometimes I do think given that we are a federal system in ourselves -- I mean, you would never think of trying to get your sewer lines fixed by asking Washington -- we probably should have thought through some of that earlier. So that's the kind of thing that we've tried to make a tactful adjustment. It's why the Provincial Reconstruction Teams that actually go out into the provinces, work with local governments, develop projects and put those projects into place was an innovation that we started in sort of the end of '05.

QUESTION: How about the -- in due respect, what people have called a series of miscalculations, not just mission accomplished? But from the beginning, the farmer that shot at our helicopter three days into the invasion, apparently because he was angry to see the United States of America on another Chinook at 100 feet over his head again. But the -- from WMD to the insurgency, on and on and on in the war, with the death toll now at 3,500, I know that's a question you get often, but more fundamentally.

SECRETARY RICE: Yeah, but the question isn't what did you do; the question is what was the alternative. You know, there's a tendency to look at decisions in isolation and say all these difficult things happened or these bad things happened. But the question is what was the alternative. And I don't think a good alternative was leaving Saddam Hussein in power and he wasn't going any other way. You know, the idea that he was somehow eventually going to give in to a sanctions regime that was, as the President said in the first week we were in office, Swiss cheese -- but forget the Swiss cheese, that was thoroughly corrupted. We now know how thoroughly corrupted the Oil-for-Food program was. And that somehow that regime was going to either keep Saddam Hussein contained or throw him out of power seems to me just illogical.

He was shooting at our aircraft, which were the aircraft which were trying to suppress his air forces so he couldn't use them against his own people or against his neighbors. I remember very well that some of our most intense discussion in the first days was how could we strengthen sanctions and how would we deal with the shoot down of an American pilot by Saddam Hussein, because he kept coming close. You may not remember. We were in Mexico for our first big trip to Mexico, and what happened? Because of a no-fly zone action, we set off the alarm systems, the detection in Baghdad. And remember, it looked like we were bombing Baghdad? That was the world we were living in, in February and March of 2001.

What is more, after September 11th, it became very clear that the nature of the Middle East was a real problem and you were going to have to change, dealing with the threats that were there. And can anybody imagine a different kind of Middle East with Saddam Hussein in the middle of it?

So yes, it's not that there weren't -- there wasn't an understanding that there were downsides and potential risks and negative consequences to trying to overthrow -- trying to liberate an Iraqi nation from this brutal dictator. People understood that there were consequences to that.

But when you're making decisions, you're weighing against the consequences of keeping him in power. And I know that now there's a tendency to say, well, the WMD, as if when the decision was made to go to war the story that we now know about WMD was, in fact, available to the Administration or anybody else. Frankly, it wasn't. How do we know what the real state of his WMD was? Because we overthrew him and went in and found out what was the state of his WMD was. Prior to that, you were relying on what inspectors had found before, what the UN thought, what all of our intelligence agencies thought about the development. And those assessments that said he had reconstituted his biological and chemical weapons and would, if given time, reconstitute his nuclear weapons, had to be a part of a decision about the consequences of leaving him there.

QUESTION: We have a number of topics people have asked us to get to. The length of the answer, of course, is -- are all up to you. And I'll take you on a brief tour of the world.

SECRETARY RICE: All right.

QUESTION: The real threat you see that Chavez represents.

SECRETARY RICE: First and foremost, to his country, who undermined and caused deterioration in a very, very good place. You know, where by all accounts what he's doing to the oil sector and so forth is very devastating to the country. What he's doing to democracy in Venezuela, as seen in the RCTV decision, but also what he's doing in the neighborhood where he's directly interfered in a number of elections, where he is trying to destabilize certain governments. That's all the threat from him.

But our policy is not to talk about him. It's to have a positive agenda of social justice and economic development and support for democracy in Latin America. And I think it's having an effect.

QUESTION: Same question: Kim Jong-il.

SECRETARY RICE: Well, North Korea is, I think, the most isolated country in the world. I don't think there's any doubt about that. And the first thing we're going to try to do is to deal with his nuclear weapons program, first to stop it and then to begin to reverse it, in a context with the neighbors that allow the right set of incentives and disincentives to be on the table for him to make that strategic choice.

If that strategic choice is made, then I think you're dealing with the potential to hopefully open up North Korea to contact with the outside world. I mean, Andrea was just there and, you know, contact with the outside world would be a good thing for this place so that -- and to be able to deal with the humanitarian problems of the Korean people and ultimately to begin to relieve the tensions on the last vestige of the Cold War, the division of Korea.

QUESTION: The future of Musharraf and the prospects of a world without him in charge.

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I don't really think that speculating on a post-Musharraf makes much sense because he's there and I think he has a number of strengths. We are encouraging him to use the upcoming elections to make sure that they are done democratically, free and fair; that opposition is brought in. He is fighting a fierce battle against terrorists and that is really important. I think keeping relations with Afghanistan, which are sometimes rocky, are certainly better than they were when Pakistan was supporting the Taliban as an ally; one of the only countries to recognize the Taliban.

So there -- and he is somebody who believes that Pakistan has to have a future that is free of extremism and that is moderate, and he's worked toward that goal. But we are talking to and pressing for democratic change in Pakistan; I think it's necessary.

QUESTION: When Tony Snow mentioned the Korea model concerning a follow-on U.S. presence in Iraq, was he riffing, did he grab that out of the air, or perhaps had that been mentioned somewhere that put it in his head?

SECRETARY RICE: People have been talking about when we are through the period in which we're just trying to give the Iraqis enough space, in terms of its security environment, to get this de jure reconciliation in place, what are the next steps going to look like? I think everybody understands that for some time, the Iraqis are going to need help in training their security forces. They're going to need help in maintaining their territorial integrity, which means that there has to be a presence to say to the neighbors, don't meddle in their affairs, whether it's their Iranian neighbors or their Sunni neighbors or the kind of work that we're trying to do with Turkey to make sure there's no trouble on the Turkish-Iraqi border; that there will probably be a terrorist presence in Iraq to fight for some time, al-Qaeda presence that needs to be dealt with.

And so, as you move out of the surge phase, what do follow-on commitments done need to look like? And under those umbrella of follow-on commitments, how far can the Iraqis get toward both, you know, de jure and normative reconciliation?

But I think of Korea as more of a metaphor than an analogy because, obviously, the situation's different, but there are some things that make -- that are very much the same; a very violent situation that ultimately resolved into one that was peaceful, done with the help of a strong ally that was prepared to stay engaged with them, and a democracy that took some time to develop over a period of time. So I think drawing on some of the elements without being literal about the analogy is important.

QUESTION: Okay, not to be too literal --

SECRETARY RICE: Yes.

QUESTION: -- but does the word "presence" mean U.S. bases on a quasi-permanent basis?

SECRETARY RICE: Okay, look, we are not seeking permanent bases anywhere in the world. As you know, we're trying to get rid of some of the ones that we have. But what the United States does, I think, and how we do it, and how we support the Iraqis as they go through their evolution is something we're going to have to talk to the Iraqis about.

QUESTION: Do you regard the yet-to-be-fully-opened new U.S. Embassy in Baghdad as what has been called a "white elephant"?

SECRETARY RICE: No, of course not. We're going to move people into it. I think it's an embassy that, I think, demonstrates our commitment to Iraq not as a military power but as a political and economic power, which is very important. And it is an embassy that's built to security and other specifications to deal with the specific circumstances in Iraq, and that's why it has a particular character to it. But no, I think it's an extremely important project. I'm just looking forward to being able to get people into it because it's -- it will be, I think, a better environment for our people than what they have now.

QUESTION: I'll read this question verbatim: "Numerous polls show that the United States is really disliked, not just across the Middle East but in Europe and elsewhere. Do you think the Bush Administration is to blame in any way for some of that strong anti-American feeling, or are those feelings unjustified?"

SECRETARY RICE: Well, they are what they are, although I'm a social scientist and I always want to see what the question was when I hear something like: We are disliked. The United States, I think, is still very admired. People still want to send their kids to school here. It's still the place to -- that more people want to immigrate to than any place in the world. It is a dominant factor in terms of cultural influence, some for good, some so not-so-good. But if you go around the world, you will see strong images of American values and American influence everywhere. And, by the way, English is still the language that most people would like to speak because it's the language of commerce and so the American economy is very admired.

Are there some things about our policies that people don't like? Yeah, because we had to do some very difficult things and frankly burst some myths after September 11^th about what the world was like. You know, when we came into power, al-Qaida was preparing to attack the Twin -- well, preparing to attack the United States. Afghanistan was a failed state that was allowing them to do it. We couldn't even talk across our national boundaries to hear -- couldn't even hear what terrorists on one side of the boundary was saying to terrorists inside the country about attacking the country. We had insufficient intelligence to give us anything to act on.

There was not -- no international legal and law enforcement and intelligence network to try and stop terrorist attacks. There simply wasn't, and now there is. And we've had to do some things that people don't like in order to create it.

Take the Middle East. The second intifada had begun because Yasser Arafat had decided to walk away from the Camp David deal. Ariel Sharon had been elected, who believed both in a Greater Israel and no Palestinian state. And now you have the great bulk of both Palestinians and Israelis believing in a two-state solution. And people act as if just kind of happened magically. Well, of course not. It happened because it's a policy that President Bush articulated early and has pursued ever since. We reviewed the record of what Saddam Hussein was doing in Iraq. Iran was building a -- reprocessing and enriching out of sight, having lied for 18 years about it. Kim Jong Il was -- and the North Koreans were cheating on their arrangements with little -- on their agreement with us with little interest or intervention from their neighbors because it was our agreement, not theirs.

And I can go on and on and on about the world that we inherited, and I think that if you ask where are some of those issues now, they're not resolved but they're in a better place than they were when, either when people were not aware that there was a problem or where we were largely ignoring the problem.

And yes, some of the people don't like some of the answers that we've had to come to, but I think in the long run though we will be -- it will be seemed to have been the right thing to do.

QUESTION: To lead up to your point, last answer about the Middle East, former President Carter -- someone very close to this administration, I know -- is walking around saying this is the first time in memory the U.S. isn't in the game. We're not convening the -- a structure; a peace process in the Middle East.

SECRETARY RICE: Yeah, and all of those others had such great success, didn't they in solving the Israeli-Palestinian issue.

QUESTION: Does that mean just try a Camp David 2, 3 or 4?

SECRETARY RICE: No, I'm just saying let's recognize that one has to ask the question why, given all of the attention and all of the effort that has gone into the Israeli-Palestinian issue, it still is there as a problem to solve? And I think that one of the reasons is that we didn't -- have not until recently had certain fundamentals in place that might allow some progress on that issue. I do think it's a time for active engagement to see how far we can get toward the two-state solution. And I've been personally doing that. And I'm determined to keep personally doing it until we are out of office because I do think that there is -- given where Israelis are about wanting to see this conflict resolved, given where, I think, most Palestinians are about wanting to see this conflict resolved, and perhaps most importantly, seeing where the Arab states are now, the responsible Arab states are about wanting to get this resolved -- I think there's a chance that you might be able to really move this forward.

But I am quite certain, having looked at this quite a lot, that if you have an America-only solution, or if you try to do it without laying the groundwork, you're just going to have another failure.

QUESTION: Have you entertained for an hour or a day the thought of running for governor of California or any other elective office?

SECRETARY RICE: (Laughter.) Not for an hour or a day.

QUESTION: How about five minutes? (Laughter.)

SECRETARY RICE: I'm going to hopefully as Secretary of State, be able to leave in place some fundamental changes and some fundamentals -- let me put it that way -- to either make progress on the resolutions on some of these issues, maybe even to resolve some of them. But they're such big issues and we're so early in the historic transformation that I suspect we're laying the groundwork for others over time to resolve them, particularly when you talk about the big issue of the rise of extremism in the Middle East. That's going to be a generational struggle. So I've got a lot of work to do. And aside from my visit to California convincing me that I really do belong west of the Mississippi, not east of it, I haven't given much thought to what comes next.

QUESTION: Final question for all the people on Blackberries fidgeting on this side of the table and the motorcade waiting downstairs, how in your view, will history treat the legacy of two men: number one, John Shinseki, specifically his farewell address; number two, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I've said that I think history's judgments are rarely like today's headlines. They're often very different. And I think they will both be treated as people who serve their countries -- their country to the best of their abilities, who made their share of -- had their share of successes and made their share of mistakes. And I think that you can look at any historical figure and you will find the same effect.

It's too early I think to start trying to pick apart this decision or that decision as I've said to you before. Now I've been reading a lot of biographies. I love biographies. And you look at biographies, for instance, of Abraham Lincoln and you know, almost until the day that -- of a surrender, everybody thought he was doing a terrible job -- terrible job. He wouldn't fire McCllelan when he was obviously in over his head in doing things that Lincoln disagreed with. He couldn't control Seward and he couldn't control Bates and he couldn't -- and you just look at the record close -- at that day and you would have said this President's a failure. And in retrospect, many years later he's the greatest President perhaps we've ever had.

I think that when you look at historical figures like Shinseki who I have enormous respect for and really liked and I think was probably right about some of the things that he foresaw, you will have a -- you'll have an assessment of his tenure and you'll have an assessment of Don's. And I suspect you will find that on balance, these are people who served very well and made good decisions, though not every decision was a good decision.

QUESTION: Under the umbrella of follow-up, would one of the things General Shinseki have probably been right about include the numeric figure of the force required to invade and hold Iraq?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I think that, you know, again, people can look back in retrospect and see that. I know that at the time, the President's advisors, his military advisors, not Don Rumsfeld, his military advisors told him that the force levels that were being proposed for the force levels that they believed they needed to fight this war. Now, there was fairly early on probably an overly optimistic view of what the Iraqis themselves could do. I don't think there's any doubt about that. It's not that anybody didn't believe you needed more forces, say, a year out or two years out, but there was probably an overly optimistic view of what the Iraqis themselves could contribute to that force level. That is why when Dave Petraeus and others, George Casey and others, looked at the near term problem of securing Baghdad, they recognized that there needed to be more American forces because you just didn't have enough Iraqi forces to do it. But you know, all of those issues will be looked at. All of those questions, all of those decisions will be looked at over time.

I can just tell you that at the time, the assessment that the President looked at was that the force levels -- and I remember he asked many times, do you have everything you need, that was the assessment -- and it wasn't as if the commanders had said, oh, we need an additional 100,000 forces, the President was going to say, no, of course, not. But there was an assessment of how to fight the war and what would happen after and that's the assessment that he followed.

QUESTION: I've asked the President this question. I know I'm -- now I'm in the liar category. This is the last question. (Laughter.) I've asked the President this question. You invoked Lincoln. Had Lincoln run the Civil War that way, I don't think there's a living historian who would disagree with the thesis of this question, it's a good chance the U.S. would have ended up differently. He did not let the commanders in the field run the war and, in fact, quite the contrary when he saw things going wrong as we saw in the letter released yesterday.

SECRETARY RICE: After two or three different tries, okay. Come on. I mean, how many times did McClellan have to screw up before Lincoln decided that he was done with him? So my point isn't that there's a perfect analogy here. My point is that decisions that are taken out of context at a specific point in time in a very big and complex issue turn out to look very different when you get to the end of the road. You know, would the war had ended earlier if he fired McClellan in 1862 instead? Well -- or 1863 instead? Well, that's not a question we ask any longer, right; because it came out right.

But what we do remember is the big things that he did. That he was not prepared to have a kind of -- the partial piece that people suggested to him. And he was not prepared after the war to punish the South in the way that people suggested to him. So I think if you get the strategic decisions right, and I think in the case of the decision that Saddam Hussein could no longer be in power in Iraq was the right strategic decision. And let me just say something about it. Look, this has not gone -- the war and its aftermath -- has not gone as I -- and I'll speak only for myself -- thought that it would or as well as I had hoped that it would. Did I think it was going to be an easy outcome? No, because it's so big and so complex and Iraq was such a complex place. But even at the end of '05, I thought the Iraqis were well on their way to being able to take over security missions; they were doing it. And that the political system having just produced a landmark election and the possibilities for a new government that they were on their way to a more stable outcome.

I still believe that what happened in February of '06 is the -- is a very big part of the explanation for what turned problems of sectarianism, which would have existed there into violent sectarianism, when al-Qaida deliberately went after a strategy that was to stoke sectarian hatred between these groups. And I think the circumstances changed dramatically in February of '06 and we've been adjusting to that since then.

QUESTION: Well, as a fellow baseball fan, I'll put it this way, you've always been known as someone willing to step in and face major league pitching and this is not a city, depending on which team you love, that has been known for the caliber of its major league pitching lately. (Laughter.) We're hoping to change that on Saturday when the Rocket gets here. But I can't thank you enough and that's the highest tribute in our business is standing in that batter's box. I can't thank you enough for your time and your graciousness here today and willing to take our questions.

SECRETARY RICE: Well, I've been delighted to be. And you probably don't know this, but because there was no team in Birmingham, Alabama when I was growing up I'm a Yankee's fan. And I sure do hope that the pitching comes along because I've got four members of Red Sox Nation on my staff who drive me crazy every morning at staff meetings. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Isn't it awful.

QUESTION: Nick Burns?

SECRETARY RICE: Nick Burns, Sean McCormack, Chris Hill and Elliott Cohen are all card-carrying Red Sox Nation.

QUESTION: And Shilling picks that -- oh, I'm sorry he didn't. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: I'm sorry, I forgot that two with out in the 19th --

QUESTION: Why didn't the blood on the sock match where the wound was. (Laughter.)

SECRETARY RICE: Brian, but I will tell you -- for those of you who like both history and baseball, I do have to tell my story about Nick Burns. And Nick Burns is our Ambassador to NATO when the Red Sox finally win a World Series, and I sent him a note. He was a having a Red Sox Nation's party and I sent him a note that said, "Just remember that in the length of time between the Red Sox last World Series and this one, the Soviet Union was born -- (laughter) -- occupied half of Europe and died." (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Yeah. And Tyrannosaurus Rexes were on the earth. (Laughter.)

(Applause.)

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