Interview With CNN's John King

QUESTION: Right off the top, you've now been to three of the countries who suffered the bulk of the devastation. I'm trying to get a sense when you get back to the president, or if you made a call today, what are the two or three things that need to be done now to address the most urgent needs?

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, the first thing I'll say to the President is that he should be very pleased in the way that U.S. government agencies, especially the U.S. Agency for International Development and the military have responded. And for all the countries that I have visited, they were thankful for that. Now we have to move on to the recovery and reconstruction phase. And right here in Sri Lanka, for example, we've committed $24 million, ten of that (inaudible) is going to be just to get money into the economy, to get people jobs so they can start cleaning up communities such as Galle. Another $10 million will be for shelter. So, shelter has to become a top priority, clean water has to become a top priority and sanitation to make sure you don't get any infectious diseases moving.

But each one of the countries has a different set of needs and we'll respond to what the country thinks they need. I think there's a lot of money in the international pipeline now. Food does not seem to be a problem. Here in Sri Lanka food distribution is easier than in a place like Banda Aceh in Indonesia.

QUESTION: Are you concerned at all that as more aid groups, trying to do the right thing, come flooding into these regions, that there will be competition and chaos and confusion?

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, I don't think there will be competition so much as so many people trying to do the right thing. And speaking to our USAID people here, so far they've been able to coordinate the efforts of all these different groups. And as you know, we have some military personnel on the ground that I think will also play a useful role in coordinating all of these well-meaning organizations. The demand is great, and there are a lot of people in need, so there should be a flood of organizations coming in and we have to make sure that we rationalize what we're doing in each of these countries.

QUESTION: You read all of the briefing books on your way over telling you what you're going to see. But you're in Banda Aceh, we just drove along the coastline here, the boats up on the shore, the buildings destroyed...

SECRETARY POWELL: No briefing book, no television picture really could convey what really happened here. To drive through the town, to see all of these fishing boats that had tossed up on the shore, to see an 800-ton freighter that literally was taken out of the ocean and simply plopped on a roof and it sits there until something big enough can come along and get it off. And to hear stories about young children, children who saw the tide go out suddenly and not knowing what that meant, ran down to the beach to see why the tide went out so suddenly and picking up fish, only a few minutes later to see this monstrous wave coming and taking their lives.

Women and children were the bulk of the losses here because men had the strength to hang on to something. Mothers trying to defend their children were washed out to sea. And to realize the power of nature and the power of this tsunami and how it affected not just the side of the island that was facing the earthquake, but it was able to go around, it was able to go past here, hit the Indian coast and come back here, rebound and hit the west coast of Sri Lanka. It's just amazing the force that was unleashed here.

QUESTION: Two of the countries affected, this where you are now in Sri Lanka, and in Indonesia, where you were, have civil strife, sometimes civil conflict that could potentially complicate relief efforts. Does your job include trying to get involved with the Tamil Tigers here in the government and the separatists in Aceh?

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, we have played a role for a long time in trying to get a reconciliation between the Tamil Tigers and the government and I hope in my conversation with the President later this afternoon we'll have a chance to talk about it. In talking to government officials since I arrived, the Tamil Tigers up north have been cooperating on a local level, on the ground level, they have been cooperating with the government because they see that the people are in need. I hope that kind of cooperation will now reach to the upper levels and they’ll take advantage of this catastrophe to realize that it's time to solve this long-running conflict.

QUESTION: Obviously American losses were quite minimal when compared to the other countries, some of the foreign nationals involved, as well, but there was some confusion in the early days as just to what that number was. Are you confident now that you have idea what the scope is?

SECRETARY POWELL: We scoped the problem and we have lost somewhere in the neighborhood just shy of 40 Americans, here and in Phuket, Thailand principally. There are another 2,300 names on a list and these names are names of people who were called into us by family members seeking to know about them, or said they were over in the area. And that number has been going down rather significantly as fewer calls are coming in. And I hope that number will go down to a very low number and we won't have many more casualties other than the roughly 40 names that we know about now.

QUESTION: I want to ask you about one question off topic here, but there are elections coming up in Iraq. Based on everything you have seen, about the insurgency, about the political situation on the ground, about the uncertainty and about the violence, if you were an everyday Iraqi citizen, would you feel safe to vote?

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, the Iraqi citizens want to vote. Now in most of the country, they can feel very safe about voting. There are a couple of provinces in the Sunni heartland where there is a greater danger. But even there, we sense that the Iraqi people, the Sunnis, want to vote and their leaders are determined to go forward. The Iraqi Interim Government is going forward. And as you know there was a conference in Amman, Jordan yesterday and that gave a powerful push to the people of Iraq to come out and vote and don't let these murderers and terrorists determine your future.

QUESTION: You are on this trip, part of it is to assess the need, part of it is also to show American goodwill and compassion and generosity. In many ways, you are the face of America right now in the region that is devastated. And back in Washington, despite that, there is occasionally this chatter that Colin Powell, the odd man out, the only member of the war council not asked to stay in the second term. Does that affect you at all?

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, it's not a matter of being asked not to stay. The President and I determined that four years was enough and I wanted to move on and that was fine. There's no fight there. This odd man out thing is an interesting story and it causes me to have amusing moments in the evening. But, what I've tried to do is to serve the President to the best of my ability, give him the best of my advice. To serve the American people once again and I leave feeling pretty good about the things we've accomplished in the first term. We've engaged in the war on terror. We've gotten rid of two dictators. We've increased development assistance. We've increased assistance to people who are in need, in poverty, have HIV/AIDS. So, I feel pretty good about what we've accomplished.

QUESTION: You say amusing moments. You've been at this for a long time, in a number of capacities, so you understand the Washington part of the game but you're also a human being. Does it bother you at all?

SECRETARY POWELL: Yes, some days I think that the accomplishments of the administration, and not my personal accomplishments, but what the administration has accomplished with respect to free trade, with respect to development assistance, with respect to solving the problem of weapons of mass destruction in Libya, with respect to the good relations we have with China and Russia, and we've been able to expand NATO, we've put a spotlight on Iran and North Korea and their nuclear weapons programs.

So many terrific things have happened in the course of the past four years that I'm privileged to be a part of that I hope in the future more attention will be given to these accomplishments and successes, and not just what people think are not accomplishments only because we are not finished with the job yet. We're not finished with the job in Iraq.

People were arguing about Afghanistan a few months ago until they saw a free election there. They didn't think that would happen, but it did. And now the Afghan people have a freely elected President and they're going to have freely elected parliament. They can have a democracy that represents the views of the people, the desires of the people. That's what we're going to do in Iraq and we'll see whether or not history makes the correct judgment in this, which I think history will. But these have been successful activities of the president’s administration. I'm proud to have been a part of it.

QUESTION: You have two weeks left in this job. Are you going to miss it all or just parts of it?

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, I'm always looking to see what's around the next corner. And I've had a wonderful 40 years of public service in the military and now in the Department of State. I've been privileged to lead the wonderful men and women in the Department of State for last four years and I don't know what door is going to open but there are a lot of doors out there.

QUESTION: Let me close with just asking you one last personal question about what you've seen, not so much about what the government can do and what country needs what-what's your personal reflection?

SECRETARY POWELL: To think about what it must have been like when that wave hit and the horror that must have been in the hearts and minds of these people knowing they were facing sudden death. And you now see clean up activity underway. You see buildings knocked down but what you don't see any longer are the people who were here--thousands upon thousands of people who simply lost their lives in a matter of moments. So, every building that I saw that was knocked down or the debris that I saw, that represented human beings that lost their lives here in one terrible, horrible, devastating moment on December 26th.

QUESTION: Mr. Secretary, thank you for your time.

SECRETARY POWELL: Thank you, John.

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