secretary of state condoleezza rice interview with
andrea mitchell of msnbc
U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
January 12, 2009
Excerpts
QUESTION: Thank you very much. Madame Secretary, Iran. The President-elect has said that he wants a change of approach to Iran. Do you think a change of approach, engagement with Iran, can work?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, it’s not an issue of engagement or non-engagement with Iran. It’s a question of whether or not Iran is willing to make a strategic choice to move in a different direction. And there are all kinds of tactics that one can apply to try to bring that about. But the most important element is that we have now an international coalition that is sending a very strong message to Iran that it cannot have a nuclear weapon, that it ought to abandon its current course. It is not just a matter of the nuclear program, but also support for Hezbollah and Hamas. And when you’ve passed four Security Council resolutions and you have international agencies and international economic agencies leaving Iran in the way that they are, companies leaving – the last Western company to be there was Total – it really does show that Iran is paying a cost for what it’s doing. Now, whether sooner or later, reasonable people in Iran will decide that it’s too high a cost, I think that’s another matter. But Iran is clearly paying a cost.
QUESTION: David Sanger wrote in his book – in The New York Times and in his new book, The Inheritance, that President Bush vetoed an Israeli plan last year to attack Iran’s suspected nuclear facilities.
SECRETARY RICE: I’m not going to comment on internal deliberations in the White House or in any place else. I’m not going to talk about that story. But I can tell you this, the President has always been very straightforward that he believed that a diplomatic course was the appropriate course, that he believed that enough pressure could be brought on Iran through sanctions, some of them unilateral on our part, some of them multilateral through the UN, some sanctions of choice that the European Union decided to impose, that enough pressure could be brought upon Iran to make Iran take another course, and that’s the policy that we’ve been devoted for – devoted to for the last couple of years, and it’s had some effect.
QUESTION: I note that you’re not denying the reports. There had been –
SECRETARY RICE: I’m also not confirming them, Andrea.
QUESTION: There had been conclusions along the way that you and Secretary Gates had taken a strong position in favor of diplomacy, of more engagement – in your definition of engagement – through the United Nations, through the Europeans, to try to stop the nuclear program. And that there had been countervailing pressures, perhaps from the Vice President and others, perhaps from Donald Rumsfeld, that had been pushing the other direction. Why do you think it was the right choice?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, the most important thing here is that the President thought it was the right direction. Because the very fact that we were constantly trying to find a course that would turn responsible people in Iran – you notice, I don’t say moderates in Iran, but responsible people in Iran – to a different course, shows the dangers of what Iran was doing. And so it is, in fact, an urgent task. But bringing the international community together to say to Iran, you must change your behavior – something that by the way in 2005, there really wasn’t an international consensus about Iran and about its nuclear ambitions. And so I think we’ve achieved a lot.
Now, the President never took any of his options off the table. Never. And he constantly repeated that. But he also believed, and believes until this day, that the diplomatic course is the appropriate one.
QUESTION: But there are plenty of reports also, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, that this has not slowed Iran’s progress. And that, in fact, we are several years down the road – several years closer, maybe months away, from them reaching a point where they have enough for a bomb and where they are a real threat not only to Israel and their immediate neighbors, but a threat to us in terms of the deterrence, the balance of power in the region.
SECRETARY RICE: Look, there are no perfect policies here.
QUESTION: When is the risk too great to wait –
SECRETARY RICE: Well –
QUESTION: – to wait, given how slowly the UN and everything else has evolved?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, there are no perfect policies. These are tough choices. And one set of policies brings a set of consequences, other policies could bring even greater unintended consequences. Because after all, we are dealing with Iran not just in terms of its nuclear program, but also in a regional context. We have to remember that the United States has a new relationship with Iraq that is really central to the emergence of a different kind of Middle East which is going to be more stable and more favorable for American policies. That has to be taken into consideration when one considers how to deal with Iran.
So yes, the multilateral diplomacy is not something that is known for its quickness, but it can be effective. And the Iranians are facing a lot of difficulties in what they’re trying to do. They’re facing difficulties because they have a great deal of trouble in annexing – or accessing the international financial system. One of the reasons that we’ve worked so hard to sanction some of the Iranian entities that might be able to fund their weapons programs and their proliferation programs and their terrorism programs is it makes it more difficult for them to carry out their goals.
QUESTION: There are a lot of reports, including over the weekend in The Washington Post, that those sanctions have plenty of holes, like Swiss cheese, that there are front companies, that they have gone beyond Dubai, they’ve gone to other countries set up fronts, and that they’ve gotten the technical help that they needed through other companies, including through American companies, illegally perhaps.
SECRETARY RICE: I think that the – I would not go there in terms of gotten the help that they need from American companies. Sure, the Iranians are quite ingenious. They try to use front companies. They try to get around sanctions. We know that. But the United States and the international financial system don’t sit still either when the Iranians are trying to find backdoors to the – to fund their activities.
If one looks also at the effects on the Iranian economy, you’re looking at an economy that, despite their great hydrocarbons wealth, is importing a refined product, and finding it harder and harder, by the way, to do anything about their creaky refineries because it is difficult for them to get help. So yes, it is not ideal that Iran continues along this course.
But we have seen and are seeing a lot of criticism of the course that the Iranian President Ahmadinejad has taken. We are seeing in the run-up to elections that will take place this spring in Iran a lot of criticism of the isolation that Iran is enduring. And perhaps, as the costs mount, there will be an opportunity to find Iranian interlocutors who want to take a different course.
. . .