Official Transcripts
Interview of Secretary Condoleezza Rice with Andrea Koppel of CNN
London, England
October 15, 2005
QUESTION: You've just come from meetings with President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov. When they came out and spoke to reporters, they indicated that they're clearly in no hurry to refer Iran to the UN Security Council. How much does that undermine U.S. efforts and EU efforts to turn up the heat on Iran?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, the Iranians are under plenty of heat. They
faced a resolution a couple of weeks ago in the Board of Governors that
I think was a surprise to the Iranians because the only ones who voted
against the noncompliance finding and the possibility of referral was
Venezuela. The Russians abstained, and an abstention is a wait and see.
And the wait and see is can the Iranians use the next period of time to
get back into negotiations with the international community that will
come to a solution on Iran's civil nuclear ambitions that will give
confidence to the international community.
QUESTION: And you, in fact, had said that that meeting, that
next IAEA meeting on November 24th, is crucial to finding out whether
or not the Iranians are serious about coming back into compliance. Do
you still feel that way? Do you feel that that is the deadline to send
it to the UN?
SECRETARY RICE: I haven't set deadlines. I do think that every
meeting of the IAEA Board of Governors, given the course of the Iranian
events, is extremely important, indeed crucial. But we will, with our
allies, and the EU-3 is still in the lead on this because they are the
ones on whom the Iranians walked out, and so we will continue to work
with them to determine the best course. As the French Foreign Minister
said yesterday, the Security Council is a real possibility and we're
going to keep it as a real possibility, but at a time of our choosing.
QUESTION: Right. But the day after the last IAEA Board of
Governors meeting some of the senior officials in your Department were
briefing reporters, and I was among them, and they said effectively -
come the next board meeting in November, the next stop if Iran hasn't
come into compliance and hasn't agreed to come back to negotiations is
the UN Security Council.
SECRETARY RICE: Well, certainly if there's been no movement and
the Iranians continue to say to the world they are going to threaten
instead of coming back to negotiations, we may well be in the position
where the Security Council is the appropriate step.
QUESTION: So what are the triggers?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, you know, Andrea, that I don't like to
talk in terms of triggers and red lines and deadlines, because that's
not how diplomacy works. What we said to the Iranians and the
international community has said to the Iranians in the strongest
possible terms is get back into negotiations; that's your course ahead.
Now, in the first days after the vote, the Iranians threatened
all kinds of things. They were going to pull out of the additional
protocol, they were going to start enriching again, they were going to
do all kinds of things. More recently, they've been saying, well,
perhaps they'd rather negotiate. So let's see where we are in a few
weeks.
QUESTION: But Madame Secretary, you know very well from having
watched this country for the last five years that they are very good at
playing one side against the other. Aren't you afraid that this is
going to be drawn out and that they're going to be playing for time?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, at this point, the Iranians, of course,
are not enriching and reprocessing, which is extremely important. I
don't want anyone to underestimate the pressure that the Iranians are
under, not just from the vote but from concerted and consistent efforts
that we know are being carried on with the Iranians by a wide variety
of parties to tell them that they have one course and one course only,
and that's to find a satisfactory solution to the negotiation. If not,
I am quite confident they're going to be referred to the Security
Council.
QUESTION: What are the consequences if they don't give -- basically come back to negotiations by November 24th? Are there any?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, I'm not going to set any deadlines, but
it's quite clear in what the Foreign Minister in France said yesterday
and what the IAEA Board of Governors resolution says that the Iranians
have got to come back to negotiations. They've not just got to come
back to negotiations; they've got to come back seriously to
negotiations.
QUESTION: And what is an indication -- how can they show they're serious?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, it would help if they would come back to
negotiations without continuing the kind of threats that their
President levied against the international community when he spoke at
the United Nations General Assembly. And indeed, they've backed off
some of those threats.
But the Iranians know what they need to do. They need to find a
solution that if they're going to pursue civil nuclear power, and we
don't believe they need to, but if they're going to pursue civil
nuclear power, that does it in a way that gives confidence to the
international community that they're not going to use that technology
to build nuclear weapons. That means the fuel cycle.
QUESTION: So did you and the Russians discuss any ideas as to
how if they're going to continue -- the Iranians -- with that civil
nuclear program, they might dispose of that fuel?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, we are very aware of the fact that the
Russians are having conversations. I'm not going to talk about the
Russians' conversations with the Iranians. That's for the Russians to
do. But we know how the Russians structured the Bushehr deal. The
Bushehr civil nuclear plant that the Russians are under contract to
build for the Iranians has what is called a fuel take-back provision,
meaning that they will help the Iranians with the power generation that
the fuel -- that the generator would give, but that the fuel would be
taken back to Russia. That would seriously reduce the proliferation
risk of having a civil nuclear power plant in Iran.
QUESTION: And did the Russians raise that with you today or did you raise it with them?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, we've talked about this on numerous
occasions and we talked about it again today. But we have to remember
that right now the problem for the Iranians is that they are not in
compliance, they are not in good standing with the international
community. There are multiple unanswered questions about why the
Iranians were lying about their activities 18 years ago until the
present of how certain things happened, of why the enrichment
activities were discovered when they were unveiled by Iranian
opposition, why none of that was reported to the IAEA. That's the
question that's on the table.
QUESTION: Ambassador Bolton, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN,
today said that the United States was afraid that if Iran did have
nuclear weapons it would give them to terrorists. Do you agree?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, whenever you have nuclear weapons in the
hands of a state that is irresponsible where it comes to terrorism,
that is certainly a concern. The Iranians have plenty of terrorist
friends: Hezbollah. They've supplied terrorist groups within the
Palestinian territories. They are, to our classification, a state
sponsor of terror.
So as the President has said many times, our worst nightmare is
nuclear weapons or nuclear materials in the hands of terrorists. The
Iranians support terrorism. So it's a natural concern that if the
Iranians, if there's proliferation in Iran, that some link with
terrorism is entirely possible.
QUESTION: I want to ask you about the elections in Iraq today on
the referendum. Before the referendum took place, a senior official in
your Department said that it didn't really matter whether or not the
referendum went well or not that violence was going to increase and
that it was going to be a number of years before the political and
economic situation could stabilize such that basically the situation
were calm. What does that mean for American troops in Iraq?
SECRETARY RICE: Well, first of all, it is absolutely true that a
few terrorists can continue violence against innocent people. It
doesn't take many people to strap a suicide bomb onto someone and blow
up schoolchildren. That doesn't take a lot of people. But what the
terrorists are facing is that the Iraqi political process is continuing
and Iraqis are demonstrating every day that they see their future as
linked to the political process. And this referendum is an important
step, an important milestone, but they have elections in December for
the election of a permanent government.
The Iraqis have also been training their forces. We have been
training their forces and the coalition has been training their forces.
And so over time they will be able to fight the terrorists, stand up
and fight the terrorists themselves. They are already making great
progress. In many cases they've been able to fight on their own. In
some cases they fight with us. But if you look at a place like Talafar,
that was really a triumph for the Iraqi security forces where they were
able to make a difference.
So yes, Iraq has a long road ahead to full stability and
democracy and prosperity. Everybody understands that. But what is at
stake here is an Iraq that will either be a stabilizing force in a
different kind of Middle East, a Middle East in which we will not have
to see the forces of evil and the forces of hatred produce suicide
bombers in New York and in London, or an Iraq that is unable to
stabilize, where the Zarqawis of the world become the masters of Iraq.
That's what's at stake.
And we strongly believe that the Iraqis have every probability
of achieving that stability, but they need our help. They don't need
our help alone. They need to take responsibility themselves and they're
doing that. But there is a great deal at stake here and if we leave
this work prematurely, not only are we going to condemn generations of
Iraqis and generations of people in the Middle East to fear and
desperation, we're going to condemn generations of Americans to
insecurity and fear.
QUESTION: I know we're out of time. I just need very quickly your response, your reaction to today's referendum.
SECRETARY RICE: The referendum today was an important step
forward for the Iraqi people. What's remarkable is that they have been
on a political course since the creation of the Transitional
Administrative Law before the occupation ended and before sovereignty
was transferred to Iraq, and they've taken it step by step. They had
elections in January. They wrote a constitution. Now they had a
referendum on that constitution. Then they're going to have elections
for a permanent government. This is a process that has momentum and
Iraqis know where their future is. There are a few people who are going
to try to stop them and who are going to succeed in carrying out
spectacular violent acts, but the future of Iraq is in the political
process and a referendum like today, where Iraqis participated in large
numbers, is very bad news for the terrorists.
QUESTION: Madame Secretary, thank you very much.