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US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Iran, Iraq and North Korea, May 27, 2005

'Nonproliferation, Human Rights Concern Everyone, Rice Says', Washington File, US Department of State, May 27, 2005.

U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE
Office of the Spokesman
For Immediate Release
May 26, 2005
2005/558

INTERVIEW

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
with Al Hunt, Janine Zacharia and Matt Winkler of Bloomberg News

May 26, 2005
Washington, D.C.
(9:00 a.m. EDT)

...

MR. HUNT: You mentioned earlier North Korea and you've said before that China has been helpful in the six-party talks. But China has also made clear that they would like the United States to engage in more substantive bilateral talks. Why don't we?

SECRETARY RICE: Because we've been down that road before and signed an agreement with the North Koreans in 1994, which practically before the ink was dry they started to violate by finding an alternative route to a nuclear weapon.

Because when the United States is engaged in bilateral talks with the North Koreans outside the context of a multilateral framework, the North Koreans can cherry-pick and try and make it about the United States and North Korea -- and it's not. It's not about the United States and North Korea. This is about what the neighborhood is going to be like and is there going to be a North Korea that is nuclear on the Korean Peninsula, and what does that mean for the security interests of Japan and South Korea and China and Russia and the United States.

And I think the real achievement of the six-party talks, even though it has obviously not resolved the North Korean problem, is that it has made clear that a non -- that a nuclear North Korea is not a problem for the United States alone, it is a problem for all of North Korea's neighbors as well. And we simply have to keep that framework. Now, we do talk to them. We have a New York channel that we use for communication, not for negotiation. We talk to them within the context of the six-party talks. It's not that we are somehow afraid to directly talk to them, but it's a question of what is the structure of those conversations, and if the structure of those conversations is about bilateral relations between the United States and North Korea, we don't have that much to say.

MR. HUNT: Yet they have steadily acquired a greater nuclear capacity over the last five years and they've seemed to have paid a minimal price for that. Why is there any reason to think they won't continue?

SECRETARY RICE: I'm not sure they've paid a minimal price. They've certainly paid a lot of opportunity costs. If you look back to 1999, 2000, 2001, they were talking about expanded relations with Russia. There was a visit between Putin and Kim Jong-il. If you look at the subsequent years, there was talk about the normalization of relations with Japan. The South Korean-North Korean dialogue was sprinting ahead and we were in the process in 2002 of presenting what we called "a bold approach" to North Korea that I think you could associate with something more like the Libya approach, where you had a pathway to better relations with the United States and more normal relations with the entire region.

And while, yes, people are willing to give them fertilizer or trying to deal with their oil needs or trying to deal with new food concerns or to try to deal with the smaller issues, I think these large-scale improvements in relations with their neighbors and therefore with the international community have been off the table because people don't want a nuclear-armed North Korea. So the opportunity costs to this regime have been pretty great, particularly if you take them at their word that they do believe that they need to improve their economic situation and that they do need help in reforming their economy...

MS. ZACHARIA: I want to shift to Iran. The EU-3 talks yesterday and Mr. Rowhani. They seem to want a temporary pledge again, kicking the can down the road, to all of this. How concerned are you about sort of these minor steps, sort of giving Iran actually more time to cheat to pursue its program?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, the Iranians are in a state of suspension right now, which is a good thing. They are also under the spotlight of the international community, which is a good thing. The United States and our European colleagues have the closest possible coordination on what is being done there and what is going on there. And I think that what the EU-3 did in holding to the Paris agreement, of holding to the insistence on a suspension, on holding to objective guarantees as the outcome, which we believe has got to be a permanent cessation of the sensitive activities associated with the nuclear fuel cycle, is a very positive development.

And the Iranians, some months ago, I think, believed that they had a split between the United States and Europe. When I first went to Europe just after becoming Secretary, I was really quite surprised at the intensity of feeling that the United States was not somehow supportive of the negotiations, that we were saying we were, but that we were standing on the sidelines. And I think we intensified our cooperation with the Europeans. We made some moves in terms of WTO application, WTO accession for Iran and spare parts and therefore reunited the Europeans and ourselves, and to a certain extent the Russians, who have handled Bushehr in a way that reduces proliferation concerns. And I think now the Iranians realize that they would be quite isolated if they, in fact, walked out of those talks.

MS. ZACHARIA: Will the United States go beyond the spare parts and the WTO pledge? The Europeans are urging the U.S., I understand, to put -- to give something else, perhaps.

SECRETARY RICE: I'm in touch with the Europeans practically every day on this and nobody is urging us to do anything more than we've done. Not on the level that matters...

MR. HUNT: You got back from Iraq just a week ago, that secret trip, which I gather was a great trip.

SECRETARY RICE: Yeah, it was a great trip.

MR. HUNT: Did it make you feel that it's realistic to believe we can bring home a significant number of troops next year?

SECRETARY RICE: Well, look, I don't know about how many troops we'll bring home when. The goal -- the President has said very often, you know, we don't have an exit strategy, we have a success strategy. And we --

MR. HUNT: Is (inaudible) always talking about bringing home a fair number of troops --

SECRETARY RICE: The military has to plan for different contingencies, but this is all based on what's happening on the ground and it's especially based on how the Iraqis are doing. And I know that there have been questions about how well the Iraqis are doing, but they are certainly doing it a lot better. They have been involved in a lot of joint operations with us recently. They protected the elections pretty much on their own. I mean, General Casey said that he didn't have a single case where the Polish forces had to intervene.

What Iraq really convinced me of -- because I had never been to Baghdad -- I had been with the President on the Thanksgiving trip, but I had never been into Baghdad. It's a remarkable city and this is going to be a great country. It's got a lot of challenges, but, you know, the political process is moving forward and they are coming to terms with the difficulties and the splits that have been there in that society. And the way that you defeat an insurgency is politically, not just militarily. And so as Iraqis see their interests as represented in the political process, the insurgency will lose steam.

Now, a few people can do a lot of very violent things and they obviously are at a kind of peak in their violence at this point, the willingness to kill innocent Iraqis to make a point. But you do see Iraqis more and more turning to the political process. And what happened with the Sunnis was a big step, because I think the Sunnis now acknowledge that they made a mistake in not fully engaging in the political process. Some of that was not their fault; you know, a lot of intimidation, areas where voting was difficult. But to the degree that they, by choice, did not engage in the vote, I think they realized they made a mistake. They're now organizing themselves to be more involved in the constitution and be more involved next time. That's a very good sign...

Source: US Department of State, http://usinfo.state.gov.

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