Powell IV by Clarence Page of The Chicago Tribune

Interview by Clarence Page of The Chicago Tribune

Secretary Colin L. Powell
Washington, DC
October 14, 2004

(3:00 p.m. EDT)

MR. PAGE: I was talking with friends and doing a research and all. I was trying to get, you know, the top 10 questions everybody would love to ask Colin Powell. And I figured that the number one question is, in all of your time as Secretary of State, was there ever a time when you seriously considered handing in your resignation?

SECRETARY POWELL: No, I don't quit.

MR. PAGE: You don't quit?

SECRETARY POWELL: No, I -- there have been up days and down days. There always are in every job I have ever had, but I believe that we are doing some very important things in the world. A lot of the things we are doing that I think are so important don't get much attention with Iraq and Afghanistan sort of blanketing everything. But I'm very pleased with what we have done on the Millennium Challenge Account, you can talk more about that, and what we're doing with HIV/AIDS, 100 percent increase in development assistance funding in USAID.

We stopped the Indians and the Pakistanis from going to war, at least helped them stop themselves from going to war two years ago. We have gotten rid of weapons of mass destruction in Libya.

We included a number of free trade agreements that open up trade, have gotten a trade agreement that are helping developing nations, whether it's the Andean Trade Preferences Act extended that helps our friends in the Andean region or the African Growth and Opportunity Act, which is a remarkable act from the previous administration but brought forward in this Administration to help our African friends. We have helped in getting rid of Charles Taylor in Liberia, which is the right application of force. We encouraged President Aristide to leave. It's not -- we could spend a lot of time in Haiti, but I mean a lot of people have swung the bat at that ball and it's a troubled country.

MR. PAGE: I have gone there twice myself. (Inaudible.)

SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah.

MR. PAGE: I mean, I did talk to Aristide about a month or so before he was deposed there.

SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah, and then I'm on both sides of that one. I helped get him in, and then I encouraged him to get out. He blew his opportunity in my judgment. And so, a lot of things are going on: expansion of NATO, our relationship with the European Union, even though we've had some tough times with some of our allies and friends, with most of our allies and friends, we're doing well.

It's the best relationship we've had with China in 30 years. China is 1.3 billion people. India is 1.1 billion people. That gives us close to half the world population there that are on very good solid ground with us.

Russia, we've expressed some concern about some of the things that are happening inside Russia but, by and large, we have a good relationship with the Russian Federation. And we've started to do some things in the Middle East that don't solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem, but perhaps have long-term effect. The Broader Middle East Initiative on reform and modernization that we launched in New York three weeks ago, I think has a lot of potential where we're helping them with their reform and modernization efforts.

A lot of your colleagues were writing that we are trying to impose our system on them, quite the contrary. We're helping them with the reforms that they have gotten underway already in a number of those countries. What's clear is that each one of those are so different that you can't cookie cut at them.

I can talk about women's voting I can talk about women's voting rights in some of those countries and get a receptive audience; and I say it in another of the countries, oh, they start putting out statements about me.

MR. PAGE: Is Saudi Arabia one of those countries?

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, Saudi Arabia, as you know, women don't vote.

MR. PAGE: Mm-hmm, right.

SECRETARY POWELL: And I was asked earlier this week that, you know, whether I thought that ought to change at some point, and I said it's up to the country but it's 50 percent of the population. And I think that any country that is not allowing all of its population to participate in the civic life of the country and the economic and political life of the country are doing itself a disservice in the long term.

The Saudis, of course, have a unique political structure and a unique cultural background and they all have to do it at their pace. It doesn't mean they can't be talked to about it, which I do on a regular basis.

MR. PAGE: That was a headline on the -- in the Arab press this week that --

SECRETARY POWELL: Oh, I didn't know that it made a headline. Yeah.

MR. PAGE: From what I saw, my Google-Nexus searches.

SECRETARY POWELL: Ah, yeah. I gave the interview in Al-Hurra, and I'm sure it made a little news over there because I saw that the Saudis responded today -- never mind. (Laughter.) That's all right, fine. We're having a dialogue with them. And some days they will appreciate it, some days they won't, but that's what friends do with each other, for each other. And --

MR. PAGE: While we're on the subject of that, has the post-9/11 atmosphere really helped us to advance our relationship with Saudi Arabia, as well as the rest of the Middle East? I mean, you know, because things have been kind of stagnant for a long time, and as long as we're getting our oil put aside.

SECRETARY POWELL: It's changed the relationship in many ways and we were able to relieve, after the war last year, the military burden that was imposed on Saudi Arabia by our President. That's been dealt with. Saudi Arabia is now under assault by terrorists who can no longer blame our presence there as being the reason, and the Saudis understand that so the Saudis are fighting back and fighting back with a vengeance, which then pulls us together again.

We need intelligence exchange, law enforcement exchange, and that bleeds over in other areas of cooperation, reuniting families, which has been a problem with the Saudis, getting them to increase their oil capacity and production capacity to the limit, just about, because of the problem that the war was having on oil supply.

Doesn't mean there are not problems because of Iraq and they have suggestions about how we should do it differently or might have done it differently. But our relationship with Saudi Arabia is strong. We are joined by many decades of history of working together. We need each other. And that mutuality of interests will keep us together, even though there will be disagreements.

In other parts of the Arab world they respect us, but there's also resentment. The power we hold produces emotions of respect and resentment. The fact that the Middle East peace process is not moving the way all of us would like to see it move is often put at our doorstep, yeah. "You guys, it's your fault." Every president for the last 10 have had that same problem put at their doorstep. President Clinton had the same frustration with the problem. And it --

MR. PAGE: But the only time did they make progress over there, those who were involved, isn't it?

SECRETARY POWELL: No. Sometimes. Carter made progress back in 1979 in the Camp David Accords, but it was the Norwegians who pulled off the 1994 signing that was held here.

MR. PAGE: Oslo.

SECRETARY POWELL: Oslo. Not in Washington, Oslo. Not Camp David, not Wye Plantation, Oslo, although it was signed here in Washington on the South Lawn. I was privileged to be there, September 9th, 1994. Don't quote the date, it may be a day or two off.

MR. PAGE: Right.

SECRETARY POWELL: And so, we have to be involved. We are seen as, yeah, the interlocutor between the two and as a nation that has greatest relationship and influence with Israel. But Israel is fighting a war. It's being attacked by bombers. And therefore, we have got to do something about the terrorism that kills innocent people. We've got to do something about the occupation that frustrates the hopes and dreams of the Palestinian people.

So we need reformed, responsible Palestinian leadership, and we need Israel also to meet its obligations under the roadmap. And the President was successful in getting them all to Aqaba last summer, standing up there and saying, I'll do this, I'll do that, and we're all going to do it in the context of the roadmap.

Unfortunately, we didn't make progress. Arafat did not devolve sufficient authority, or any authority for that matter, to his new Prime Minister; and Mr. Sharon, still being under assault, believed that his first priority was to defend Israel, took a wall, put a wall up.

We've been able to persuade the Israelis to take a close look at how the route of the wall runs. It's one thing to use a wall to protect yourself from a danger on the other side of the wall, as you see it. But to put the wall on land, which is making judgments about the future status of the states, that goes beyond just protecting yourself. That goes beyond changing the reality on the ground for political purposes. We speak to the Israelis about this.

MR. PAGE: Are we making progress there in Europe to you, or is our roadmap in tatters now?

SECRETARY POWELL: No, the roadmap is not in tatters, but the roadmap needs two cars to get on the road, and we haven't been able to get it started. We've got the Mitchell Plan, the Zinni Plan, the Tenet Plan. I've been over there several times. The President decided in June, and correctly, in June of 2002, that we can't work with Arafat, therefore we have to try to get a new political arrangement and we succeeded.

The Palestinians came up with a prime minister position and legislated it. But the Prime Minister, either Abu Mazen, the first one, or the Abu Alaa, the second one, have not been able to wrest power away from Arafat. Arafat enjoys a unique position with the Palestinian life and within the Palestinian community. He is seen as their leader, carries their hopes and their dreams and their aspirations.

And that's something for people to pick. Nobody can pick that kind of a leader from the outside, and he's the one they have picked for 30-odd years to carry that mantle but he hasn't done anything with it and his leadership has not brought the Palestinian people one step closer to a state in the last four years of the Intifadah. And so, that's enormously -- makes an enormously difficult problem but one we'll continue to fix and address.

The other reason that I'm, you know, driving ahead with everything the President has asked me to do, is that we've liberated Afghanistan and I could tell you it was a very pleasant Sunday morning to sit at home and see not bombs going off, but to see people lined up. And a number of people wrote, it couldn't happen, wouldn't happen. Ah, the registration is phony. They're cooking the books, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And that's all great, but there they are. And they showed up at 3 o'clock in the morning. They refused to go home until they voted. Thousands upon thousands of absentee ballots coming in from Pakistan and the Taliban blew up a bridge to keep people from voting. People found a ford and crossed the icy water in their bare feet to get to the polling station.

Women, I mean, you saw the television picture of a woman in a burqa, totally covered up until her hand came out with her ballot, you know. And now what do you suppose she was thinking underneath that burqa? "I'm going to decide, you know, how I'm going to be governed."

And we did that. And we did it working with coalition partners, and we did it working with the Afghan people and a great leader in Hamid Karzai. And now we're all sitting around to see what these ballots tell us. And guess what. There's dispute. The ink, was it indelible? Wasn't it indelible? Was that ballot box correct? Was that ballot box open?

Ballot boxes are coming in on donkey backs and everything else. As I said to an audience recently, "It sounds like any county election in the United States, any election year, for the last 227 years." There are always these kinds of things going on, these differences. What's surprising is that out of the period of about four days now, they've pretty much determined, working with the UN and the election authorities and President Karzai, they've pretty much determined how to work their way through these little irregularities. And the ballots are being counted.

MR. PAGE: Well, on that note --

SECRETARY POWELL: And in Iraq we have, you know, it's the toughest problem we have, the toughest problem.

MR. PAGE: May I just ask you one follow-up on Afghanistan before we get to Iraq? Because it is important since Iraq is about to have an election, too. But Human Rights Watch and other observers have given descriptions, anecdotal descriptions, out of Afghanistan that remind me a lot of the bad old days of Chicago.

I, to tell the shortly, in 1972, I was part of a vote fraud investigation that we had that got a Pulitzer in Chicago, and our elections are cleaner. I won't say they're totally sanitized, but they're considerably cleaner.

Does this -- do reports like these dim the sense of victory for democracy in Afghanistan?

SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah, I don't know that I've seen the human rights reports -- from Human Rights International -- Amnesty International?

MR. PAGE: No, this is not, I don't think it's their official report, but this is -- it was Human Rights Watch --

SECRETARY POWELL: Human Rights Watch?

MR. PAGE: -- over there. And these -- I haven't seen the full, official report either. These were anecdotal reports coming in over the weekend because I, like you, was watching all of the --

SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah. The anecdotal stuff I got was that the indelible markings weren't always indelible.

MR. PAGE: Right.

SECRETARY POWELL: Because they weren't applied properly.

MR. PAGE: But there were also reports of intimidation out in the villages, right, by warlords?

SECRETARY POWELL: Reports of intimidation by warlords and whatnot.

MR. PAGE: Right.

SECRETARY POWELL: I can't attest to the, you know, to the factuality of any of this or whether it's anecdotal. But leaning back and just kind of watching, maybe all of this stuff did happen. But I have to believe by looking at the numbers and by seeing the observers that were all over the countryside, Human Watch and others, that we're probably going to get a result that does reflect the will of those 10 million people who registered and however many of them voted.

I won't predict the outcome. But, you know, if I was really a betting man, I think I'd take a bet on it and my view of what the outcome is. And I think that the election, when it is adjudged in the next couple of weeks and a winner is declared, will be an adequate reflection of the will of all those people we saw standing in line, even after you discount whatever difficulty might have been associated with indelible ink, ballot boxes that didn't show up or whatnot, or some warlord intimidation. There was a fascinating piece on BBC last night.

I know you don't watch BBC, Clarence.

MR. PAGE: I do watch their website, anyway. (Laughter).

SECRETARY POWELL: They had a fascinating piece of television. They had one of their reporters, who tend to be skeptical.

MR. PAGE: Oh yes.

SECRETARY POWELL: He was walking through an Afghan village with a, what appeared to be a field grade officer, might have been a general, couldn't tell if he was British, or sounded like he was British, dressed like a Brit.

They're walking through this village and the colonel or general was quite candidly and objectively explaining to the BBC reporter what it's like in this village, how the people really want to get rid of the bad guys, and they wanted to vote. And he said, you know, there was a big problem there a few weeks ago -- I think it was the place out west where they had killed one guy. One warlord killed another warlord's son and then there was a big -- wasn't that in -- what's his name, Dostun's country? Somewhere out there.

But in any event, the British officer pointed out to the reporter this mud hut, mud fortress, and said, "Well, that's where he used to be, but he's gone. They've gotten rid of him. They've run him off because they're tired of it. They don't want any more of this. They don't want any more guns. They don't want any more warlords." And then he took him to a smaller mud fortress with some people sitting around outside. And the reporter says, "Well, what's that?"

He said, "That's where they have all the guns and ammunition." He said, "Well, what are you going to do with it?" He said, "Well, we ran off the bad guys and the militia. So these citizens that you see sitting here are sitting and watching this and guarding it with no weapons or anything. They're just sitting and watching it and guarding it until the government can come and take this stuff away. They want to be done with this."

Now, I think that is the attitude that drove these 10 million people to register and these millions of people to vote last weekend. And to think that they have come this far, not just in the last three years, which they have, but to think that they have come from 5,000 years of no history or tradition of doing anything like this in their lives -- now, even Chicago in 1972 had more of a history and tradition of how you should run elections, even before your Pulitzer --

MR. PAGE: The basic democratic ideal, yes. (Laughter.)

SECRETARY POWELL: But you know, the suggestion has been that this will all be crooked, it will all be warlords and therefore can't work has been belied by these people coming forward.

Why shouldn't we hope that we can get the same thing in Iraq? We can get the same thing in Iraq, and here's why I'm absolutely sure of it. If we didn't have this insurgency raging right now, which is serious, and I won't downplay it, but just stay with me for a moment. If this insurgency wasn't underway, what would be going on in Iraq? We'd be cutting the size of our force; we'd be building up more and more Iraqi police; the government would be functioning without worrying about getting blown up every morning; the pipeline system and the petroleum system would be doing even better than it is and it's doing quite well, because there wouldn't be concern about it blowing up every day. And we'd be getting ready for elections in an even smoother manner than we did in Afghanistan, which wasn't that smooth, you know, when you get to the Taliban and al-Qaida.

And so it's clear the Iraqi people want the same experience. They're an educated population. They know what democracy is. And they wrote a Transitional Administrative Law that provides for representational government, full sovereignty for women, and recognizing that there will be majority but protecting the minorities. And if it wasn't for this insurgency, we'd be marching right down that track and people would be throwing bouquets at this Administration, as opposed to bricks.

Now, the challenge then is to defeat this insurgency. It is a tough job, but it is not impossible. And so, should we deny ourselves that hypothetical to become the reality because a bunch of thugs and murderers and terrorists and people who were part of a regime and were the ones responsible for murder of their own people, for gassing neighbors in other countries and neighbors in the north? Should we allow these kinds of people to keep us away from that hypothetical that I think can be reality? The answer is, obviously, no, we can't allow that; and therefore, that's what I get up every day trying to help the President do.

MR. PAGE: Well, do you feel more hopeful as a result of what happened in Afghanistan about Iraq, or are these entirely different places?

SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah, no, they are two very different places but it shows it's possible, and it shows that if we are steadfast and if we are willing to take on these bad people, these enemies, and defeat them -- they won't be defeated overnight, but everybody was swearing that this election would not take place last weekend because al-Qaida and Taliban were going to stop it, and they couldn't pull it off. They didn't stop it. And it wasn't because every polling station was guarded by American troops. It was because the people of Afghanistan wanted to vote.

And anybody, everybody can write any commentary they want about it. And they can talk about what Human Rights Watch said or what the ink people said or what this person said or what that person says, but you can't ignore what your lying eyes saw.

(Laughter.)

MR. PAGE: Indeed.

Well, a good friend of mine one of our reporters, Mike Dorning, just came back from his fourth trip to Iraq. He was kidnapped on the second one by bandits that -- and early after the end of major fighting, and fortunately only held for an hour, they stole everything but his SAT phone --

SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah.

MR. PAGE: -- and all this. And --

SECRETARY POWELL: But his what?

MR. BOUCHER: Satellite.

MR. PAGE: -- this time -- his satellite phone.

SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah.

MR. PAGE: Remarkably. I mean, why, we don't know. But he gave them the money, everything else was gone. But anyway, you know, it was a taxi driver that was in cahoots with them, you know, this kind thing.

But anyway, he came this last time looking more haggard than ever and I asked him, "How is it?" and he said, "It's bad."

SECRETARY POWELL: It's bad.

MR. PAGE: It's gotten worse and I -- demonstrably worse for reporters, and he's not the only one, obviously, you know --

SECRETARY POWELL: Well, you know, 46 of your colleagues have been killed over there.

MR. PAGE: Absolutely. Well, yeah, the CPJ record for this kind of thing in our 22-year history.

SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah.

MR. PAGE: And these reports obviously are not news to you. It reminds me of the National Intelligence Assessment that said the best-case scenario, continued chaos, worst-case, civil war. What do you think?

SECRETARY POWELL: It didn't really say that. They paint a picture of how they see things, and they make certain judgments in the NIE; and then they put a high confidence, moderate confidence, or low confidence against the judgments. So they list about 12 things that could happen.

Their judgment is that, this is going to be hard, this -- what is your confidence in that judgment? And so, that's where high, moderate and low come from. It's a confidence rating on the judgments they made. And they did what they're supposed to do in an NIE. They tell us not all the happy things that are going to happen, but they say, "Look, you, as the policy maker have to be prepared for this." And then they give you the scenarios that they have been thinking about and the key judgments that they've come to.

Almost always, they are couched in a negative form because that's the issues that policy makers have to work on. The NIE got a great deal of attention but it didn't at the time it came out. The, you know, I don't think I saw it until several weeks later when you guys told us --

MR. PAGE: It came out in June and we saw it in September --

SECRETARY POWELL: It came out the end of July, I think.

MR. PAGE: Almost like July, I mean, yeah, end of July (inaudible) September.

SECRETARY POWELL: It came out end of July. I don't recall seeing it at the time, but it was -- when I did finally read it carefully, after it got all the attention, it was essentially, you know, what I would have, you know, if the President and I were alone in a room talking about it is what I would have said to him, or something that I already had said to him over the course of our many conversations.

It was a clear statement of the kinds of challenges we were facing and the kind of problems that you're going to run into. And they give you that kind of assessment so that you can adjust policy to get rid of those items that you don't want to see happen, particularly those that they have high confidence about are liable to happen if you don't do something like get after the cities in the Sunni Triangle. You can't leave them alone to fester or they become a problem.

Let's see. You're on question 10 now, right?

MR. PAGE: Almost. (Laughter.) How'd you like my top 10 listing?

MR. BOUCHER: You've probably got about five more minutes.

MR. PAGE: Thank you very much for that. I like John Kerry, I'll try to be as focused as possible here.

SECRETARY POWELL: Hit the light.

MS. MILLER: Yeah, the yellow light.

(Laughter.)

MR. PAGE: I'm trying to be focused.

MR. PAGE: But the -- speaking of the debates, President Bush last night said he is concerned about bin Laden. This has been contrasted today with recordings of him over a year ago saying that he's not that worried about bin Laden. How does bin Laden rank in your list of concerns in the world today?

SECRETARY POWELL: We want to -- anyone thinks the President did not want to capture Usama bin Laden, I, you know, I'm not going to get into who got the best of that one. And I can just assure you that when the President said what he said last year, and I don't know the context in which he said it or, you know, at all. But he has never given up on his focus on bin Laden; bin Laden is the one who is responsible for 9/11 and he's still out there, and a lot of his people have been gobbled up.

We think, perhaps three-quarters of the top leadership. But he's still out there, and we think he is alive. We think he's operating in those western reaches of Pakistan or perhaps going back and forth across the border. And we work very closely with the Pakistanis and we're all after him. And the President gets briefed on it on a very regular basis and he asks about it on a very regular basis, so he has not taken his eye off the Usama bin Laden ball. He's the guy who brought us 9/11.

MR. PAGE: Was Iraq a diversion in the war against terror, as Kerry says?

SECRETARY POWELL: No, we had no plans to put more troops into Afghanistan. The troop level that we had there was thought to be adequate. We'll be able to get more NATO troops to come in for the election period.

People don't know that we got a Spanish battalion and an Italian battalion sent to Afghanistan as a result of the President's intervention at the NATO summit in Turkey. And we sent another battalion in that was adequate to the task and they had a successful election. So our policies are paying off in Afghanistan.

And so we have not stepped back in the hunt for bin Laden. Our intelligence people are hard at work. Our law enforcement people. I spend a lot of time with the Pakistanis and President Musharraf talking to him about his plans. We have got the Pakistanis doing more in those tribal areas than they've ever done in those tribal areas before, to put down Taliban elements and to put down al-Qaida. They don't want them there.

And so we haven't taken our eye off that ball. Iraq stands on its own two feet. You know the President's position why we did it. We tried to do it peacefully. We tried to do it through the UN. The President made it clear that if the UN wasn't going to act, he would. And he did. And we now know from the Duelfer report that there are no stockpiles that we can find, but we all believed the stockpiles were there and it wasn't a figment of anyone's imagination.

It's what our very extensive intelligence community was telling us, and the intelligence community of other nations. It's the basis upon which President Clinton bombed in 1998. It's the basis upon which Congress passed its resolution of support.

So if the intelligence community was wrong about stockpiles but right about capability, right about intentions, right about missiles that they were trying to break out of UN sanctions on, and if Duelfer's right about -- and I think he is, I'm sure he is -- Saddam Hussein being so interested in getting out of sanctions so that instead of just getting $2 billion that he could steal from the Oil-for-Food program, he could get all $20 billion without any constraints in the Oil-for-Food program if we had him under sanctions, you could bet that, oh, no, he would just be so relieved to be out from under sanctions and $20 billion available to him that he would never do anything bad again. The President chose not to believe that.

MR. PAGE: If he was so interested in getting out from under sanctions, why was Saddam more -- not more cooperative with the UN inspection regime? He didn't have anything to hide over there.

SECRETARY POWELL: I don't know. And Duelfer talks about it a great deal in his report. This was a man, Hussein, who was living in different worlds and with different understandings of the world than we have, and, you know, there's a lot of speculation. Was he being deceived by his own people about what they were doing or not doing, what they had and didn't have?

Maybe he thought he had a stockpile. I don't know. But I haven't been able to get inside his mind as to what he was thinking, because we gave him an early test in UN Resolution 1441. It was a test we insisted upon because we thought it would force the issue, tell us whether he was serious or not, and that was put forward in 30 days, a complete declaration of everything you've been doing, answered all the questions we put to you about missing anthrax, missing botulinum, what are you doing with these crazy weapons. Remember the crazy gun he was building with the British guy?

MR. PAGE: Yep, the super gun.

SECRETARY POWELL: See, we're not talking, you know, a boy scout here.

MR. PAGE: Right.

SECRETARY POWELL: The super gun. And they weren't building it just to plink over the border of Kuwait or cross the Shatt al-Arab into Iran. That thing was going to be aimed in other directions.

But who else but a Saddam Hussein would try to get this gun that's out of a Jules Verne movie?

(Laughter.)

MR. PAGE: From Duelfer to Darfur, if I'm pronouncing this correctly, now, what's your impression of Sudan? I know you've got a lot of experience with it. We've got two troubled regions there, really, and the government seems to be cooperating with us now. Do you think we're making progress there?

SECRETARY POWELL: I've been on the phone today with Dr. Garang, and on the weekend I was on the phone with Dr. Garang and Vice President Taha and Sumbeiywo, who is the IGAD negotiator, pushing on the north-south deal. Got them to stay there. Taha was going to leave. But they're still there and they're getting closer on the Lake Naivasha comprehensive agreement. It's an issue of payment for the southern army, the SPLA. Literally, an hour ago, I was on the phone with Garang. So that was a little more promising.

But with this portfolio, I never over-promise because I've seen how they can drag things out. Marvelous negotiation, both of them, Taha and Garang.

The real challenge, of course, is Darfur. The humanitarian situation has improved to the extent that more aid can get in with fewer restrictions. We improved that and we have doubled, and maybe tripled by now, the number of humanitarian workers there.

The negotiations are taking place with the rebels, but that's going to be long and contentious. The problem is security in the countryside and that hasn't been dealt with yet. And as a result of that, the people in the camps can't go home. They're afraid to go home. And more people in the countryside, in that same spirit of insecurity, are coming into the camps. And the camps are growing.

And we've got to accelerate the arrival of the African Union protection force monitors. And I've been on the phone. I talked to President Obasanjo yesterday and talked to some other people today to try to expedite the flow of the African Union forces.

MR. PAGE: And is AU cooperating with all this?

SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah, but it just takes some time, Clarence. It's not like in the old days when I could pick up the phone and call the 82nd.

MR. PAGE: Right, right.

SECRETARY POWELL: You know, and 30 minutes later they were at Pope Air Force Base wanting to know where I want to go. It just takes time. They don't have internal capacity to move themselves or to sustain themselves once they've been moved, so we've got to help them with all that. And we've got contractors in place. We've got planes being lined up. But it just takes them more time because it's not what they normally do. They need help and we're going to help them.

MR. PAGE: Well, are you ready to tell us what your plans are if the Bush Administration has a second term?

SECRETARY POWELL: Ready to tell us? Are you going imperial on me? (Laughter.)

MR. PAGE: I'm a member of the editorial board. I'm used to using third -- first person plural, yes. (Laughter.) We are indignant today. (Laughter.)

SECRETARY POWELL: We don't have a term of office. We serve at the pleasure of him.

MR. PAGE: Which has been your standard answer to the question.

SECRETARY POWELL: And continues to be.

MR. PAGE: Which many of us call a non-answer.

SECRETARY POWELL: That's fine. Call it whatever you want. (Laughter.)

MR. PAGE: Well, let me finish --

SECRETARY POWELL: I'm consistent.

MR. PAGE: I'm sorry. Yes, you are. Yes, you are. No one could say otherwise. Let me finish, and you've been very, very gracious, all of you today. But the same question I asked Thurgood Marshall, which would now be his last press conference, and I do hope to have a much better future for you.

(Chit-chat.)

MR. PAGE: Yeah, let me try that again. Let me just ask the question. How do you want to be remembered as far as your term, your tenure as Secretary of State?

SECRETARY POWELL: It doesn't make any difference. Others will judge and I will accept that judgment because there is no choice. The only judgment I make on myself, which is the one I really have to live with and take with me wherever I marry up with Thurgood Marshall -- (laughter) -- hopefully I marry up with him.

MR. PAGE: We all hope, yes, indeed.

SECRETARY POWELL: But the only judgment I will make is that I do my best and that I served my country and the people I work with as best as I could. And if I can go to bed with the right answer to that, yes, then others will judge. And that's pretty much how I've gone through my career. And you guys will write the report cards.

MR. PAGE: Indeed, there will be a story. We only write the first draft, as you know.

SECRETARY POWELL: Yeah.

MR. PAGE: But you had a choice of many people urging you to run for President. You didn't. Even before you became Secretary of State, a lot of us were hearing that you'd rather be Secretary of State than President.

SECRETARY POWELL: Actually, I was quite content in private life and I never was comparing the two. In 1995, as you well know, we stopped and took a hard look at this, and there was a level of interest and encouragement that I was astonished to see and hear about after the book came out. I was, you know, amazed. But that forced me to take a very hard look at myself. This wasn't what I would do well -- politics. And it's not either a character defect or an apology. It's just who I am. And I think I try to keep a pretty good idea of who I am, what I am, what I can do well, what I don't do well.

MR. PAGE: What attracted you about this job?

SECRETARY POWELL: It was a way of serving and it was something I thought I knew a lot about. I wasn't seeking it. I never asked for it. As you know, I was not really one of the Vulcans in the run-up in the campaign. I was around and I met with the President-elect, the Governor, several times, and I know the family, you know, very well. And so when he asked me to do it, it was kind of hard to say no, nor did I want to say no. I was willing to do it and wanted to do it. But it was not a problem for me if somebody else had gotten the job and I stayed in private life. I was having a good time. I take what comes, Clarence.

MR. BOUCHER: Okay.

MR. PAGE: Well, many of us are happy that you took the job. (Laughter.) I hope you're happy you took the job -- (laughter) -- to say the least.

Thank you again.

2004/1120

[End]

Released on October 18, 2004

© Scoop Media