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Everywhere she turns -- from Iraq to Iran, from Lebanon to North Korea -- Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice faces a crisis of diplomacy. In this exclusive interview, she talks about the turbulent times ahead and the strategy to steer America safely through.RD: We were united as a nation right after the 9/11 attacks, but today we're deeply divided along partisan lines. Is there something you might have done to maintain that unity?
Secretary Rice: I still think there's an underlying unity. But perhaps we didn't have time to reflect fully on what 9/11 was going to require of us as a country.
Did it mean we were going to hunt down Al Qaeda as the organization that did this to us? Perhaps capture Osama bin Laden, and then we could return to life as we knew it? Or was this instead a struggle of a generation to change the very circumstances that created Al Qaeda? For those of us who came out on that side of the debate, it was the only way to leave a permanent peace to our children and our grandchildren. I liken it in some ways to what happened after World War II. America didn't think it enough to have just defeated the Nazis. We had to leave a stable Europe and that meant a democratic Europe, with a democratic Germany at its core. We had to leave a democratic Japan.
Those policies clearly proved themselves right. When we recognize that nobody thinks we're ever going to go to war again on the European continent, or that France and Germany are ever going to fight again, or that Japan is ever going to be a threat to their region, you recognize the wisdom of dealing with root causes.
RD: You are describing a vast undertaking that would benefit us and our allies by creating a more peaceful world. But the U.S. image, as reflected in polls in Europe and elsewhere, has been battered. Do you have a strategy to burnish that image?
Secretary Rice: Well, first, we have to do what 's right, and sometimes doing what 's right means doing hard things that people may not agree with. Was it right to finally deal with the threat of Saddam Hussein? Some people said, "No, that was not right and it has had its cost in terms of American popularity." But I believe firmly that when the history of this period is written, and when Iraq is a pillar of democracy and stability in that region, people will look back and say, "All right, it was the right decision." Difficult decisions will sometimes be unpopular.
But there's more we can do. We need to have a conversation with the people of the Middle East, not a monologue. We need to increase our exposure to people, particularly young people. So we've been very big supporters of student exchange programs. And we must be clear that we really believe that the people of the Middle East deserve a democratic future, something that American Presidents were not willing to say for 60 years. We were only concerned with stability, not with democracy, and we got neither.
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