19 September 2001
Transcript: Bush Counseling Patience in Anti-Terrorism Campaign, Rice Says
(National Security Advisor briefs on plans for Sept. 20 speech) (4770)
President Bush will tell the American people September 20 that the
campaign against terrorism getting under way in response to the
September 11 attacks on New York and Washington will be a long one,
and will require "patience and reason," according to White House
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.
Briefing reporters September 19 on the president's plans for an
address to the nation the following day, Rice said this will not be a
speech to announce military action. "This is a speech that will seek
to start to broaden and deepen the American people's understanding --
indeed, people around the world -- the understanding of what it is we
face, and how we're going to have to face it, because we're in this
for the long haul," she said.
Following is a transcript of the Rice briefing:
(begin transcript)
THE WHITE HOUSE
Office of the Press Secretary
September 19, 2001
PRESS BRIEFING BY NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISOR, DR. CONDOLEEZZA RICE
DR. RICE: Good afternoon, everyone. I'm here principally to answer
questions. But I thought I might just give you a little feel for what
today has been like for the President.
He has, of course, had several meetings, including a very successful
with President Megawati of Indonesia. He took that opportunity at this
meeting, which was planned before, but, nevertheless, came in the
middle of this situation, to express to President Megawati -- where
there is, of course, the largest Muslim population in the world in
Indonesia -- his very great desire that everyone understand that
America believes that the terrorism that we experienced is not the
work of Islam, it is not the work of Islamic people, it is not the
work of Arabs, it is the work of extremists. And he used the
opportunity again to underscore his message of tolerance that he has
been underscoring all week.
He also met with German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, who
delivered a message of support from Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder;
with Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov of Russia, who did the same from
President Putin. And he had a couple of phone calls this morning --
one with President Mbeki of South Africa, and another with President
Kim Dae Jung of South Korea.
The President has met with his National Security Council this morning.
The pattern is that he meets with his National Security Council in the
morning. He chairs those meetings, himself. And then the principals
reassemble later in the day to share notes, to consult and coordinate,
and to prepare the next day's national security meeting.
The President also received the leadership of the Congress, the two
House leaders, Speaker Hastert, Leader Gephardt, and the two Senate
leaders, Senator Daschle and Senator Lott. And he was delighted to
receive from Speaker Hastert an invitation to go and address the Joint
Session of Congress tomorrow.
So it was a very busy day, but I think again, a very successful day as
the President begins to lay out the first phases of this campaign that
he wants to underscore is going to be a very long campaign in this war
against terrorism.
Q: Condi, will you tell us what he hopes to accomplish tomorrow? And
will the American people have any better idea of who he's going to
strike, where he's going to strike, when he's going to strike, what
he's going to strike?
DR. RICE: Ron, this is not a speech to announce military action. The
President has made very clear that he intends to be patient, that he
is going to review his options, that he is going to look for ways to
be effective in whatever it is that we do, and that we are now
launched on a long campaign.
So what the President will do tomorrow is to use the opportunity to
talk to the American people about the kind of threat that we face. The
American people have a lot of questions about what kind of people
would do this to the United States, why this kind of hate would exist
against the United States. So we'll get a clearer picture of the enemy
that we're facing.
I think the President is going to use this as an opportunity to talk
about the sustained nature of this campaign, that this cannot be a
campaign that is thought of like the Gulf War, where there was a
capital with a leadership that one understood fully in the way that we
traditionally understood leadership. I think he will use it as an
opportunity to urge patience and reason, and to demonstrate again that
his resolve is going to be over a long period of time, not in a single
moment.
One other thing, Ron, I would just like to mention is that he's going
to talk about what Americans can do to prepare for this effort, and
he's going to talk some about the nature of the support that we're
getting from around the world, which is really quite extraordinary. I
think everybody understood that this was not just an attack on
America, this was an attack on freedom.
Q: You said that the President reiterated the message of tolerance and
the importance that this is not a campaign against Islam or Arab
nations, generally. Has it been communicated to the administration
from those nations from that part of the world that you've been
talking to recently that it is a highly critical thing for the
President to do, not just once, but over and over and over again? And
President Megawati has returned to the building; we've seen her enter
the West Wing just a few moments ago. Can you tell us with whom she is
meeting and what we can read into that?
DR. RICE: I believe President Megawati was scheduled a long time ago
during this to have a meeting with the Vice President. She's meeting
with the Vice President. But it was not arranged hastily or anything
like that; it was scheduled as a part of her program.
In terms of the tolerance message, it was very much the President's
instinct from the very beginning that it was extremely important that
he, first as President of the United States, make very clear that we
had a lot of Muslims in the United States of America who are patriotic
people, who salute the flag just like all of us do, who were appalled
and saddened by what happened on September 11th, and that we are a
country that judges people not by their religious beliefs or by their
color, by the fact that we're all Americans.
So that was the first part of the message. The second part of the
message is that we have a lot of friends around the world who are
Muslim. We have countries that are long friends of the United States
who are of the Islamic faith. And the President wanted to be very
clear that this is not a war of "civilizations," that this is not a
war against Islam. This is a war against people who in many ways
pervert what Islam stands for. Islam stands for peace and stands for
nonviolence. And he wanted to make that very, very clear.
Q: If I may follow up --
DR. RICE: Yes, sure.
Q: -- did that need become more pronounced after the President invoked
the word "crusade" on Sunday, and that raised some alarms within the
Muslim community in America and internationally?
DR. RICE: This has been part of our -- the message from the very
beginning. And in every conversation that the President has had with
leaders of all countries, but also with Muslim countries, he has been
saying this from the very beginning.
Q: Is the President prepared for the inevitable comparisons with
President Roosevelt, vis-a-vis tomorrow's speech?
DR. RICE: Well, I think the President is going to deliver the speech
on its own terms. But it allows an interesting point, which is that
this isn't Pearl Harbor. I know that there are a lot of comparisons to
Pearl Harbor, but this is different. And it's different in a lot of
ways. This is the first war of the 21st century.
In that case, we had a country with a capital, with marching armies
and beaches to storm, and islands to take, and in the last war,
deserts to cross. That is not the nature of this war. There will be,
undoubtedly, some things that our military forces and the military
forces of others can do. But this is also a war of will and mind. It
is a war in which information may be the most important asset that we
have. And so we're asking a lot of countries to help us with
information. These are not traditional enemies, and so he's going to
have a very different task.
Q: -- will have a different speech for us than the one Roosevelt
delivered?
DR. RICE: This is a speech that will seek to start to broaden and
deepen the American people's understanding, indeed, people around the
world -- the understanding of what it is we face and how we're going
to have to face it. Because we're in this for the long haul.
Q: Condi, does the President believe and will he try to prepare people
tomorrow night for some sort of sense of sacrifice? For instance,
we're already talking about spending some $100 billion on things other
than what it would have been spent on. Clearly, something has to give.
DR. RICE: I think that every American understands that life changed on
September 11th. Now, what didn't change is our way of life. And we
have to, as the President said when he welcomed workers back here at
the White House Complex, it's every American's duty to try to get back
to doing the things that make us American: Going to work and going to
shop and taking your kids to school.
But there is no doubt that the country faced a severe shock and blow.
And we have to respond to that. And he said to the leaders that this
country is going to respond and its leadership is going to respond.
He's been heartened by the fact of unity between the Congress and the
Executive Branch on exactly this point.
But, yes, this is going to be a time of sacrifice. I think the
President is not afraid to say that, and he will make that case.
Q: Dr. Rice, a lot of nations around the world are calling for the
United States to act with restraint, China, Egypt, Jordan, saying that
we should act with restraint. Some are even suggesting we operate
through multilateral institutions. What's the balance between this
coalition-building that the President is doing, and the U.S.
exercising its right under the UN Charter to act unilaterally?
DR. RICE: The United States faces a situation in which we really are
in a situation of self-defense. If no one believes that these are
dangerous people to the health and well-being of the United States,
then just look again at that tape on September 11th.
I would caution that this is a different kind of coalition. This is
not the Gulf War coalition where we all mobilize our military forces
and march off to war after 100 days. This is a coalition in which I
think a lot of states have recognized that this is not just an attack
on the United States, this is an attack on freedom-loving peoples
everywhere. This is an attack that was meant to generate maximum fear
in countries that don't want to close their borders, that don't want
to act in a fearful way.
Now, there are going to be a lot of different fronts in this war; some
on the information side, some on the financial side, some on the
military side, some on other fronts. And I think that we will have
broad support, different countries are going to play different roles.
There are going to be countries that you may never hear of their
contribution. But it might actually be the most important contribution
in locating this network.
So this is a different kind of coalition. The President is absolutely
committed to doing what the United States has to do. But I think that
we have tremendous support and understanding that there have to be
several phases to this, and this has to go on for a long time.
Q: A quick follow-up. Does the U.S. feel constrained at all by the
calls from other nations, especially as time passes and the urgency of
the moment fades -- does the United States feel constrained about
that?
DR. RICE: The President's made clear that he's not going to lose his
focus. And with every foreign leader -- and I've sat in now on lots of
meetings with leaders -- every conversation is about how the world
cannot lose its focus on what happened; cannot start to get back to
normal life -- we want to do that
-- but forget that this is a threat that is out there and that will
strike again if we don't take the necessary measures to root it out,
to draw them out of their holes, as the President said, to bring them
to justice. And so we are not going to lose focus, and we don't think
that the rest of the world will lose focus.
But the main thing here is to do something effective; to do something
effective in the first phases, but also to continue to do something
effective over the long haul.
Q: In my mind, the President left the impression today that in terms
of coalition-building, the first objective is that the U.S. has the
right and the obligation to retaliate against those who are
responsible for the World Trade Center attacks and the attack on the
Pentagon, and that that's first. And that for the longer part of the
sustained effort, the coalition-building may come after that. Is that
a fair reading?
DR. RICE: No, I think that we believe that this first phase in which
the President demonstrates, if you will, that what he said about being
determined to root out those who perpetrated this act and those who
harbor them -- in other words, that there isn't a distinction here --
that that is an important part of the next phase of this; that you
have to be able to demonstrate to states that might harbor terrorists
that that's not going to be a good thing to do in the future, and to
give states that have been harboring terrorism a chance to change
their ways.
But the President is committed to the coalition because the coalition
is being committed to him. And I want to caution: Talking about the
coalition again, we tend to think of the last war and we tend to think
of the way that the Gulf War coalition was put together. But countries
are going to contribute different things. And the most important
contributions may come down the road as we deal with the financial
networks of these organizations, that we deal with rooting them out of
countries in which they are burrowed in and ready to strike.
This is a long conflict, a long struggle, and there are going to be a
lot of different contributions along the road from a lot of different
countries.
Q: As you say, the President isn't going to announce military action
tomorrow night, so what will he say that we have not already heard
from him? Is he going to tell us anything new?
DR. RICE: The President will take this opportunity to make a case, I
think, to the American people of why we are entering this long
struggle and to understand better its nature. This is not something
that is going to be over in a matter of months. And so the President
feels, I think, an obligation to bring the American people along with
him in his thinking, to bring them along with him in his deepening
understanding of what it is we face, to understand that there may be
sacrifice along the way. Also to rally the country and the world to
understand that this really is an attack on freedom. It's a chance to
bring this together in a way that lays the foundation for what is
really going to be a long struggle.
Q: Did the President today, Condi, sign any deployment order, as was
reported on at least network, regarding additional airplanes to the
Gulf region, to beef up the no-fly zone forces there and potentially
clear up other forces to deal with something in Central Asia?
DR. RICE: The United States is repositioning some of its forces to
support the President's goal. I'm not going to talk about operational
matters or further about troop movements. I can refer you to the
Pentagon for anything further. But we are repositioning some forces.
Q: But can you -- at least, without the specifics, as an order signed
and approved by the President, whatever the order says?
DR. RICE: Well, you understand that the President has done a couple of
things. The order on the call-up of the Reserves; he's talked with the
Secretary of Defense about what is necessary to prepare the United
States for any action that it might wish to take in accordance with
the goals that he's laid out.
Q: Dr. Rice, the Chinese President, Jiang Zemin, has been raising a
quiet campaign that's quite different from the United States. He
called several world leaders, including President Chirac, just been
here yesterday. And what they are saying basically is that the United
States, if you want to wage a war, you have to go through the United
Nations Security Council and respect the so-called territorial
integrity and the sovereignty issue. A lot of analysts are saying that
the Chinese real target is Taiwan and Tibet. I just wonder whether the
President has any idea on this. I mean, the Chinese Foreign Minister
is due here tomorrow.
DR. RICE: Yes, the Chinese Foreign Minister is due here. But let me
say that one of the first phone calls that the President had was with
President Jiang Zemin. It was a very positive phone call that promised
cooperation.
Again, we do not expect every country in the world to be involved in
every phase of this operation, or in every aspect of it. We expect,
though, that everybody understands that terrorism is a real threat to
civilization, to freedom-loving peoples, and that we believe the
Chinese understand and understand fully.
Q: Do you need another U.N. resolution to do it?
DR. RICE: Look, the United States -- first of all, we had an
expression from the U.N. of support for the United States, and an
understanding that there are things that may have to be done. I can't
tell you what further U.N. activity there may be or we may request. We
have had several expressions of support from a number of countries,
from a number of alliances, and I think the most remarkable in this
regard was NATO's invocation of Article Very, that an attack upon one
is an attack upon all.
But the United States, of course, has certain rights to self-defense.
I think people understand that. Again, if you don't think that this is
about self-defense, just look at those pictures on September 11th.
David.
Q: Condi, several of the leaders have asked for evidence of Osama bin
Laden's involvement. We heard this today from Pakistan; we've heard it
from Chinese, as well. Within the constraints that you have, given the
classification of the material, what are you prepared to go do, and
what model
-- in the way of sharing this evidence to help build the coalition?
And what model do you use for this? Does it go back to sort of the
Cuban missile crisis, where obviously some intelligence data was
shared? What do you do and how central is that?
DR. RICE: Well, David, the first thing to say is that, obviously,
there's an ongoing investigation, and so I can't get into details of
what is being looked at. But I will say this: The organization that
were talking about has a history. There are already indictments out
against members of this organization and against Osama bin Laden,
himself. This is an organization that is well-known to have been
involved in several other terrorist incidents or attacks against
American interests. There are a number of operatives whose names have
popped up during this investigation that are known to be linked to
Osama bin Laden.
I think that we know who we're dealing with and what we're dealing
with here, and we've known for a long time. I would just say that we
are more than happy to talk with allies and friends in the rest of the
world about what it is we need to do. But the United States is going
to have to take measures in self-defense to deal with this problem.
Let's be very clear: The President is concerned to protect the United
States in any way that he can. And rooting this cancer out of the tens
of countries that are out there in which it's operating has got to
take place because that is in the self-defense of the United States,
and frankly, in the self-defense of all countries that favor freedom.
Q: Can you tell us anything about the speech preparation -- how long
has his speech been in the works, and how is he putting it together?
And what is the explanation for why people would do this?
DR. RICE: I'm sorry?
Q: What is the explanation for why people would do this?
DR. RICE: Well, I think that I'd refer you to the President's speech
tomorrow night. I think that he's going to really lay out this case
for the American people as a fundamental, a foundation for what we're
about to face. And I urge you very much to listen to it in its
totality. The speechwriting process is, you know, the speechwriting
process. There have been a number of people involved in it. It
wouldn't surprise you that --
Q: When did it start?
DR. RICE: You know, a couple of days. The President's been thinking
about the speech for a couple of days, but not with a specific date in
mind. I think he's known for quite some time that he wanted to make
the case to the American people for what it is we're about to embark
on, and he wanted to do that in a way that is not hurried, not a press
sound byte here or there, but really lays out the case.
Q: As far as the message of returning to a normal life, returning to
school, returning to jobs, what does the President intend to do for
those people who have no job to return to you in the wake of massive
layoffs, particularly in certain sectors? Is he going to outline in
any way or reassure the American people of any economic stimulus
package, any assistance, to particular sectors that have been hit in
the wake of all this?
DR. RICE: You know that the President is in discussions with his
economic advisors and also with the Congress about what can be done to
deal with the national emergency that we have faced. I think the
President is quite aware, as everyone is, that there have been effects
on the economy of what happened.
But I know that he said to the leaders today that he wants to work
with them and that he is prepared to try to think about what it is
that he needs to do. But beyond that, the details will come.
Q: Many Americans expect some kind of decisive military action. From
all that you've said, this being a campaign of mind and will and so
forth, is part of the President's intention to suggest that perhaps
what will be decisive here will not be military action?
DR. RICE: The President is going to be results-oriented. And he is
bringing to bear all of our instruments of national power. He is also
bringing to bear the assets and instruments of national power of a
vast number of countries around the world.
I have no doubt that military power is some part of that. But we are
not facing a traditional enemy here; we're facing a quite
unconventional enemy. The President, though, made very clear that
while he wants to root out those who are hiding who we've gotten
accustomed to as the car bomber who runs and hides, but who, this
time, perpetrated this well-orchestrated terror attack on some of the
most important symbols of power and authority and prosperity of the
United States, that he's got to get them. He's got to root out that
organization, wherever it may be, but that he also believes that those
who harbor them need to be -- it needs to be demonstrated to them that
harboring these terrorists is not good for one's well-being.
So there will be a host of instruments brought to bear on this
problem, and that's the case that the President is going to make
tomorrow.
Final, final question.
Q: On the coalition, are you suggesting today that it might be useful
to think of this as multiple coalitions for multiple purposes? And
second, this 192 countries that have responded with condolences or
offers of help include a lot of countries that are not, as you
describe, freedom-loving countries, people that the Vice President's
described as some unsavory characters. And I'm wondering, some of
these countries are able to provide the most help in rooting out this
terrorist threat. I'm wondering how you're going to be guided in
striking a balance between how far the United States can go in dealing
with these countries to get at this threat?
DR. RICE: Our values matter to us. And I want to make the point that
our values matter to us internally as we try to think about how to
secure ourselves better. Civil liberties matter to this President very
much, and our values matter to us abroad. We are not going to stop
talking about the things that matter to us, human rights, religious
freedom and so forth and so on. We're going to continue to press those
things; we would not be America if we did not.
We have a particular threat here to our -- not just our well- being,
but to our way of life. And the coalition and what countries can bring
to it, it's very important to take advantage of what can be brought
from a variety of different countries and a variety of different means
to address that threat. And yes, I think the notion of multiple
coalitions is probably a good one.
There is clearly one, big, over-arching coalition that says, this
could have been us, and we understand that when America was attacked,
more than America was attacked. But what different countries will
bring to the equation, what different fronts people will fight on
against this war on terrorism I think will unfold over this period of
time.
But I do want to say that the really interesting thing about what
happened on Tuesday, if you try and step back from the horrors of it
-- and it's just really horrible -- is that when the World Trade
Center went down, the world's trade center went down. There were
citizens from numerous countries that died in the World Trade Center.
This was not just Americans. These were Pakistanis and Brits and
people from the continent of Africa and Latin Americans.
What really was attacked was this world community that trades and
works and tries to make people more prosperous and enjoys the freedoms
and the kind of freedom of life that we're so accustomed to in the
United States. And so when the President says that he is doing this to
rally the world, we have a very visible symbol of the fact that it was
the world that was attacked, and it was the multiple nationalities
that were attacked in the World Trade Center.
Thank you very much.
(end transcript)
(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S.
Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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